Twitter: Jobs’s 20 Years on the Planet is Behind His Will: Evan Musk’s Haste to Make Twitter a Giant Tech Power
At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was very familiar with the company he began and was the leader of the team who created its most important product. He left Apple to start another computer company with a different approach to the internet and operating systems. Plus, he was Steve Jobs. If anyone could turn around the computer giant, it was him. It took months for him to come up with a plan. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. It was not on the road map of Jobs in 1998.
Musk is a shoo-in for a hall of fame. He believes his Musk-itude will enable him to do what generations of previous Twitter leaders could not even begin to accomplish, swatting away historical precedent like an annoying gnat. Twitter began in 2006 but didn’t take off until almost a year later, when it became a hit at the South by Southwest conference. It experienced massive growth from then on. A 2009 memo quoted then-CEO Evan Williams saying in a strategy meeting, “If we had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet.” A billion users on 140 characters was plausible at the time. Williams thought it would be easy to create a business plan that would make the company wildly profitable. Even though it gained more than one billion users, it didn’t get as much profit as it could have, and even though it had a good ad model, it only had two years of profit in its 20 years on the planet. Every person has tried to boost user growth on the micro-blogging site. Evan Williams tried to do something. Dick Costolo tried to do something. Jack Dorsey tried, twice. Over and over, smart people who knew the workings of the platform from the inside tried and failed to boost Twitter from an important speech platform to a giant tech power. Musk hopes to figure it out before he puts up his Christmas tree, as he’s just now learning how the micro-blogging site works.
The absurdity of Musk’s haste isn’t necessary since his own successful enterprises have done just that. The company was five years old when he took over. The company didn’t have an annual profit until 2020 even though Musk came up with a plan to turn it around. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. The company Musk runs is private and doesn’t report earnings. It can take years to build a rocket ship, and it’s not good to cut corners that can wind up killing people.
Facebook Layoffs in the Metaverse: How Social Media Affected the Big Tech Decay and Apple’s Advertisement Budgets
Facebook-parent Meta is said to be planning the first significant layoffs in its history as the company grapples with a shrinking business and fears of a looming recession.
The CEO of the company stated last month that he expects the company to be roughly the same size as it is today, and even a little bit smaller.
Meta’s core business has been weighed down by Apple’s privacy changes and tightened advertiser budgets. Last month the company posted a revenue decline and reported a halving of its profit from the previous year. The drop in profitability is largely driven by the billions Meta is spending to build a future version of the internet called the metaverse that likely remains years away.
Once boasting a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion last year, Meta is now valued at about $250 billion. Meta’s stock gained more than 5% on Monday morning after reports of the job cuts.
There are other tech companies said to be rethinking staffing. In a stunning shift for an industry sometimes thought of as untouchable, a number of tech companies have announced hiring freezes or job cuts in recent months, often after having seen rapid growth during the pandemic.
Big Tech got smaller in this month. The leader in the shrink was a troubled firm that was led by a new owner who tried to wriggle out of his commitment to buy the firm. Job 1 was to get rid of some of the workers behind the platform. But Twitter was far from alone in stripping employees of their salaries, health plans, and email addresses. The staff cuts at the gold standard for rising deca-uncorns were 14 percent. 20 percent was contributed by Intel. Almost 40% of its workers were kicked out. Lyft lifted 13 percent of its staff off the rolls. At least a tenth of its staff was discounted. Snap disappeared a fifth of its people. Meta was the unkindest cut, at least in volume. Mark Zuckerberg gave 11,000 workers an opportunity to share the “badge posts” that outgoing workers write upon leaving the Frank Gehry-designed building. Apple and Amazon simply announced hiring freezes.
Dozens of laid off employees have been asked to come back by the social media platform, according to reports.
Facebook Becomes a Made Man: A Tale of Two Walls and Two Eaves: Mark Zuckerberg’s Failure to Lose His Job
A lot of stuff has been thrown at the wall in the pursuit of becoming the everything platform. It has been hard to keep but it has been brought to work on these projects.
But that only shows a part of the story, according to company people who are outside of the company. An employee with knowledge of the company’s operations, who left shortly before the layoffs were announced, was speaking to WIRED because his employer wouldn’t grant him the right to speak on the record. It is most likely the last five to ten years, starting even before Zuckerberg’s obsession with Metaverse. Some of the losses can be attributed to the sheer range of risky and failed experiments the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram parent company has conducted over the years, the former employee says. A former employee says that he can’t remember a feature that wasn’t acquired in the last five years.
New projects helped Facebook to accumulate employees rapidly. Flush with cash as one of the world’s biggest companies, and with big plans for dominating all aspects of consumers’ lives, the company formerly known as Facebook hired plentifully. In the year of 2017, Meta employed 25,000 people. The company had 87,000 workers before it slashed 11,000 from its payroll. The company has grown each of the last five years by an average 28 percent. Even after these latest cuts, the newly slimmed-down Meta is still three times as large as it was in 2017.
Given that ordeal, you would think that actually landing a Big Tech job would earn you the status of a made man in the Cosa Nostra. This week’s message is that when the bottom line finds another bottom in the economy, companies are willing to write off their talent and assets into the street. In tech, the only untouchables are those at the very top. It seems Mark Zuck is to blame for the bloated staff that led to a massive layoffs, but the company’s stock price went up by 7 percent on the day after he withdrew the paychecks.
At least Zuckerberg signed his letter explaining the layoffs. The email that told Tweeps half of them would lose their jobs was signed, simply, Twitter. Without a blue check mark!
Wall Street, Wall Street Walls, and the Future: How Millennials Live, and how they’re going to live in the 21st Century
The irony is here. While the economy can fluctuate between boom and bust, valuations always rise and fall on Wall Street’s tastes, and the technology goes only one direction. Connection speeds increase, chips increase capacity, and rocket ships are more reliable. Generative AI models don’t erode because advertisers and equity people force themselves onto a company’s board. They get better and scarier.