The Musk-helmed Twitter: What will we learn in 2021 when Twitter becomes a free platform? A keyhole view of the social media giant’s decision to buy Twitter
By the end of this month, Elon Musk may finally own Twitter, after the mercurial billionaire changed his mind yet again this week about buying the social network for $44 billion.
Musk’s letter appears aimed at quelling those fears, which could impact the company’s core business. Advertising revenue for the year was over 4 billion dollars, or 902 percent of total sales.
It’s a theme he reiterated both in public, telling Twitter employees at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting investor Antonio Gracias that “Free speech matters most when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bull****.”
“It’s likely that advertisers won’t want to advertise on the platform if it’s loosened slightly.” Enberg said, adding that advertisers already find social platforms lacking in brand safety tools.
For a “keyhole view” of what a Musk-helmedTwitter will look like, just look at the alternative platforms that promise less restrictions on speech, said the president of Media Matters for America.
On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. They are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.
Musk previously stated that he would like to allow legal speech on the platform. Content rules are different in the world. The Digital Services Act imposes high moderation standards in Europe. Musk said he is in full agreement with the new law.
“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).
That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.
After rejecting a seat on twitter’s board, Musk updated his filing to announce that he would not be a passive player. Gone was the language that he would restrict his holdings to just 14.0 percent of the company. In retrospect, this was the first clue that he may attempt something more impactful than just buying some stock of serving as a board member.
The person told Musk to hire someone who had a political view and was good at cultural/political enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Can Twitter Blue be the Future of Twitter? The Significance of Musk’s Twitter Tweets in the Era of Facebook Disruption
The possibility of allowing Trump and other people to return is being considered by Facebook, which is considering banning the former president when its ban on him expires in January.
“If Trump is replatformed on Twitter, it makes it easier for [Meta president of global affairs] Nick Clegg and [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg to say, ‘Well, he’s already back on Twitter. We might as well let him back on Facebook,’” said Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, a progressive advocacy group.
Musk immediately fired four of Twitter’s top executives — CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Policy Head Vijaya Gadde. Personette and Brand resigned from the company on Friday.
Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”
That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.
Could Twitter Blue be the future of Twitter? Musk thinks so. He believes he can turn Twitter subscriptions into a $10 billion business by 2028, which would be double the entire company’s current revenue. Of course, that also includes huge user growth. Musk estimated that the social network could have 600 million users by 2025. That’s a big jump from the company’s current crop of 217 million users.
LOS ANGELES: Musk’s SpaceX cost cut to support the Ukrainian Army Communications Crisis in Ukraine (hereafter SpaceX)
He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.
What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. In the summer of 2015, Musk told his staff that the company should copy the Chinese app called ‘Wenfare,’ which combines social media, payments and shopping on your phone.
Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.
On Friday, senior U.S. officials confirmed that Musk had officially asked the Defense Department to take over funding for the service Starlink provides in Ukraine. Since the beginning of February, Starlink has provided vital battlefield communications for Ukrainian military forces, who have been fighting against Russia.
Early Friday, Musk tweeted that it was costing SpaceX $20 million a month to support Ukraine’s communications needs. Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
A Note on “Starlink is not a revenue-making venture for Musk” by U.S. Senators Elected on the Condition of Anonymity
According to the senior U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter not yet made public, the Starlink funding issue has been discussed in meetings and is being considered by senior leaders. There have been no decisions.
In the letter, Musk said that it is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.
The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
He stated in the Thursday post that the platform needs to be warm and welcoming to all and that they can choose their experience according to their preferences. The most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise is whatTwitter aspires to be.
This is a huge story with a lot of fast-moving parts to it. It’s also a story that will likely stretch out over the next few months, maybe even longer. We thought we’d put together a guide for you to keep up with what’s going on. We are like you.
The Musk-Twitter connection and the Musk-Agrawal lawsuit: Where are we going? What will Twitter do after Musk’s lawsuit?
Let’s talk about the loans for a hot minute. The banks that helped facilitate the deal hold the debt because they usually only try to find buyers for the debt. But Musk’s lawsuit and delayed closing made that harder, and they’re stuck with the loans on their balance sheets. When they got into this situation, interest rates were lower. By the time the deal closed, though, the appetite for debt had changed, says Anant Sundaram, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
Things got particularly messy, it appears, when current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal asked Musk to stop tweeting damaging things about the company. When he decided not to join the board Musk decided to take it private. Everyone was falling over themselves to give Musk money to make it happen, Calacanis had a lot of weird ideas about it, but Dorsey was very fond of the idea. The text are funny and worth a read.
A few days later, Twitter responded the way it always does: your argument is invalid, Twitter hasn’t breached its side of the deal, and so you can’t either.
Musk’s side wanted more time and for the trial to start in February 2023. Twitter wanted it to start as soon as possible. The trial will start on October 17th and will last for five days, according to the Chancellor. That assumes the two sides don’t settle, and that is anyone’s guess.
Twitter Layoffs and First All-Hands Meeting: Yoel Roth’s Tweet on the Terms of Musk’s Twitter Deal
Twitter’s Head of Safety and Integrity, Yoel Roth, has also remained at the company. In recent days, he has tweeted about the company’s efforts to address a surge in hateful rhetoric on the platform, and Musk on Twitter encouraged users to follow him for “the most accurate understanding of what’s happening with trust & safety at Twitter.”
The subpoenas ahead of the trial have become a who’s who of the tech industry, including Dorsey, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Tesla, Keith Rabois, and many others. Dorsey was a surprise but seems likely to have plenty of pertinent information, given both his tenure as Twitter CEO and the fact that Dorsey reportedly pushed hard to convince Musk to buy the company in the first place.
We wouldn’t normally tell you it’s worth reading a 162-page legal filing that gets deep into the weeds of bot measurement procedures. Much of the case was written in such a way that the entire audience would be able to read it. It is a good yarn.
The first all- hands meeting after Musk made a public bid was weird. The company said after serenading employees with bands, it would continue with its evaluation.
The employees were upset by the lack of a detailed response. The future of the social media platform and the possibility of layoffs are concerns for them.
The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She had threatened to hold a trial if there wasn’t an agreement.
What Will Happen When the Eccentric CEO Tells Us About Twitter? After the Twitter Scandal and the Hateful Tribune of Y.T. Yildirim
The first of many big changes the eccentric CEO will make is almost certain despite the fact that the major personnel moves came quickly.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. The harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks and also called for Musk to fire her, as well as calls for an 11-year employee of the social network to be terminated. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
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.”
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 do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
The deal is going through, Musk has been saying. He walked into the company’s San Francisco headquarters with a porcelain sink, changed hisTwitter profile to “chief twit” and then wrote “Entering twitter HQ let that sink in!”
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
A Tweet from Musk and a Blue Heart Follows Up with a Single Heart: The Times Reports Chief Marketing Officer Jay Caldwell Turned to Twitter Exec
Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a discussion with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to support his 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 note showed that advertisers were focused more on ad revenues than they were in the past, and they wanted to see more “relevant ads” that collected and analyzed users’ personal information.
Both Calacanis and Krishnan confirmed that they were working with Musk to run the company and come up with new products.
Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, has changed his Twitter bio to “former Twitter Exec,” and Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed the company and his title from his Twitter bio. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the company’s chief marketing officer had left, and on Tuesday night she followed up with a single blue heart.
Calacanis stated that he was in New York on his way to meet with the marketing and advertising community. He has asked people on the platform about their subscription and bookmarks.
A Brief History of Musk and the Steve Jobs Legacy of Silicon Valley: a Case Study of Persistence in the Rejuvenation of Tesla
In May 1998, I visited Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters to hear his plans for reviving Apple. He was the interim CEO for almost a year, and had returned to the company that fired him a decade earlier. Greeting me in the boardroom of his suite at One Infinite Loop, he went to the whiteboard and began scrawling out his solution to the company’s business woes. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.
Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 17 years after being incorporated, Musk created a plan to turn the company around, but it did not post a profit until 2020. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.
The Fed: Premarket Stocks Trading in a Time-Dependent Scenario for the First Quarter of 2019.01 (Aug. 1904)
CNN Business originally published a version of the story. Is that not a subscriber? You can do that right here. You can listen to the audio version of the newsletter with the same link.
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 have a big effect on the market, as investors try to deduce what will happen to 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 the Fed has a long way to go in fighting inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”
Powell added an important caveat. The pace of the hikes could be slowed as early as December. Powell said the incoming data will influence the outlook for economic activity and inflation.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Premarket Stocks Trading: A Study of Employment, Food, and Energy Demands in the U.S. with a Strong May Increase in October
The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.
That will lead to more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and are able to charge more for their goods and services. The hourly wage increase will be looked at closely by the Fed. Wages increased by 5% in September.
There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. Even if the unemployment rate stays historically low, it could make Fed officials feel better if both reports show a downward trajectory in employment.
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.
PCE is used to indicate changes in the prices of goods and services in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate than CPI because it accounts for a wider range of purchases from a broader range of buyers.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Wall Street Walls, Wall-Free Housing, and Wall-Building: Wall Walls in Wall Street, Wall Crosscutting, Wall Wall Breaking and Wall Wall Stability
Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.95% last week, up from 3.09% just a year ago, and elevated borrowing costs are leading to a decline in demand.
Powell said the housing market was “very overheated for the couple of years after the swine flu epidemic,” as demand increased. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”
The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.
But the bank also issued a stark warning. It said that it expects the economy to go into a recession through the first half of the first century due to high energy prices and tighter financial conditions.
Organizations including the ADL, Color of Change, Free Press and GLAAD pointed to Friday’s mass layoffs of Twitter staff as a key factor in their thinking, citing fears that Musk’s cuts will make Twitter’s election integrity policies effectively unenforceable, even if they technically remain active.
The email said that the company’s offices would be temporarily closed and badges would be suspended to aid in the safety of employees.
TheWARN Act requires companies with more than 100 workers to give at least 60 days’ written notice if they want to cut 50 or more jobs.
The End of Twitter: Musk’s $18/Monday Blue Check Mark for Account Holders Trying to Make a Living on Twitter
An end to the disruption seemed nowhere in sight on Friday. A gray official pin will be re-introduced for select accounts to help confirm their identities. The decision came after Twitter was forced to fend off a wave of verified-account impostors this week, including some posing as former President Donald Trump, Nintendo, and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, among others. These were the result of Musk’s decision to rush ahead with offering a blue check mark to account holders willing to pay $8 a month, no questions asked, as he races to find new ways to make money from the platform.
The richest man in the world used an F-word to describe his assessment of the current system of lords and peasants. He said that he wanted power to the people. For $8/month, you can get blue.
The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the moves, also said Pfizer and Mondalez are pausing ads on Twitter. The companies didn’t reply to the request for comment.
The impact is apparently already being felt at Twitter, as Musk tweeted that “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers” Thursday after many of the advertising announcements were made.
The Volkswagen Group stated in a separate statement that it had advised its brands to stop their paid activities until further notice.
General motors had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on the platform, while it analyzed the direction of the platform. When CNN inquired about Toyota’s position on the situation, it said that it is in discussions with key stakeholders and is monitoring the situation.
What Happened to Twitter in the First Three Days of the Musk Explanation? A Brief Discussion with Calacanis, the CEO of Interpublic Group, and a Critique of Musk
Interpublic Group, which works with brands like Coca Cola, recommended to its clients that they cease advertising on the platform.
Civil society leaders are concerned that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and disrupt the elections.
Musk is working to prevent an exodus of advertisers. 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.
I didn’t think chaos would take so long, but I do admit: this rules. This is very hard to own. Awoooou (wolf howl), Twitter is good again. We’re no longer locked in here with Elon Musk — Elon Musk has locked himself in here with us.
This part is not Musk’s fault. When the economy slows down, companies spend less money on advertising. So even if Musk weren’t doing wild stuff to alienate advertisers, such as tweeting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, Twitter might have been in trouble anyway. Musk has essentially identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which could cause people to cut back on spend on advertising before it starts to hurt.
Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that 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.
Well, no, because this is the internet, and there’s forum drama. The account with the display name “Nintendo of America” has a blue check mark that looks just like the verified one, but it doesn’t have to be verified. To an unwary user, that might look sufficiently like the actual Nintendo account to do brand damage.
I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. 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 said that the new checkmarked users made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.
Under the consent decree, the government requires full documentation of any foreseeable risks of a product or service affecting commerce. The changes to Twitter Blue rolled out less than two weeks after Musk bought Twitter. Do you believe in full documentation about its risks? Sounds as if the lawyers are worried.
Now that the debt is out of the way, the banks will take an immediate loss. Banks may choose to hang on to the debt for a while to see whether the market conditions change. The debt unloading gets even harder, if it is actually shitting the bed. Now, Musk is the richest guy in the world, so banks might be willing to negotiate terms with him about debt repayment. I’m not sure how long they want to hold these loans. It would be difficult for other tech buy outs to get done if banks can not place the debt.
In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly launched and un-launched other features aimed at compensating for it; and witnessed an exodus of senior executives.
After gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users distinguish legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk suddenly halted the feature in the middle of the night.
A day and a half later, the account said it had added an official label to some accounts to combat impersonation.
The rocky launch of the paid verification feature caused a lot of backlash from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identification of trustworthy information much harder when the elections are in full swing. Some high power users of the platform got a hard time giving feedback.
“@elonmusk, from one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. Or bring it back to the micro-blogging site. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”
Musk’s comments came after CNBC reported Sunday that he had ordered one of the larger advertising packages available from Twitter for his company. CNN Business requested comment from SpaceX, but they did not reply.