The CEO of Twitter and his “X, the everything app”: What are we waiting for? What’s happening after Musk’s takeover of Twitter
Since Thursday afternoon, when Elon Musk closed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and dramatically fired four of its top executives, employees at the company have awaited a message from their new leaders to explain what might happen next. What is changing and what is staying the same? Who will be laid off?
Yoel is the Head of Safety and Integrity at the company. Musk has been encouraging his followers to follow him and read about the company’s efforts to address a spike in racist statements on its platform.
The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.
Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He announced he’d honor the contract his lawyers negotiated after all just days before the deposition was to take place. Musk deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case and a judge found that in the deposition. The deposition was delayed as Musk and Twitter worked toward a deal; Musk even received a court order halting proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th.
The Supreme Court will take up two cases that could determine whether the company is responsible for illegal content.
An important communications platform that plays an outsized role in our information environment is now under the control of a billionaire. Musk has an implicit responsibility to make sure that it doesn’t become ahellscape because he is the steward of the platform.
Musk’s “X, the everything app” has been talked about. This is a reference to China’s WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments and gaming. In June, Musk told the staff that they live on the messaging app on China’s eastern coast. We will be a great success if we can recreate that.
Tesla CEO Eric Musk Takes Control of Twitter and Immediately-ousts Topexecutives: The Bounds on Online Toxicity and Divide Our Society
The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
Musk and his wife had a fight with Agrawal in April before Musk decided to make a bid for the company.
He criticized the company’s top lawyer, known as Gadde. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. In addition to calling for Musk to fire her, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, as well as calls for it to be stopped for 11-year veteran of public policy and safety Navneet Gadde. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
The message appeared to be aimed at addressing concerns among advertisers — Twitter’s chief source of revenue — that Musk’s plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and drive away users.
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
According to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the note changed Musk’s position on the issue of free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content.
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You don’t want a place where consumers are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about, and the platform doesn’t take any responsibility,” Yildirim said.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1132153277/elon-musk-takes-control-of-twitter-and-immediately-ousts-top-executives
Musk’s Tweets about Twitter and How He Has Been There: An Insider Perspective on the Media Landscape and Twitter’s Ad Business
Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a good conversation with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
The employee shared a note they had received from Berland. Berland wrote that the press swirl was making everything worse. “Planning is happening and is moving as quickly as possible but it’s not complete. Two things I wanted to make sure you all saw is that Elon has debunked that he was ever planning a 75% layoff and stated it’s false that he is or was trying to rush a layoff before a Nov. 1 vest. Neither of those things are actually true.
Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said Musk has good reason to avoid a massive shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because Twitter’s revenues have taken a beating from the weakening economy, months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover, changing consumer behaviors and the fact that “there’s no other revenue source waiting in the wings.”
Take Musk’s last 24 hours on the platform for example: The billionaire gave credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi. Then, when media outlets reported on his irresponsible behavior, Musk assailed them. He trolled The New York Times in one tweet and chastised The Guardian as a “far left wing propaganda machine” in another.
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He is also trying to disassemble the little infrastructure that was erected to allow users to sift through the daily chaos. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.
Charging for verified badges may be seen as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. It will be hard for users to distinguish authentic accounts from inauthentic ones.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.
The Musk Employees’ Facing Experience after the Musk Layoffs Fiasco, and Why Tesla is Doing What It Means to Save Social Networks, Democracy and Hacking
In the year of 2018, Musk’s biographer wrote that “the best thing” one could do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email and reduce hacking would be authenticating users.”
The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. In the absence of official communications, workers have been gathering in private channels to share their latest rumors.
The teams that were wiped out entirely were the ones that were cut more. It turned out the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.
Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, using public threads to discuss aspects of the organization that have been broken after the Musk layoffs fiasco.
One thing that made people nervous was the instruction on Friday afternoon that engineers print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written, as Platformer was the first to report. It was part of a set of measures Musk and his team have undertaken in an effort to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest performing employees as a precursor to layoffs.
Musk has brought more than 50 employees from Tesla into Twitter to help with the transition, CNBC reported. One employee we spoke with said they had received a call from a Tesla engineer late at night who quizzed about their team and which engineers at the company are most highly regarded.
How are Slack Engineers Getting What You Want to Know About Twitter, Facebook, and Twitter? An Employee Response to Musk’s “Memory on the Vine Project”
since no leadershippy type appears willing or interested in filling the void: if you’re feeling bleak and dismayed right now, just want you to know you’re not alone. This is not good.
In other Slack channels, employees are sharing contact information in case they suddenly lose access to their communications, another employee told us.
Musk has pressed engineers to work on at least two major projects, and to complete them within days or weeks. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. Our colleague at The Verge Alex Heath reported that, in the case of changes to Blue, the features must ship by November 7th or the team will be fired.
The Vine project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far, we’re told. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to be part of the project after Musk gave it the go-ahead Sunday night.
The backdrop is a company that has yet to hear anything official from Musk, via email or a companywide meeting. Many employees did not know their managers at the start of the work day after Losing thousands of colleagues days earlier.
Similarly, on Monday, the senior director of software engineering at Twitter, sent a note to his team acknowledging the changes they were about to see. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. “Some good, some bad.”
Do good engineering work, if you are asked what to do now. Write code. Fix bugs and keep the site up. I’ve been told that the criteria for being at a social networking website is that. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. It is better to be less on documentation, planning, strategy, and more on coding and shipping. If you want to join a group this week, you must code and ship 5x as usual. Sexy isn’t the criterion, building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is. The criteria is helping our users and being impactful and changing product. You don’t need to tell me what to do. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be improved. Do it. You are in charge.
Hitting Kicks in the TWo Social Network, and Losing a Member of the Twitter Employees – A Letter to the CEO of an Unrested Company
But Musk’s attention can be unnerving, too. Musk is known to be focused on some projects and one employee said they had mixed feelings about working on one of them.
The stock market filing shows that Musk is the sole director of the social platform now that they are no longer with him. At the same time, Musk is also running several other companies, including as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Jay Sullivan, the general manger of consumer and revenue products, removed the company and his title from the general manager’sTwitter bio, and Nick Caldwell, the general manager of core technology, changed his bio to make it look like he was a former TWo Exec. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the company’s Chief Marketing Officer had left, and that on Tuesday night she posted a single blue heart.
Calacanis wrote on his website that he had been to New York for a meeting with the marketing and advertising community. He has asked about the features of the platform on the micro-blogging site.
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.
Some employees lost their access to their work accounts in the morning. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. Many employees of the social networking site took to TWo to express their support for each other with blue heart and blue bird symbols in their replies.
Barry C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent have not received any recent such notifications from Twitter.
A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of oneemployee who was laid off and three other employees who were locked out of their work accounts. The law requires notice if employees are to be laid off, and it’s been alleged that they weren’t given that notice.
The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers — mainly TikTok — are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Weak earnings reports from Microsoft and Alphabet led to Meta’s disappointing results.
The $44 billion purchase of the company by Musk led to layoffs and raised questions about whether the billionaire would be able to restore banned accounts.
The covid pandemic and what the paywall will look like in the next 20 years: how Musk and Johnson left the Covid PLANdemic
Big pharma created the Covid PLANdemic to silence me. She said that everyone tries to silence her. Please speak at a lower volume. I’m sorry, am I too loud for your precious intensive care unit? You aren’t even sick!”
“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer was dressed in a red dress and spoke as the bot. I was told that I was a robot, which is crazy. I love men like you that are funny. You should look out for this website where I and other girls hang out.
But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump had his account banned in 2021.
“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It was very good, according to Johnson’s Trump. It was also terrible in a lot of ways. It’s very bad. Very, very bad. It is a little hard to crack the phone screen and automatically drain the Venmo.
Many current and former employees have a sinking feeling about the future of their company, due to the erratic leadership of Musk and his constant mockery of women on his account on the social networking website.
Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.
A rumor on the Blind app, and why some workers are leaving their jobs in hopes of preserving employment for the most vulnerable among workers
Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.
It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within a day, it was posted in public channels.
I apologize to everyone on the weekend. but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”
“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. Platformer is told that the company has been trying to get engineers and designers back.
Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
How IT became a company, and why it is important to employees to listen to them? When Musk made the announcement about his new health policy, a former employee spoke with The Verge
Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. A person I spoke with said that a technical manager should spend half their time writing code, as well as manage at least 20 individual contributors. Others have been given more direct reports.
“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. The majority of the company is just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”
To learn what they are supposed to do, employees looked to some unusual sources. After a number of celebrities and high-profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a new policy, via a tweet, that anyone found impersonating someone else would be permanently banned without warning. I learned about that from the policy team, and employees began discussing how to implement Musk’s order.
Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. The “All-in” show is co-hosted by a venture capitalist who has been assisting with the Musk transition, Sacks.
A vice president said that the most recent podcasts contains some insight into why this is happening and how it can be avoided. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understanding the macro environment we are operating in.”
The health benefits became a question mark after most employees became more interested in them. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.
At least some teams began holding meetings in which employees were informed of who their managers are, what their charts look like and what priorities they have.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23446262/elon-musk-twitter-paywall-possible
The Verge’s Alex Heath: “It’s not coming from the ad-light!” Musk and Sacks
On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.
The company rolled out a new version of the app on Saturday with release notes that said the new Blue was now available. (The copy, written by Calacanis, was widely derided for sounding like a phishing email.) The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.
The company postponed the launch due to the debate about the potential effects of thousands of new verified accounts on the platforms in the middle of the elections.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Musk and Sacks have been discussing the idea recently. One such plan might allow everyone to use Twitter for a limited amount of time each month but require a subscription to continue browsing, the person said.
Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates show that there will be a $6 loss in US ad revenue for every user who is switched to TWITTER. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.
Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.
It could not be learned how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall; Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It doesn’t look imminent, because the Blue team is entirely occupied with the launch of expanded verification.