Musk’s Twitter Ascent to a Free-For-All Hellscape: A Brief Remark on the Idea of a Town Hall

Shortly before news broke last week that his $44 billion Twitter acquisition was completed, Musk wrote an open letter attempting to reassure advertisers that he does not want the social network to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”

“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk said.

Musk and Jobs both had similar situations when Musk took over Twitter last week. It has become a second tier social network in terms of audience because it has lost money. According to Musk, the original motivation for him was that he viewed micro-messaging as the Town Hall. He was going to allow more, freer speech on the platform, and fast. Musk finance some of his takeover with bank loans and now had to pay off the debt. Musk began making changes that would change the fortunes of the company.

Robot Podcasters in Silicon Valley — Why aren’t Podcasts there? What are they talking about in tech news? A two strikes for Elon buying Twitter

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. It may contain mistakes, even though it was reviewed by human transcribers. Before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@ny Times.com, please review the episode audio.

So usually, on this podcast, we’re going to try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what’s happening in Silicon Valley. But right now, the only story that anyone in tech cares about is what’s happening just down the street from us in San Francisco, at Twitter.

Yeah. So that’s the other big idea coming out of Elon’s brain trust. And underneath all of these changes and announcements and changes to the announcements, there’s just been this atmosphere of total chaos and confusion inside Twitter, as engineers and other Twitter employees are getting extraordinary demands to make changes much more quickly than they otherwise would have.

So what we’re going to do is talk to them, like have a normal interview. Instead of playing them their voice, which would de-anonymize them, we are going to take what they say and write it down. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.

When we started this show, we said that we wouldn’t put on the artificial voices unless we had a really good reason to do so and a limited capacity. Twice in five episodes.

Well, you were wrong about Elon buying Twitter, and you were wrong about this not being a podcast filled with robot podcasters. So two strikes for him.

Yeah. And this is one of the — sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly, that you think, well, this couldn’t possibly be true. The tip about the last 30 to 60 days of code that was given to me was a lie, and I thought it was false.

The sources that I have, they are not like, uh,Casey, that sounds right to me. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!

So why is this funny? What is this fascinating about? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. How much code they have written isn’t used to evaluate people.

If you show up with a large amount of code, that is not a good thing. You could have helped the company by eliminating some code. Sort of making it simpler. So —

Who prints code when there is a problem? I was surprised that the coding programs had a Print button. That is not what you are bringing to your daily review of your code.

What has Twitter Blue been up to? What have we learned? Why is Twitter Blue having a major printing fiasco, and what has it to do with verifications?

It was stated in the memo that Omnicom requested that the issues be removed from the platform, but that it was due to the lack of senior leadership.

Two hours later, they get this new notification on their phone and all the other people on the website get it. It’s like, change of plans. Elon and his folks, they still want to see your code. We need you to shred it if you have printed it out, but why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop?

Like, there’s just this boss in charge who, like, doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone’s just kind of humoring him. It is not the sort of thing that happens in a big tech company.

It’s not. Now, one thing that we should say is that the Elon folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He sees himself as an engineer.

I have talked to people who get calls late at night from random engineers and asked them who is really good on their team. Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?

This exercise is ridiculous as it seems, and part of an evaluation system where they are trying to figure out who is keeping the service running.

And who can we lay off? That is sort of a secret part of this. OK, so we have this code printing fiasco. On Sunday, you reported that verifications may be tied to blue subscriptions, and what that meant.

In Musk’s first email to Twitter employees, the billionaire owner said roughly half of the company’s revenue would need to come from subscriptions. But in the last few days, Twitter Blue, the premium tier for $7.99 a month that Musk has been pushing, has been through tumultuous changes in the short time it’s been live. The suspension of the service won’t change in an hour, though who is to say that it won’t happen again?

If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that’s $38 million a year, roughly. The company’s second-quarter revenue was over a billion dollars. If you pay $8 a month, even when you are verified, this is not a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah. People, including Stephen King, the horror author — he tweeted, ”$20 a month to keep my blue check? I am going to go like Enron, if that gets instituted.

Stephen King has written about a lot of the scariest things, but the idea of paying a monthly fee for his verification badges was something he was scared off by.

It is strange because it is not that large a moneymaking idea. I was working on the back of the envelope math on this. There are 400,000 people verified on TWiTTER right now. That is the most recent number that we have.

When I worked at the news company, someone put my name on a list and I suddenly got a checkmark by my name.

The Blue Checks Mob of People on Twitter and the Correspondence with Stephen King on Twitter, which is a way to make money out of Twitter

It is not about this person. It was literally created because people like Oprah were joining Twitter many, many years ago, and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter, saying that they were people like Oprah. It was necessary that users be able to tell if the person they were speaking to was actually the person they claimed to be.

This is an essential feature of the platform, and I think it is fair to say. Every platform that is social in some way has a feature like this. You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

Right. People have seen these checkmarks next to your name as sort of a status symbol over the years, so I think it is fair to say. Like, it means that you’re someone, it means that it —

Correct, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.

It almost immediately results in a hugeTwitter timeline meltdown, where users say no way will we pay $20 a month. That is more than I pay for. It was more than I paid for the video-sharing website.

That seems insane, to just keep my check mark. Subsequently, Elon responds to Stephen King on Twitter and says, we need to pay the bills somehow. There is no point in using advertisers entirely on social media sites. How about $8? Stephen King is a pricing consultant.

Well, here’s my theory about it, real quick, is that I think that inside Elon world, and inside, frankly, a lot of right-wing sort of circles, there’s this idea of the blue checks, right? People on Fox News and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of, like, blue check mob of people on Twitter, mostly journalists and other media figures, who are sort of, like, self-important and care very deeply about their checkmarks.

And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

Yeah. I mean, look, I have to say, I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves part of this plan. Paying to keep your badge is not the only thing that makes people pay. It’s also that if you pay, you could get a badge.

It also seems to me that I want to keep an open mind. This could work. I think some of the features that are being discussed here should be paid for by people who are power users of the social networking site.

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 the product to $8 and it may not be enough to cover its costs. We need to do back-of-the-envelope math. 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, it will be $1 billion in revenue. It is easy, right?

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. So there’s still a lot of details to be worked out here.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What’s Happening in Vine 10 Years After the Deal Closing and Where Will They Go?

Before we go, we should say we did reach out to Twitter and ask them to respond to what you just heard from employees about what’s been going on inside the company. They did not write back. The company has not made any comments since the deal closed.

It was one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years, and I have been going to Krispy Kreme often in the past. At the same time, the culture has also moved on. The code base for Vine is 10 years old, and the idea that it is now going to be revived and turn into a TikTok competitor — that’s a really steep hill.

I would say that it was not an immediate revenue driver. They will have to put a lot of effort into that. A new social network is going to be launching within the micro-messaging service. So that’s a huge, heavy lift. I think it could be fun to have a very popular American short-form video network that wasn’t owned by Facebook or YouTube. We just have to see if they can do it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Say Out: Why Do We Need These Employers? Why Do They Have the Right Jobs? What Do They Need? How Do They NEED to Speak Out?

That’s right. They’re being told, you have days to ship this. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. You will be fired if it’s more than an hour past deadline.

People are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them are here on work visas. They have 60 days to find a new job or leave the country. It is serious for people that have these jobs.

The first chapter of the book is called “Hardfork.”Welcome to “Mockingjay.” So it is about 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday right now. How’s your day going so far? Do you see anything noteworthy happen today?

Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels. I think most people have figured it out and moved on to other channels. We’ve had no communication internally, so we’re trying to chase rumors.

Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain this job that I have currently, while clearly looking for a way out, while having zero support and acknowledgment from the people above me, is very stressful. Already, there have been multiple rumor mill-based scares.

There were supposed to be layoffs on Monday. They did not happen. It was rumored that it was going to be Friday. It’s tiring. I am sure we are all paid well.

We have some money to save. Some people don’t. But it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we’re entering a really tough hiring market in tech. And also, we’re entering the holidays.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speaker Out? What Have We Learned in the Last Three Days? How Have We Solved It?

So just to really underline that, you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has been fired or resigned and you have yet to receive an email saying who is in charge and what the plan is for the next few days.

That is accurate. We have received zero information, other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is very sparse. The messages are not getting answered in the company-wide channels.

And so what is that like, when, day to day, you wake up, and it’s almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing?

You have probably heard, and you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I’ve seen people say that code is written by them, without crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hopes that they’ll be on some preferred status list.

Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. Everybody is sharing code they have ever written no matter how insignificant or garbage it is. [SIGHS]

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

I’m not afraid to talk about what’s going on at work, but what I can’t cope with: A message from an employee

I received a message from a manager that said, if you don’t know what you’re doing, work on something. Work on anything.

I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from Blind. Blind is this app where you sort of log in with your work email, and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what’s happening at your company.

And multiple people have sent me this post. I am curious if you have seen it. The whole thing is not going to be read by me. The headline is, “I can’t cope.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

The Life Under The Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out – How I Get My Sleep and What I Can’t Do About It

I am working on the team of people that will make all of Elon’s crazy dreams come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we miss delivery, even if it’s totally outside our control. If we don’t work at weekends, we’re gone. We are gone if we leave or takePTO.

People are working for long hours. I work 20 hours a day at full speed. I wake up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can’t cope. I am a mess. I’m at a point in my life where things are not going well. This is after just a few days of the man.

So there are two camps at Twitter right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces. People who are being ignored and fired are the people who should be in this position.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

What the hell are the worst decisions people can make in a country with a large telecom network? Are they scared of their decisions? And why are they scared?

My heart goes out to this person. I hope they find gainful employment and apply to jobs four hours later while they are trying to sleep and care for themselves.

I am hoping that people who are on visas are taken care of. I know many people who are on visas who have no idea what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.

So this is more than just the privileged tech people crying, we are moving from a six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

So there is a lot to that I do not necessarily disagree with. I think Twitter, at the end of the day, is structured very poorly. This goes back to a lack of operational leadership, which has been existent in the company for many years. This company does not have good operations, and it shows.

So I think it is not because engineers are sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured, it is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine processes, literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. So there is some truth to that statement. This is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.

Life Under-Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out, and What Has Happened in Twitter in the Space Since Pre-Elon?

And I wonder, as you’ve been going through all this, if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk, and what fears you might have around the future of Twitter the service?

I would love to think that a lot of people will leave on the social networking site. Many people may stay in the situation. But it’s going to be interesting to see who stays.

Now that community is being shifted and changed. The platform has heavy speakers coming out of it. And it’s not just people leaving the platform. The platform’s popular content is changing to less popular content. Pre-Elon, we should have known that there was an unfortunate direction that was headed in anyway.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Survey of Current Trends and The Promise Of A New Job, And Why Many Workers Would Necessarily Quit

Scared and relieved. It will be scary to not have income. But at the same time, I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later and say, all right, got to get that resume out there. It is sucking the life out of us, so we need to be more excited about these other jobs.

There is uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. The pile of unknowns in conjunction with the information we have left leads to a constant stress and cognitive disfunctionality.

People would raise privacy concerns or misuse of new features even in the lowest parts of engineering. And their only job is to write random code that no one’s ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes. The company has always allowed people to speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: What Did he Learn? How Did He Get What He Wanted?

That’s complicated because no one really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. There were many people that thought that this should have been banned a long time ago for his behavior. And everything just sort of came from there.

I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.

I’ve been there for a number of years and have to say that the company has grown in many ways and not so well. I don’t disagree with people if they say there’s too many managers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow. Management has never been the company’s strong point.

You don’t change like this without a huge structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under The Muscle: Two Tweets About Their Employers – Exactly How Fast Should They Be? What Does Elon Need to Say?

Alright. There is an idea that would like to see Tweets move faster than it has been. We’ve been hearing that Elon is saying, ship this thing by next Monday or else you are going to be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?

I have lost my mind. I mean, having a three – to four-day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday, that’s normal. That is a lot of stress. I think it will put in a couple more hours. It’s necessary to get it done. It makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I wouldn’t be asked to do something about the blue status at work by Friday. That is completely insane.

The number of engineers that have to be dragged in is just like raising the Titanic from the depths of the ocean.

It is not just a set of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers, and lots of other folks, right?

Yeah. If you look at some of the features reported on that he wants to add, you can see how ranking blue check users higher than others is something he wants to add in. They need to completely reprogram how it works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.

Yeah. If somebody came to you and said, “We want to redo your account”, what would the time frame that you would be given that would make you say, yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that?”

It depends. If the change requires a ton of infrastructure changes, it could take quite a while because the Twitter platform is generally pretty slow. We’re more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.

But feature-wise, I guess if I had to give a round-about time frame, there would probably be something that could possibly be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Are We Really Going to Disturb a Social Problem? Is That the Case?

This is an engineering problem and it is also a social problem. We need to do testing. We have to figure out how this can be abused. What will people do with it? What are the Bitcoin bros going to do to try to steal more of people’s money abusing this feature?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? It seems like these deadlines are so short that it would be hard to figure out what would go wrong without some testing or scrutiny. They are going to be free.

Yeah. There’s a section on privacy and data. We are not doing anything with user data, so we do not worry about it. There is a blue check on a profile.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Social Media Marketing – What Elon Musk’s Tweets About (Re)conciled with Facebook and Twitter (And Why) It Has Been Done

So there’s a couple of things. It varies depending on where you are in the leadership stack. Generally the one overarching message that did get communicated was, find something cool that you like. Hopefully, Musk likes it.

Think about it. He wants the idea to be done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.

Elon Musk has been busy over at Twitter HQ. He has talked about implementing some big changes at his $44 billion acquisition. Here are what’s happened so far.

I mean, one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the Explore page. My understanding was that we may even be able to serve ads to people who aren’t in the account.

Now, if you go to Twitter and you’re not logged in, they’ll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in, create an account. If you linger and browse a bit, you might see some ads. So that was a relatively quick change that he made that I think a lot of people would agree makes some sense.

The Vine one, it’s not the worst idea. The cynical part of me thinks, too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.

But sure. The original content from vine is what we have. The nostalgia factor gives us a big foothold in marketing, and this gives us the chance to at least launch something.

But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we can do? There have been mock-ups.

Life under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do You Want to Learn? What Will You Do? (Derive Your Options)

It’d probably be the most boring. You could probably make a really interesting ethereal horror movie out of just constantly walking around with nothing.

There is no communication. The people in the corner aren’t the only ones talking. But it’s not like, oh, the whole company went to an all-hands and learned what’s happening. It’s everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?

So as we’re recording this, we don’t know what might happen to your job. Are you interested in working at Twitter in three months? Or do you feel like you’re ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is real. I mean, culture seeps through the product. For all of Twitter’s faults, a lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared so much. That can be hard to take in its own way.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

On Musk’s tweet about the current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark

I mean, people have seen this. We are going to move fast and break things with no regard for the people who are using it and that defeats the point.

He is reading the news about work hours. He has been speculating on what sort of labor law lawsuits would come out.

So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”

If people want to send you huge scoops about what is happening atTwitter, they can do it over to Casey. Kevin is his email address. ruffe

The Hard Fork of Steve Jobs: How a Silicon Valley CEO Can Make Sense of an Abrupt Success Success Story, and How Tesla Has Done It

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. We’re edited by Paula Szuchman. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was made by a person.

Dan Powell and Elisheba Ittoop were involved in creating original music. With special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda.

I went to Apple headquarters in May 1998 to hear from Jobs about how he would revive Apple. He had been its interim CEO for almost a year, after returning to the company that fired him over 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.

The absurdity of Musk’s haste isn’t something he should look farther than his successful businesses. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 17 years after inception, Musk’s plan to turn the company around did not make an annual profit. 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. It takes years to make a successful rocket ship, and cutting corners will cause death if you try to go faster.

Before the Bell: Why Did the Market Plop and Stocks Plunge? A Report by CNN Business on the Priors of the Bell

A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. Clicking on the same link will lead to an audio version of the newsletter.

The Federal Reserve will have a 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.

Key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have larger effects on the market as investors speculate about what will happen with interest rates.

What are the things happening? Federal Reserve Chair was the reason for the market plunge, he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. “We have a ways to go,” said Powell of the Fed’s current hiking regime meant to fight persistent inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”

The central bank doesn’t believe inflation will go down until next year. In the coming months, more interest rate hikes will be required.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html

The First Month of the Fed Inflationary Year: Expected Activity in the U.S. Consumer Spending and the Perturbation of the Core Core Rate

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 means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and charge more for their services. The wage growth will be looked at by the Fed. Wages increased by 5% in September.

There is a chance that the Fed meeting will bring another jobs report in December. If both reports show a downward trajectory in employment, that could be enough to placate Fed officials, even if the unemployment rate remains historically low.

The core inflation rate, which excludes oil and food and is considered a leading indicator of economic health, rose 0.6% in the month of September, well above expectations of a 0.4% increase. Analysts expect to see a big increase in October.

PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers 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

The housing market: the role of Fed and Wall Street tightening in a financial crisis after the UK Bank of England raises interest rates

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.

“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.”

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.

The bank warned of dire consequences. It expects a recession to continue through the first half of next year as high energy prices and loose financial conditions weigh on spending.

Employees of the micro-blogging site are claiming in a class action lawsuit that layoffs violate the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

The company is closing its offices and suspending all badges in order to ensure the safety of employees and systems.

The WARN Act requires a company with more than 100 employees to give 60 days of written notice if it intends to cut 50 or more jobs.

Twitter Is The Blue: It’s the Blue for 8%/Month, and General Mills and Volkswagen Group Are Pausing Advertising on Twitter

The company filing states that all previous members of Twitter’s board, including recently ousted CEO Parag Agrawal and chairman Bret Taylor, are no longer directors “in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement.” The filing states that Musk is the sole director of the social networking site.

In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He said that he wanted power to the people. It’s blue for $8/month.

The remarks came after General Mills and the Volkswagen Group confirmed that they are pausing advertising on Twitter in the wake of Musk’s acquisition of the social media company, in the clearest sign yet of growing advertiser uncertainty about the future of the platform under new ownership.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” he said in a tweet. It was extremely messed up. They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

In a separate statement, Volkswagen Group, which owns Audi, Porsche and Bentley, confirmed it had recommended its brands “pause their paid activities on the platform until further notice.”

General Motor said it would pause paying for advertising on the social media platform while it reviews its new direction. Toyota previously told CNN it is in talks with key stakeholders and is keeping an eye on the situation on social media.

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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 challenge for brands is that they’re sensitive to the type of content their ads run against on 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.

Musk is trying to stave off a possible advertiser exodus. Musk had a meeting with the marketing community in New York on Monday, according to a member of his inner circle.

Twitter may be in big trouble when it comes to generating advertising revenue: GroupM, part of WPP, the world’s biggest ad company — and Twitter’s biggest spender — is reportedly telling its clients that buying ads on the platform is “high-risk,” according to Platformer and Digiday. Big corporations may want to take their money elsewhere, after IPG and Omnicom Media Group both recommended pausing advertisements on the platform.

GroupM is reportedly concerned about several specific things following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; in a document, it cites the large numbers of Twitter executives leaving or being fired (especially those in charge of safety, security, and compliance), the wave of high-profile impersonations by “verified” users, and also raises concerns about Twitter’s abilities to follow the Federal Trade Commission’s orders. If Twitter wants to lose its high-risk label, there’s several things GroupM reportedly wants to see, according to a document viewed by Digiday and a Slack message from Twitter’s agency partnerships lead seen by Platformer. The list includes things.

I did not think that chaos would spread so quickly, but I have to admit: this rules. This is very hard to own. It has been good again, it is known as TWITTER. We are not locked in with Musk, he has locked himself in with us.

The acquisition of Twitter does not necessarily mean it is full of Musk fans. It’s a less favorable environment for Musk. Dril is a forum goon who loves fuck with people, and is the most prominent of the early subset of Twitter users. 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. It most likely did. Certainly, that would explain why his very first policy change was to increase punishment for impersonation.

Let’s talk about the loans for a hot minute. The Twitter debt is currently held by the banks that helped facilitate this deal — unusual since, generally, they 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. The appetite for debt changed by the time the deal was closed, according to Anant Sundaram.

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.

This is the internet, and there is forum drama. Blue users get a blue check mark, which looks exactly like the check mark verified users get, which is how an account with a blue check mark and the display name “Nintendo of America” managed to put up a tweet of Mario. To an unwary user, that might look sufficiently like the actual Nintendo account to do brand damage.

Even without an economic downturn, I don’t think a lot of advertisers want to come back to someone with that attitude. 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 mentions bad. People stay on the platform to drive Cuban off, because his thoughts are one of the reasons they stay.

That paid subscription service, too, was also suspended on Friday with little warning, just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for Twitter Blue suddenly disappearing from Twitter’s iOS app — the only place the add-on had been offered. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.

It is risky debt, B1 rating, and it is on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. Four months ago, investor appetite for this debt was much larger. And when Moody’s rated Twitter’s debt, it cited Twitter’s governance — i.e., Elon Musk — as a major driver of risk.

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.

It’s a stunning reversal of fortunes not just for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion, but also for a platform used by some of the most powerful people on the planet, including world leaders, CEOs, and the Pope.

Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday, Musk killed the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.

On Wednesday evening, the verified support account said that they are not putting an official label on accounts, but that they are aggressively going after impersonation and deception.

Misinformation experts had warned that the paid verification feature would make identification of reliable information much more difficult in the days ahead of the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

elonmusk, from one person to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. Mark Cuban, billionaire, spent too much time muting his verified mentions in order to make them useful again.

Cuban explained that there was a decision to be made. The new version of the service puts the onus on all users to care for themselves, and encourages them to pay for paid accounts. Or use the service to return back to the original way of communicating. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is not good.

The company is already facing billions in potential fines from the FTC over alleged privacy missteps dating to before Musk’s ownership. But, the Twitter employee warned colleagues, Twitter could find itself even more legally exposed after the sudden resignation of multiple top Twitter executives charged with fulfilling the company’s FTC obligations, including its chief information security officer and chief privacy officer.

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GroupM works with many companies, among them Coke, L’Oréal, and Mars. GroupM has a list of clients and a graphic about how a few brands make most of what you buy at the store is similar to that.

To put it bluntly, zero percent surprising, those requests are. Companies don’t want to advertise on platforms where their messages, carefully crafted to be as inoffensive and enticing to as many people as possible, appear next to blatant hate speech, conspiracy theories, or, perhaps worst of all, a fake-yet-verified version of their profile posting pictures of their beloved mascot giving people the middle finger.

GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message seen by Platformer says that Twitter is “working through” GroupM’s requirements with leadership.