Twitter is a safe platform for all legal speech and information consumption in the European Digital Services Act, as proposed by Musk in a Twitter post
Musk wrote to quell those fears, which could impact the company’s core business. Twitter generated $4.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2021, nearly 89% of its total sales.
Musk said in the past that he wanted to allow all legal speech on the micro-blogging site. Content rules vary in the world. The Digital Services Act in Europe has high standards for moderation. In May, Musk said he is in agreement with the new law.
“In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences,” he said in the Thursday post. “We can build something extraordinary together because we want to be the most respected ad platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”
What will the Federal Reserve decide in December? An investor-driven commentary on Fed FOMC Chairman Jerome Powell’s disappointment with stock prices and interest rates
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. I don’t know, not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can click the link to listen to the audio version.
What will the Federal Reserve do at its meeting in December? Analysts can speculate all they want, but Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision.
That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.
What’s happening: No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. Powell said that the Fed has a long way to go in fighting persistent inflation. It is premature to think about pausing, in my opinion.
But Powell did add an important caveat. The Fed could begin to slow the pace of the hikes in December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Premarket Stocks Trading: State of the Economy, Wage Rates, and Costs of Goods and Services in the U.S.
The government is expected to show that the economy created 200,000 jobs in October, but this will still be a very solid number as demand for labor continues to exceed supply.
That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The Fed will be looking closely at hourly wage growth in the report. In September, wages rose by 5% from a year ago.
Ahead of the Fed meeting, a jobs report is expected in December. If both reports show a downward trajectory in employment that will be enough to get the attention of the Fed.
Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.
Changes in the prices of goods and services in the United States are reflected in PCE. The Fed believes that the measure is more accurate than the consumer price index because of a wider range of buyers.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The Housing Market After a Pandemic: Fed Rates Rise and Borrow Costs Are Lower than They Need to Be, And the Bank of England Hasn’t
The housing market has been hit harder by the Feds efforts to fight inflation than any other part of the economy.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage was 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% the previous week, and there is a decline in demand as borrowing costs rise.
“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”
On Thursday, the Bank of England raised interest rates three-quarters of a percentage point to fight soaring inflation.
A two-year recession would be longer than the one that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, though the Bank of England said that any declines in GDP heading into 2024 would likely be relatively small.
Twitter Blue: Where are the richest man in the world? When does Musk really want to shut down Twitter? Back-of-the-envelope math
So in terms of revenue, the action, at least right now, is mostly around Twitter Blue, a premium-tier version of Twitter that lets users, among other things, edit their tweets. Musk raised the price of that product to $8, which may not be enough to cover its costs. Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math, shall we? A year of Twitter blue is $96, which I am going to round to $100 for the purposes of simpler math. If 10 million people sign up for a year, that’s $1 billion in revenue right there. It is easy, right?
Several Twitter employees have already filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the layoffs violate the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”
TheWARN Act requires companies with more than 100 employees to give 60 days’ written notice if they plan to cut 50 or more jobs.
Consolidating strength: In less than a week since Musk acquired Twitter, the company’s C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations.
All of the previous members of the board, including the recent ousted CEO, are no longer directors in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement according to the company filing. That makes Musk, according to the filing, “the sole director of Twitter.”
Musk on Tuesday said he would charge a monthly fee of $8 for a service called “Twitter Blue” that would allow anyone to get a blue checkmark to verify their account. His original plan was for users to pay $19.99 a month to get or keep a verified account.
The richest man in the world was upset with his assessment of the current system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark. He told them to power to the people. It is blue for $8 a month.
The Volkswagen Group, General Mills, and Interpublic Group are Peculiar about Musk’s Changing Direction on Twitter and the Future of the Social Media Platform
The comments came after General Mills and the Volkswagen Group said they are pausing advertising on at least part of the social media platform due to doubts about its future under new ownership.
This part of the problem isn’t Musk’s fault. When the economy slows down, companies spend less money on advertising. Even if Musk wasn’t alienating advertisers, he might still be in trouble because of the wild stuff he did. Musk has identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which means that anyone looking to trim advertising spend would probably want to cut their use of social media first.
Volkswagen Group, which owns brands such as Lexus and Rolls-Royce, said it wouldpause their paid activities on the platform until further notice.
The companies join General Motors, which had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on Twitter while it evaluates the platform’s “new direction.” Toyota said it was in talks with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation on the internet.
Ad buying giant Interpublic Group, which works with consumer brands such as Unilever and Coca Cola, earlier this week also recommended its clients pause advertising on the platform.
That creates a challenge for brands, which are sensitive to the types of content their ads run against, an issue made more complicated by social media. Most marketers bristle at the thought of having their ads run alongside toxic content such as hate speech, pornography or misinformation.
The pauses also come days ahead of the US midterm elections, as many civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and create disruption.
Twitter – Continued Brand Safety Concerns: A Memorandum from Musk in New York, on Twitter’s Facebook meeting with the marketing and advertising community
In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. Musk’s team spent Monday “meeting with the marketing and advertising community” in New York, according to Jason Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle.
Omnicom Media Group is recommending clients “pause activity on Twitter in the short term,” according to a note titled “Twitter – Continued Brand Safety Concerns.” The memo cites recent events in the last few days that have “potential serious implications” for brands running ads on the platform.
Representatives of the organizations said that Musk has betrayed the private commitments he made while meeting with them.
This is something that I am sorry for, but I think it is personal for someone who loves to follow people on the social networking site. It is the funniest thing you can think of, and it is perfect for retweeting. The hellsite has a hostile user base and has been giving them the tools to troll Musk out of billions of dollars. As much as users disliked Jack Dorsey, he was not the kind of person you could effectively troll — and his slow approach to product rollout made it a lot harder to tank the site by shitposting alone. Every poster knows that it is entirely possible to make Musk mad online and that this is what his Twitter show is all about.
Twitter, however, is an acquisition and is not necessarily full of Musk fans. It is a less forgiving environment for Musk. Like, an early subset of Twitter users are Something Awful forum goons — the most prominent of whom is Dril — and they love fucking with people. Plus, Musk’s Twitter Blue plan to devalue verification check marks motivated a bunch of people who didn’t like Musk to go out with a bang by impersonating him, largely because they knew it would make him mad. And it probably did! His first policy change was to increase punishment for impersonation.
Shenanigans are fun, but here’s the thing to keep in mind: Twitter is loaded with debt from the acquisition and needs to pay roughly $1 billion a year on it. In the year of 2021, Twitter made $5 billion but did not make a profit. Mike Roberts is a professor of business at the University of Pennsylvania. He has to raise money somewhere because he owes a bunch of money. I wonder if Twitter has the ability to pay this debt.
The way to send money to people you like on social networks doesn’t take a cut of the money. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.
This is the internet, and there is forum drama. It is possible to have a blue check mark on a account with the name Nintendo of America but you don’t have to verify your identity. To an unwary user, that might look sufficiently like the actual Nintendo account to do brand damage.
I don’t think many advertisers would want to return to that person if the economy weren’t doing so well. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. Mark Cuban has complained that the influx of new users has made his statements hard to listen to. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.
Incidentally, Twitter is under a consent decree with the federal government requiring full documentation, in writing, of any foreseeable risks of “any product or service affecting commerce.” Less than two weeks after Musk’s purchase of micro-messaging services, there were changes to Twitter Blue. Do you think there’s full documentation about its risks? It sounds like they are concerned about it.
The debt is risky and is rated B1 on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” Moody’s said that the governance of the company was a major driver of risk.