Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[Celery Man 20,991]

i don't know shit about fuck in regards to twitter but I also imagine that the.... revenue driving content creators make up a very disproportionate ratio of the small percentage of third party app users as compared to the ad consuming "followers". Probably the third party app users are the power users who bring value to the platform, and most of the ad views are generated by people scrolling the app whenever they're disengaged from their surroundings.

Again, not knowing shit about fuck - if there's a "we are serving tweets outside the ecosystem without serving ads" scenario I would think it would be embedding tweets in websites like this one, articles, etc. Huge audience of people who see tweets all the time and never open the site or the app.

[NoName 16,369]

12 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

i don't know shit about fuck in regards to twitter but I also imagine that the.... revenue driving content creators make up a very disproportionate ratio of the small percentage of third party app users as compared to the ad consuming "followers". Probably the third party app users are the power users who bring value to the platform, and most of the ad views are generated by people scrolling the app whenever they're disengaged from their surroundings.

Again, not knowing shit about fuck - if there's a "we are serving tweets outside the ecosystem without serving ads" scenario I would think it would be embedding tweets in websites like this one, articles, etc. Huge audience of people who see tweets all the time and never open the site or the app.

see that's the whole thing. they COULD serve ads, but never have through that API.

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

34 minutes ago, NoName said:

see that's the whole thing. they COULD serve ads, but never have through that API.

 

Right.

The smarter, more astute thing to do would be have an API that sent three times as many ads to third-party clients as it did Tweets.  Yeah, that would suck, but it would force people to make a choice:  use your third party Twitter app, or use the native Twitter app/website.

Instead, cutting them completely off and high-fiving each other at headquarters was the direction here.    

And the developers of Tweetbot ran a test to prove they were cutoff on purpose.   They applied for a new API key, applied it to their app, and it worked for a while, then was cutoff again:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89,775]

18 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

The smarter, more astute thing to do would be have an API that sent three times as many ads to third-party clients as it did Tweets.  Yeah, that would suck, but it would force people to make a choice:  use your third party Twitter app, or use the native Twitter app/website.

Or force people to subscribe to twitter so that they don't get the ads through the third-party apps when they use those ads.

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

13 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Or force people to subscribe to twitter so that they don't get the ads through the third-party apps when they use those ads.

 

Well, that too. Or pretty much any other way to have handled this would have been better than what was done.

 

I've found Tweetdeck does't show any ads, for what that is worth.  Which is interesting, considering it is owned by Twitter.  It's not mobile-friendly, but for now, it does the trick.

 

[atomheartbevo 89,775]

1 hour ago, Celery Man said:

i don't know shit about fuck in regards to twitter but I also imagine that the.... revenue driving content creators make up a very disproportionate ratio of the small percentage of third party app users as compared to the ad consuming "followers". Probably the third party app users are the power users who bring value to the platform, and most of the ad views are generated by people scrolling the app whenever they're disengaged from their surroundings.

Again, not knowing shit about fuck - if there's a "we are serving tweets outside the ecosystem without serving ads" scenario I would think it would be embedding tweets in websites like this one, articles, etc. Huge audience of people who see tweets all the time and never open the site or the app.

The thing about the power-user types (content creators, etc.) is that they may have been heavy drivers of third-party apps, but when it comes to advertising, they are also going to be the ones that, if they are using the web client, are going to have ad-blockers, etc. installed.

They are not being appreciated by Musk as revenue drivers who bring eyeballs to the websites - he sees a lot of them as nuisances who should be paying him for the right to have a blue check next to their name, and that they are no different than some 40-something mentally-ill Qanon follower rambling about Oprah Winfrey drinking the fluids of children to stay young, or some wannabe influencer sharing a few photos of herself that appeals to 45-50 year-old men in one Japanese town.

I've used third-party clients for posting and for very specific things (DMs, certain accounts I have setup a certain way), but If I wanted to just browse twitter for certain things (say current events), I have no problem doing so on the web client, whether I'm on a laptop or a phone, and I have a feeling the vast majority of people who see stuff on twitter are the same - it's just convenient to open up a browser tab.

This is just pettiness and grabbing at straws, and it's been done by other companies who are trying to control all aspects of their little part of the internet.  It's not quite an AOL situation where they are trying to lock you into their little walled garden, because here in 2022, almost everything is just a new browser tab/click away from everything else, including the competition.

But it's also a sign that rather than trying to expand the reach of twitter and increase the size of the user base, it's instead about trying to control existing users and trying to wring every last penny out of them.  This is being up by a touchdown or two in the third quarter and going to a prevent defense and trying to run out the clock, rather than trying to increase the lead.

[Chewbacca 7,781]

On 1/12/2023 at 9:01 AM, 27-25 said:

That's how my wife pronounces the name.

 She sounds smart.

[NoName 16,369]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

The thing about the power-user types (content creators, etc.) is that they may have been heavy drivers of third-party apps, but when it comes to advertising, they are also going to be the ones that, if they are using the web client, are going to have ad-blockers, etc. installed.

They are not being appreciated by Musk as revenue drivers who bring eyeballs to the websites - he sees a lot of them as nuisances who should be paying him for the right to have a blue check next to their name, and that they are no different than some 40-something mentally-ill Qanon follower rambling about Oprah Winfrey drinking the fluids of children to stay young, or some wannabe influencer sharing a few photos of herself that appeals to 45-50 year-old men in one Japanese town.

I've used third-party clients for posting and for very specific things (DMs, certain accounts I have setup a certain way), but If I wanted to just browse twitter for certain things (say current events), I have no problem doing so on the web client, whether I'm on a laptop or a phone, and I have a feeling the vast majority of people who see stuff on twitter are the same - it's just convenient to open up a browser tab.

see i have 14 year old twitter account and have never used the official app. used 3rd party when i had android and immediately downloaded tweetbot when i flipped over to ios

[Celery Man 20,991]

4 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

The thing about the power-user types (content creators, etc.) is that they may have been heavy drivers of third-party apps, but when it comes to advertising, they are also going to be the ones that, if they are using the web client, are going to have ad-blockers, etc. installed.

 

 

My understanding of “advertisements on Twitter “ is… ads appear as tweets in your feed. Actual I don’t understand how a third party app stops you from seeing tweet ads - does it not load the same feed of tweets you would get from the site or the app?

[Chopper 17,243]

Anyone know if Tesla finances its own leases or just has partners? Seems like some company is going to be way under water for any outstanding tesla leases, unless they've somehow managed to transfer the risk to the consumer.  

[HenryJames 66,152]

 

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

2 hours ago, Celery Man said:

My understanding of “advertisements on Twitter “ is… ads appear as tweets in your feed. Actual I don’t understand how a third party app stops you from seeing tweet ads - does it not load the same feed of tweets you would get from the site or the app?

 

I have no knowledge of the workings of Twitter.

In the case of third-party apps, you see *your* feed only---not what Twitter wants to send you (advertisements).  Nor do you see suggestions, "for you", or any other fluff.

Or so you could up until a few days ago.  I used Tweetbot on both Mac and iOS, and it was glorious.   See tweets in chronological order, no ads, etc.  

Tweetdeck was purchased by Twitter some time back, but it is not an app.  However, if you use tweetdeck (find it at tweetdeck.twitter.com) you can see your Twitter feed without ads.  For now.

Tweetdeck's main purpose (taken from Tweetdeck's support page):

Quote

TweetDeck offers a more convenient Twitter experience by letting you view multiple timelines in one easy interface. It includes a host of advanced features to help get the most of Twitter: Manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule Tweets for posting in the future, build Tweet collections, and more.
 

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89,775]

34 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

In the case of third-party apps, you see *your* feed only---not what Twitter wants to send you (advertisements).  Nor do you see suggestions, "for you", or any other fluff.

Twitter could have fed ads through the third-party app streams if they wanted to, and they could even put it in writing that if you (the app developer) used the API for your third-party program and tried to circumvent the advertising, you would be blocked, or be charged money.

34 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Tweetdeck's main purpose (taken from Tweetdeck's support page):

A side benefit of Tweetdeck being used for multiple accounts, was that it made it easy to tie accounts to each other and to individuals so that you could charge them more down the road, or do things like kill off Google Voice #s as validation, forcing the account owners to jump through a lot of hoops.

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

Longform piece put up at the Verge this morning.  Lof of this is already known, but there's some new things in here as well.

https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji

 

Quote

In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired a 9.2 ­percent stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder, and was offered a seat on the board. Luke Simon, a senior engineering director at Twitter, was ecstatic. “Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer and scientist, and he has a track record of having a Midas touch, when it comes to growing the companies he’s helped lead,” he wrote in Slack.

Twitter had been defined by the catatonic leadership of Jack Dorsey, a co-founder who simultaneously served as CEO of the payments business Block (formerly Square). Dorsey, who was known for going on long meditation retreats, fasting 22 hours a day, and walking five miles to the office, acted as an absentee landlord, leaving Twitter’s strategy and daily operations to a handful of trusted deputies. When he spoke about Twitter, it was often as if someone else were running the company. To Simon and those like him, it was hard to see Twitter as anything other than wasted potential. 

 

Quote

In its early days, when Twitter was at its most Twittery, circa 2012, executives called the company “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” That was the era when the platform was credited for amplifying the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring, when it seemed like ­giving everyone a microphone might ­actually bring down dictatorships and right the wrongs of neoliberal capitalism. That moment, which coincided with the rise of Facebook and YouTube, inspired ­utopian visions of how social networks could ­promote democracy and human rights around the world.

Twitter rode this momentum to become one of the most important companies in tech: an all-consuming obsession for those working or merely interested in politics, sports, and journalism around the world. Frequently, the platform set the news agenda and transformed nobodies into Main Characters. What it lacked in profits it more than made up for in influence.

 

Quote

No one understood how to weaponize that influence better than Donald Trump, who in 2016 propelled himself into the White House in part by harnessing hate and vitriol via his @realDonaldTrump feed. A new consensus that the site was a sewer made it worth a lot less money. ­Disney CEO Bob Iger pulled out of a bid to acquire Twitter, saying the “nastiness” on the platform was extraordinary.

After the election and the blown deal, Twitter overhauled its ­content-moderation policies, staffed up its trust and safety team, and committed itself to ­fostering “healthy conversations.” Never again would it let itself be used by a tyrant to sow discord and increase polarization. Two days after the January 6 insurrection, the platform banned Trump; the company had seen the toll of unfettered speech and decided it wasn’t worth it.

 

Spoiler

This was the Twitter that irked Elon Musk so much that he became convinced he had to buy it. In his view, by 2022 the company had been corrupted — beholden to the whims of governments and the ­liberal media elite. It shadow-banned ­conservatives, suppressed legitimate discourse about covid, and selectively kicked elected officials off the platform. Who better to restore Twitter to its former glory than its wealthiest poster? 

Like Trump, Musk knew how to use Twitter to make himself the center of the conversation. His incessant, irreverent tweeting violated every norm of corporate America, endearing his fans, pissing off his haters, and making him the second-most-followed active account on the site. “At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne,” he tweeted one evening in late 2021. “It gives me solace.”

Musk offered to buy the company for the absurdly inflated price of $44 billion. The move thrilled employees like Simon who chafed at Twitter’s laid-back atmosphere and reputation for shipping new features at a glacial pace. Simon, who owned a ­portrait of himself dressed as a 19th-century French general, told his team, which managed advertising services, that he wanted to build an “impact-focused, egalitarian and empirical culture, where any team member, with a strong data-driven justification, gets the metaphorical center stage.”

Other employees noted the darker motifs of Musk’s career — the disregard he brought to labor relations, the many lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and racial discrimination at his companies — and found his interest in Twitter ominous. On Slack, a product manager responded to Simon’s enthusiasm for Musk with skepticism: “I take your point, but as a childhood Greek mythology nerd, I feel it is important to point out that story behind the idea of the Midas touch is not a positive one. It’s a cautionary tale about what is lost when you only focus on wealth.”

The comment would prove to be ­prophetic. According to more than two dozen current and former Twitter staffers, since buying the company in October 2022, Musk has shown a remarkable lack of interest in the people and processes that make his new toy tick. He has purged thousands of employees, implemented ill-advised policies, and angered even some of his most loyal supporters. Those who remain at the company mostly fall into two camps: people trapped by the need for health care and visas or cold-eyed mercenaries hoping to ascend through a power vacuum.

Today, Musk has become notorious for the speech he suppresses, rather than the speech he allows, from ­suspending ­journalists for tweeting links to his jet tracker to briefly restricting users from linking to their accounts on Instagram and Mastodon.

In three months, Musk has also largely destroyed the equity value of Twitter and much of his personal wealth. He has ­indicated that the company could declare bankruptcy, and the distraction of running it has caused Tesla stock to ­crater, costing him $200 billion.

If “free speech” was his mandate for ­Twitter the platform, it has been the opposite for Twitter the workplace. Dissenting opinion or criticism has led to swift dismissals. Musk replaced Twitter’s old culture with one of his own, but it’s unclear, with so few workers and plummeting revenues, if this new version will survive. As one employee said in December, “Place is done for.”

 

On October 26, an engineer and mother of two — let’s call her Alicia — sat in a glass conference room in San Francisco trying to explain the details of Twitter’s tech stack to Elon Musk. He was supposed to officially buy the company in two days, and Alicia and a small group of trusted colleagues were tasked with outlining how its core infrastructure worked. But Musk, who was sitting two seats away from Alicia with his elbows propped on the table, looked sleepy. When he did talk, it was to ask questions about cost. How much does Twitter spend on data centers? Why was everything so expensive?

Alicia was already tired of Musk’s antics. For months, he had gone back and forth about buying the company where she had worked for more than a decade. He’d tried to back out of the deal, but Twitter sued, and the chief judge of Delaware’s Chancery Court said a trial would move forward if the acquisition wasn’t complete by October 28. Facing what many legal observers called an easy case for Twitter, Musk caved. So here they were, trying to show Musk what he was about to buy, and all he wanted to talk about was money. 

Fine, she thought. If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the ­company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how ­computers work.”

Alicia knew Twitter had problems; when prospective employees asked her why she’d stayed there so long, she would tell them, honestly, that the company was incredibly inefficient. It took a long time to get buy-in on projects, and communication across teams was generally poor. But it operated with a “benevolent anarchy” through which anyone could influence the direction of the product. “You didn’t need someone in a position of power to explicitly grant you permission,” Alicia says. “It was very much a bottom-up organization.”

Unlike some of her colleagues, Alicia wasn’t reflexively anti-Musk. She respected what he had done at his companies and felt hopeful that, as someone who thought of himself as an engineer, he would support her highly technical work. But Musk had a different interest that day. Twitter, he said, should immediately get into video.

“We really should be able to do longform video and attract the best content creators by giving them a better cut than YouTube,” he said, according to Alicia’s recollection. The infrastructure engineers in the room agreed that adding support for longform video was technically possible, but their job was building stuff — not strategy or marketing. It seemed as though Musk didn’t understand the basic organizational structure of a social-media company; it was as if a rich guy had bought a restaurant and started telling the cooks he wanted to add a new dining room. Might he want to speak with the media product team instead? 

Just then, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk’s who had advised him on the acquisition, walked into the room. A fellow native of South Africa, Sacks had worked with Musk at PayPal and later led the enterprise social-networking company Yammer to a $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft.

“David, this meeting is too technical for you,” Musk said, waving his hand to ­dismiss Sacks. Wordlessly, Sacks turned and walked out, leaving the engineers — who had gotten ­little engagement from Musk on anything technical — slack-jawed. His imperiousness in the middle of a session he appeared to be botching was something to behold. (Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The next day, Alicia and her colleagues gathered in the cafeteria of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for a long-planned Halloween party. The room was decorated with miniature pumpkins and fake spider­webs. Employees tried to get in the holiday spirit, but rumors were swirling that Musk planned to cut 75 percent of the company. People were audibly sobbing in the bathrooms. One company leader recalled the surreal moment of crying about the end of Twitter as they knew it, only to look up and see a person in a Jack Sparrow costume amble by. Outside on the balcony, one entertainer blew bubbles for staffers’ children. Another figure, dressed as a scarecrow, seemed to have a handler ­following him. There were whispers: Could it be Musk himself in costume? It turned out to be a hired performer.

As Alicia walked out of the office that evening, she passed Twitter’s head of ­product, Jay Sullivan, who was standing alone, looking solemn. “It’s done,” he said. The deal had closed during the party. 

It took only a few hours before news broke that Twitter’s executive team had walked the plank. Parag Agrawal, the CEO, was out, along with Vijaya Gadde, the head of policy, and Ned Segal, the chief finance officer. They had known what was ­coming and stayed away from the office. Sean Edgett, the general counsel, was also fired; he had been present for the handover and was unceremoniously escorted out of the building during the Halloween party. 

 

The days surrounding the acquisition passed in a blur of ominous, unlikely scenes. Musk posing as the world’s richest prop comic, announcing his takeover by lugging a kitchen sink into the office: “Entering ­Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” (181.2K retweets, 43.6K quote tweets, 1.3M likes.) A fleet of Teslas in the parking lot. Musk’s intimidating security detail standing outside his glass conference room as if guarding the leader of a developing nation. Musk’s 2-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, toddling around the second floor, occasionally crying. 

Employees braced for layoffs, but no word came from Musk. People hunted for information on their unofficial Slacks, Discords, and Signal chats while glued to Musk’s Twitter feed for news like everyone else. “Hey all don’t forget to complete your q3 goals!” one employee wrote darkly on Slack. “Writes, ‘stay employed,’ ” responded a colleague. 

Even Twitter executives were clueless. Chief marketing officer Leslie Berland sent an email encouraging employees to say hi to Musk if they saw him in the office and promised an all-hands meeting would happen that Friday. An invitation for a company­wide assembly appeared on people’s calendars, then disappeared. When employees followed up on Slack, the head of internal communications cryptically said she would “send out a communication when there are further details.” 

Musk brought in a cadre of close ­advisers, including Sacks and his fellow venture capitalist and podcast co-host Jason ­Calacanis; Musk’s celebrity lawyer, Alex Spiro; Steve Davis, the head of his ­tunneling start-up, the Boring Company; and Sriram ­Krishnan, who had previously been a consumer-­product director at Twitter. To employees, this crew would be known by only one name: the Goons.

On Musk’s first full day in charge, October 28, the executive assistants sent Twitter engineers a Slack message at the behest of the Goons: The boss wanted to see their code. Employees were instructed to “print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days” and get ready to show it to Musk in person. Panicked engineers started ­hunting around the office for printers. Many of the devices weren’t functional, having sat unused for two years during the pandemic. Eventually, a group of executive assistants offered to print some engineers’ code for them if they would send the file as a PDF.

Within a couple of hours, the Goons’ assistants sent out a new missive to the team: “update: Stop printing,” it read. “Please be ready to show your recent code (within last 30-60 preferably) on your computer. If you have already printed, please shred in the bins on SF-Tenth. Thank you!”

Alicia was scheduled to meet with Musk around 11 a.m. She felt bad about the anxiety coursing through the office, even if she was sanguine about the process. As a back-end engineer, she was used to being woken up in the middle of the night because something on the platform was breaking — a ­crisis that could impact millions of Twitter users. It took more than a code review to faze her. 

She had printed out a few lines of Python rather than her actual code repository. (“Python is more at Musk’s level,” she says.) The mandate had felt like a stunt, and she’d doubted he would really engage: “I’m not gonna explain the project I’ve spent ten years working on in a fraction of an hour competing with ten other people — I’m just not.” 

She never had to. The meeting was pushed back, then canceled. “We didn’t actually get to show our code to Elon,” she says, laughing. “Which is a shame. I was very much looking forward to it.”

 

The botched code review did little to deter the Goons, who still needed to figure out which of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were needed to keep the site running — and who could be jettisoned. At ten that same night, they told managers they should “stack rank” their teams, a common but cold method of evaluation that forces managers to designate their lowest performers.

Amir Shevat, who managed Twitter’s developer platform and had led large teams at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, was perplexed. Every company did stack ­ranking differently. Should they sort ­workers by seniority? Impact? Revenue generated? No one had an answer. “They said, ‘We don’t know. Elon wants a stack rank,’ ” Shevat says. 

The project succeeded in generating large lists of names, but because different managers had ranked employees ­according to their own methods, the results were incoherent. “If I were to get that list, I would probably throw it in the garbage because it’s completely useless,” Shevat says.

In the meantime, managers and other senior employees began receiving calls late at night from the Goons. “Who are the best people on your team?” they would ask. “Who’s critical? Who’s technical?”

The questions reflected Musk’s certainty that Twitter could be run with a relatively small number of top ­engineers — and almost no one else. Meanwhile, ­managers were fielding worried questions from ­workers, but the only one that mattered — “Will I still have a job here?” — no one could answer. The New York Times reported that one engineering manager puked in a trash can after being told to cut ­hundreds of workers. Even Shevat didn’t know if his position was safe.

Soon another new directive came from above: Large meetings were banned. Musk and the Goons were wary of sabotage from soon-to-be-fired workers and didn’t want to risk any of them getting a ­warning before they were cut. The ­message was “group meetings are no longer a thing,” Shevat recalls. “And if you do that, you risk getting fired.”

Shevat had been scheduled to meet with Sacks at 1 p.m. to walk him through the developer platform’s product road map. (Musk was technically Shevat’s direct manager, but the two never met one-on-one.) Every hour, an assistant messaged Shevat to say the meeting was delayed. When it finally began, around 8 p.m., ­Shevat explained what his team did — they ran the services that allowed outside developers to create apps that connected to Twitter, a feature of any major platform. It would be a crucial component if Musk pursued his publicly stated aspiration to make Twitter a “super-app” like WeChat, which has a thriving economy of mini-apps made by outside engineers.

Shevat thought Sacks seemed bored — he spent most of the meeting checking his phone. “He didn’t want to understand anything,” Shevat says. It made him want to cry, especially since he had actually been eager to work with Musk. “I would have worked really hard for him,” he says.

Similar meetings were taking place across the company. Musk had imported dozens of engineers from his other ­organizations — including Tesla, ­Neuralink, and the Boring Company — to help run Twitter and cull its staff. Two of his cousins, Andrew and James Musk, were added to the employee directory.

Twitter employees were soon either ­sitting around waiting to be fired or placed on Musk projects, pulling all-nighters at the office and trying to meet arbitrary deadlines, even as product plans changed by the day (and were often announced on Musk’s Twitter feed). If they didn’t meet their deadlines, they were told, they’d be fired — a fate that, to some, looked ­increasingly desirable.

 

The following week, on November 3, employees received an unsigned email from “Twitter” relaying that the time for layoffs had started. By 9 a.m. the following day, everyone would receive a note telling them whether they still had a job.

“From ‘Twitter’ looool what fucking cowards,” a former employee said by text. “Your people are Twitter you shits.” 

That night, hundreds of employees gathered in a Slack channel called #social-watercooler, which had become the company’s de facto town square since Musk took over. They posted salute emoji and blue hearts — solidarity for those who were being cut and for those who deeply wanted to be shown the door but were somehow asked to stay. One person posted a meme of Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War, the super­villain who exterminates half the ­living beings in the universe with a snap.

By morning, 50 percent of the workforce had lost their jobs, well over 3,000 people. “The alternation between relief about being done, sadness about [waves at gaps and fires where there was cool people / hope], anxiety that Musk might fuck with severance, and exhaustion at thought of interviewing is a bit much,” wrote the same former employee, “but veering towards relief.”

The worker left a message for Twitter leadership in a main Slack channel before their access was cut: “news articles aren’t comms. Tweets from an account associated with half-baked rants, copy pasted memes, and the occasional misinfo aren’t comms. Secondhand internal sharing and employee sleuthing aren’t comms … I also hope failure of this past week hangs heavy on you to remind you to do better.”

To avoid violating federal labor law, Musk said employees would be paid for the next two months, though they would lose access to Twitter’s systems immediately. But even this played out haphazardly; some workers lost access on schedule, while others lingered in Twitter’s critical systems for months. 

The layoffs wiped out Shevat and his entire team. Alicia kept her position, as she’d expected, but was left with survivor’s guilt. She started quietly encouraging her workers to prepare an exit strategy.

 

Moments of institutional chaos are always someone’s opportunity, and at Twitter, that person was a product manager named Esther Crawford. Before the takeover, Crawford had been focused on products that let creators make money from their Twitter accounts and one that allowed users to show NFTs on their profiles. When Musk arrived, she began angling for a bigger role. She introduced herself to him on the first day as he mingled with employees at headquarters and soon was pitching him on various ways Twitter could be improved.

It worked: Crawford was tasked with relaunching Twitter’s subscription ­product, Twitter Blue. The feature would allow users to pay $8 to get verified and, Musk hoped, wean the company off its dependency on advertisers. The two people who once led the subscription effort were ousted, making Crawford one of the company’s most prominent product leaders. In early November, she posted a picture of herself in an eye mask and sleeping bag at the office: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she said. 

Even the mass layoffs didn’t deter her. “I feel heartbroken that this process has required many good people to leave ­Twitter, but the business was not profitable and drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company,” she wrote on Slack, further alienating herself from colleagues. (Crawford declined to comment.)

Musk had made it clear he wanted to do away with Twitter’s old verification method, which he called a “lords & ­peasants system.” To be verified — a symbol that an account had been vetted as authentic — a user had to be approved by someone at Twitter. Blue check marks mostly went to brands, celebrities, and journalists, reinforcing Musk’s belief that the platform was tilted in favor of media elites.

To correct this imbalance, Musk wanted to implement a crude pay-to-play scheme. After originally proposing to charge $20 a month for verification, he was talked down to $8 after Stephen King tweeted at his 7 million followers, “$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Twitter’s trust and safety team compiled a seven-page document outlining the dangers associated with paid verification. What would stop people from ­impersonating politicians or brands? They ranked the risk a “P0,” the highest possible. But Musk and his team refused to take any recommendations that would delay the launch.

Twitter Blue’s paid verification system was unveiled on November 5. Almost immediately, fake verified accounts flooded the platform. An image of Mario giving the middle finger from what looked like the official Nintendo account stayed up for more than a day. An account masquerading as the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly tweeted that insulin would now be free; company executives begged Twitter to take down the tweet. The marketing team tried to do damage control. “You build trust by being transparent, predictable, and thoughtful,” one former employee says. “We were none of those with this launch.”

Days after the subscription service debuted, Twitter canned it. Yoel Roth, the head of the team whose warnings had been ignored, resigned. In an all-hands meeting, Musk vowed not to relaunch Twitter Blue until the company had gotten a handle on impersonators. (Shortly after he did, in mid-December, ostensibly with defenses in place, a columnist for the Washington Post managed to get a fake account for a U.S. senator verified.) 

Musk’s blundering left a deep scar. ­Twitter Blue was meant to begin shifting Twitter’s sales away from ads toward subscriptions. But while chasing a relatively paltry new cash stream, Musk torched the company’s ad business — the source of the vast majority of its billions in revenue. The Blue disaster accelerated a rush of advertisers abandoning the platform, including Eli Lilly, and by December, what was left of Twitter’s sales team began offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ad spend to lure back ­marketers. (It did not work.) 

In a series of tweets, Musk blamed the company’s “massive drop in revenue” on “activist groups pressuring advertisers.” To Musk, it was anyone’s fault but his own.

 

The layoffs had left teams in charge of ­Twitter’s most critical infrastructure and user experience with a skeletal staff. Many managers hadn’t been consulted about which of their employees would be fired; after the rapture, they used Google Docs to create lists of workers who still seemed to be active. Then they started angling to rehire some people who had been cut.

A debate broke out in the company’s Slack channels. Luke Simon didn’t like the idea of bringing engineers back. Then he did an about-face, angling to bring four recently fired workers onto his team, but not without reservations he aired on Slack. “This is going to be the challenge,” he wrote. “The engineers I am bringing back are weak, lazy, unmotivated, and they may even be against an Elon Twitter. They were cut for a reason.” Ella Irwin, a vice-president, said she had discussed the issue with Musk and reported that he was a “hard no” on rehiring. 

The weekend after the layoffs, Musk reversed himself. Twitter’s remaining employees were told they could ask anyone who was fired to come back — with approval from leadership. The directive was given on Saturday, and managers were given till Sunday afternoon to share their lists of whom they wanted to un–lay off.

Irwin herself had been fired, but Musk brought her back after Roth resigned. When she’d talked to Musk about taking the job, she brought up her concerns that Twitter executives had historically displayed a relentless focus on juicing the numbers that mattered to Wall Street, often at the expense of making Twitter safer. Musk reassured her that trust and safety would be top priorities and later told her team he didn’t “care about the impact on revenue.” “He’s like, ‘I want you to make the platform safe,’ ” she said. “ ‘If there’s ten other things that come before trust and safety, you’re really not going to be effective as a team.’ ” Irwin believed him. “In my conversation with Elon, what became very clear was he actually really, really, really cares about this, more so than other executives have.”

That commitment was immediately tested by being pitted against his other goal of “freeing” speech on Twitter. In the weeks after Musk took over, hate speech spiked across the platform. Slurs against gay men rose 58 percent, antisemitic language was up by 61 percent, and anti-Black slurs more than tripled, according to some estimates. Twitter claimed the rise in hate speech was temporary, but the basic situation was clear: Trolls were testing the boundaries of Musk’s commitment to open discourse.

Musk said repeatedly that Twitter’s content-­moderation approach should “hew close to the law,” yet speech laws are different in every country. In the U.S., many forms of hate speech and harassment are legal. But Germany has well-known laws against Nazism and Holocaust denial, and the government of India has wide latitude to request the takedown of speech they don’t like. Musk promised he would leave major decisions, such as whether to reinstate Trump’s account, to a council of experts. Then, on November 19, he reneged and made the decision via public Twitter poll.

“The speed at which he moves and expects people to move can be dizzying, for sure,” Irwin says. She still supports Musk. “It’s probably the fastest-moving organization right now that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A former employee saw the Trump ­decision differently: “It shattered the naïve illusion that moderation would be anything more than dancing to the whims of one man’s inflated ego.”

 

On November 10, with just 20 minutes notice, Musk gathered his remaining employees to address them directly for the first time. He spoke frankly about the state of the business and suggested even more layoffs were to come. He also revoked a policy that had promised the entire staff the freedom to work remotely, forever, if they wished. “Basically, if you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted. End of story,” he said.

Slack and Signal erupted. A lawyer pointed out that this would be a fundamental change to their employment contracts, and employees did not have “an obligation to return to office.” One person said, “That’s so low.” And later, “Ok I’m quitting tomorrow 😂”

Alicia decided she too had had enough. She enjoyed working from the office but felt that forcing employees to do so, and on such short notice, was immoral. She told colleagues, first publicly in Slack, then on Twitter, not to resign. “Let him fire you,” she said. Why give Musk what he wanted? Five days later, she was fired. In her termination email, the HR department said her behavior had violated company policy. The next day, she went to the office to retrieve her belongings, sneaking in through the service elevator. She was surprised to feel more relieved than upset. She was free.

Twitter might have had a reputation as a left-leaning workforce, but there had always been a faction that disapproved of its progressive ideals. On Slack, some of these workers had formed a channel called #i-dissent, where they asked questions like why deadnaming a trans colleague was considered “bad.” When Musk announced he was buying the company, one of the more active i-­dissenters was thrilled. “Elon’s my new boss and I’m stoked!” he wrote on Linked­In. “I decided to send him a slack message. I figured you miss 100% of the shots you don’t make 😅 🚀 🌕”

This employee was cut during the first round of layoffs. Soon, all the prominent members of the #i-dissent Slack channel would be gone. The channel itself was archived, while bigger social channels like #social-watercooler were abandoned.

On November 16, Musk emailed his remaining 2,900 employees an ultimatum. He was building Twitter 2.0, he said, and workers would need to be “extremely hardcore,” logging “long hours at high intensity.” The old way of doing business was out. Now, “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” He asked employees to sign a pledge through Google Forms committing to the new standard by the end of the next workday.

But who wanted that? Employees were still waiting to be given a coherent vision for what Twitter 2.0 could be. They lacked basic information about the new company, like how they would be compensated now that Twitter was no longer a public company with easily sellable stock. Employees knew what Musk didn’t want — content moderation, free gourmet lunches, people working from home — but had few clues as to what he did want. Besides, was being fired for not checking a box on a Google Form even legal?

Word quickly spread that a significant number of employees were going to say no to being “extremely hardcore.” After weeks of trying to get rid of as many employees as possible, Musk and his advisers were suddenly in the awkward position of needing to convince a subset of them to stay. They met with small groups of senior engineers to hear their concerns. But to many, Musk’s handling of the initial layoffs, coupled with the lack of details about what staying for Twitter 2.0 would entail, had soured them for good. As one once-loyal engineer put it, “Fuck Elon Musk.”

Hundreds of employees decided not to sign the pledge, effectively resigning. In Slack, they again posted the salute emoji, the unofficial symbol of Twitter 1.0: 🫡

 

Four days later, Musk took the stage at Twitter headquarters. He was dressed in black jeans and black boots with a black T-shirt that read “I Love Twitter” in barely legible black writing. Flanked by two bodyguards, he tried to articulate his vision for the company. “This is not a right-wing takeover of Twitter,” he told employees. “It is a ­moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.”

As employees peppered him with questions, the billionaire free-associated, answering their concerns with smug dismissals and grandiose promises. What about his plan to turn Twitter from a mere social network into a super-app? “You’re not getting it, you’re not understanding,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I just used WeChat as an example. We can’t freakin’ clone WeChat; that would be absurd.” What about rival social platforms? “I don’t think about competitors … I don’t care what Facebook, YouTube, or what anyone else is doing. Couldn’t give a damn. We just need to make Twitter as goddamn amazing as possible.” What about rebuilding Twitter’s leadership team that he’d decimated in his first week? “Initially, there will be a lot of changes, and then over time you’ll see far fewer changes.” 

Twitter employees were used to ­grilling their bosses about every detail of how the company ran, an openness that was common at major tech companies around Silicon Valley. Even employees who still believed in Musk’s vision of Twitter hoped for a similar dialogue with their leader. Some expected it, now that the slackers were gone. But over the course of half an hour, Musk made it clear that the two-way street between the CEO and staffers was now closed.

 

By December, more than half the staff was gone, along with all of Twitter’s major perks, including reimbursements for wellness, classes, and day care. Remaining employees were warned not to take long Christmas vacations. Just when morale seemed to be bottoming out, Musk began doxxing their­ colleagues. 

Only a small inner circle knew Musk had invited the journalist Matt Taibbi to comb through internal documents and publish what he called “the Twitter Files.” The intention seemed to be to give ­credence to the notion that Twitter is in bed with the deep state, beholden to the clandestine conspiracies of Democrats. “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” Musk tweeted.

In an impossible-to-follow tweet thread that unfolded over several hours, Taibbi published the names and emails of rank-and-file ex-employees involved in communications with government officials, insinuating that Twitter had suppressed the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. After it was pointed out that Taibbi had published the personal email of Jack Dorsey, that tweet was deleted, but not the tweets naming low-level employees or the personal email of a sitting congressman. 

“What a shitty thing to do,” one worker wrote in a large Slack channel of former employees. “The names of rank and file members being revealed is fucked,” wrote another. Employees rushed to warn a Twitter operations analyst whom Taibbi had doxxed to privatize her social-media accounts, knowing she was about to face a deluge of abuse.

Soon after, Musk granted access to ­others, including Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, two influential writers who had gained the approval of his social circle, including David Sacks. They published Twitter threads on the company’s handling of covid misinformation and shadow-banning. While the framing was intended to stoke outrage, the internal ­correspondence that was published was more banal. It mostly showed employees having nuanced discussions about complicated, thorny moderation topics and often resisting requests by government agencies to take action. What Musk saw as damning forms of censorship were actually thoughtful conversations about user safety.

Musk followed this with a personal attack on Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. After Musk suggested that Roth was sympathetic to pedophilia — a dog whistle harking back to QAnon and Pizzagate — Roth fled his home and went into hiding. 

At the same time as he was putting Roth at risk, Musk bent the company’s free-speech policies to protect himself. After one of his children was allegedly stalked by a fan in South Pasadena, Musk blamed a Twitter account that tracked ­public data about the whereabouts of his ­private jet — his “assassination coordinates,” Musk said. He then had Irwin suspend the @ElonJet account, the account of its owner, and dozens of others that tracked celebrities’ planes. Several journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and elsewhere were suspended for tweeting the news. After she was publicly connected with the @ElonJet ban, a former employee says Irwin began insisting that instructions to restore accounts only be delivered verbally, so that the moves would not be linked back to her in Twitter’s systems. (Irwin denies this.)

Even Musk’s new ally Weiss denounced the crackdown: “The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases.” Musk responded by unfollowing her.

 

Twitter continues to hemorrhage money, so much so that Musk has stopped paying its bills. The landlords of one of its spaces in San Francisco are suing, ­seeking damages and threatening eviction ­proceedings. Twitter plans to auction off office furniture in January.

On Christmas Eve, Twitter abruptly shut down a data center in Sacramento, one of the company’s three serving regions; it also announced it would significantly downsize a data center in Atlanta. Within hours, Twitter had to redirect a large amount of traffic to its remaining data centers, ­threatening the stability of the platform. Engineers struggled to keep the service running. Outages would happen sporadically, the worst one in January, when the site was down for over 12 hours for users in Australia and New Zealand. But it was nothing near the catastrophe Musk’s critics had predicted. Mostly, Twitter kept humming along.

Meanwhile, more staff deemed non­essential were let go. In London, receptionists were fired just before the ­holiday. In San Francisco, the janitorial staff was laid off without severance. At one point, the San Francisco office got so low on office supplies that employees began bringing their own toilet paper. 

Late in December, Twitter employees noticed a prominent face was gone from Slack: Luke Simon had left the company. No one knew why. Some joked darkly that kissing Musk’s ring wasn’t enough to keep anyone safe anymore. Simon’s ­Twitter account no longer exists. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

The repercussions for Musk’s handling of Twitter are now coming. According to his public-merger agreement and internal Twitter documents, Musk agreed to at least match the company’s existing severance package, which offered two months of pay as well as other valuable benefits. Instead, he laid off employees with the minimum notice required by federal and state law and refused to pay out certain awards. Now more than 500 employees, with Shevat among the highest ranking, are pursuing legal action against Musk for what they are owed, in addition to his alleged discrimination against minority groups in his handling of the layoffs.

“I think leadership doesn’t end after you get fired,” says Shevat, adding that he was already paid out for the acquisition of his start-up and isn’t doing this for the money. “I still feel responsible for my team and for my PMs and for my engineers. So I think that this is my way of showing them what is the right thing to do.”

Originally, laid-off employees were given a 60-day notice. Now that it is up, they are receiving severance agreements asking them to sign away their right to sue Twitter or say anything negative about the company or Musk for life. In exchange, they get one month of pay before they need to find another job during what is the most difficult hiring market in tech in years.

It’s an open secret that many employees who remain at Musk’s “hardcore” Twitter are actively looking for other jobs. Even the most publicly cheerful Twitter workers can’t fully mask the despair. On December 29, one tweeted a selfie, smiling in front of an empty office, with the hashtags #solowork, #productivity, and #findingperspective.

Musk himself is starting to appear defeated. Tesla shares started 2022 trading at nearly $400. By September, Tesla’s stock price had dropped by 25 percent. It plummeted again after Musk bought Twitter and ended the year at $123. Investors are begging Musk to step away; Tesla employees are too. As one person on Musk’s transition team put it, “What the fuck does this have to do with cars?”

Musk claims he always intended to be Twitter’s CEO only temporarily. With the damage he has done in three months — to the company and to his own wealth — those watching the nosedive, whether with ­horror or Schadenfreude, can’t help but wonder how much longer he can wait. His failures at Twitter have already damaged his reputation as a genius. How smart could he really be, the guy who purchased a company for far more than it was worth, then drove what remained of it into the earth?

While both companies flail, Musk remains glued to his feed. It was an outcome Alicia predicted back in April when Musk first floated the idea of buying the company. “He’s too interested in seeking attention,” she said. “Twitter is a very, a very dangerous drug for anybody who has that personality.”

As the year came to a close, Musk’s public statements about Twitter veered from pride in the site’s usage metrics (all-time highs, he regularly assured followers) to what might have been more sober self-assessments of his predicament. “Don’t be the clown on the clown car!” he tweeted on December 27. “Too late haha.”

If he seemed certain of anything, it was the steadily improving technical architecture of Twitter itself. The staff might be vastly diminished, but what it lacked in size it more than made up for in growing technical competence. Bit by bit, Musk said, Twitter’s notoriously fragile infrastructure was improving. 

In some ways, Musk was vindicated. Twitter was less stable now, but the platform survived and mostly functioned even with the majority of employees gone. He had promised to rightsize a bloated company, and now it operated on minimal head count.

But Musk appears unaware of what he’s actually broken: the company culture that built Twitter into one of the world’s most influential social networks, the policies that attempted to keep that platform safe, and the trust of users who populate it every day with their conversations, breaking news, and weird jokes — Twitter’s true value and contributions to the world.

“Fractal of Rube Goldberg machines … is what it feels like understanding how ­Twitter works,” Musk wrote in a short thread on Christmas Eve. “And yet work it does … Even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.”

Four days later, Twitter crashed. More than 10,000 users, many of them international, submitted reports of problems accessing the site. Some got an error message reading, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”

“Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken,” one user tweeted into the apparent void.

But in that moment, Musk found that whatever might be happening in the world at large — to his site, his other companies, his reputation and legacy — that tweet, at least, appeared on his screen as intended.

“Works for me,” he replied.

 

[atomheartbevo 89,775]

25 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

While both companies flail, Musk remains glued to his feed. It was an outcome Alicia predicted back in April when Musk first floated the idea of buying the company. “He’s too interested in seeking attention,” she said. “Twitter is a very, a very dangerous drug for anybody who has that personality.”

25 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Four days later, Twitter crashed. More than 10,000 users, many of them international, submitted reports of problems accessing the site. Some got an error message reading, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”  “Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken,” one user tweeted into the apparent void.

But in that moment, Musk found that whatever might be happening in the world at large — to his site, his other companies, his reputation and legacy — that tweet, at least, appeared on his screen as intended. “Works for me,” he replied.

[Celery Man 20,991]

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

Hey, it appears the first interest payment is due at the end of the month.  

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/looming-twitter-interest-payment-leaves-elon-musk-with-unpalatable-options/?comments=1&comments-page=1

 

Quote

The bill for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is coming due, with the billionaire facing unpalatable options on the company’s enormous debt pile, ranging from bankruptcy proceedings to another costly sale of Tesla shares.

Three people close to the entrepreneur’s buyout of Twitter said the first installment of interest payments related to $13 billion of debt he used to fund the takeover could be due as soon as the end of January. That debt means the company must pay about $1.5 billion in annual interest payments.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief financed his $44 billion deal to take Twitter private in October by securing the huge debt from a syndicate of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi. The $13 billion debt is held by Twitter at a corporate level, with no personal guarantee by Musk.

 

 

Quote

Since the takeover, Musk has raced to cut costs, such as firing half the company’s staff, while seeking new revenue streams, such as launching its Twitter Blue subscription service.

The company’s dire finances—it made a loss of $221 million in 2021 before the acquisition and Musk has said revenues have declined since—have led the new owner to regularly raise the prospect that the company could crash into bankruptcy.

How Musk deals with the looming interest payment is a crucial test of his leadership of Twitter, which has so far been marked by chaotic management that has alienated its corporate advertisers.

“This company is like you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk said last month.

 

Quote

If Twitter did not make its first interest payment, it would join a small but notorious club of companies dubbed “NCAA” by debt traders—short for “no coupon at all”—that includes US car rental company Hertz and German payments group Wirecard.

Such a default on its debt would probably result in Twitter’s management filing for bankruptcy, at which point the US courts would begin an expensive and bureaucratic debt restructuring process.

Musk could avoid this fate by settling the interest from Twitter’s dwindling cash reserves or selling more equity in the company to fund the payments—both painful options. The business has a cash position of about $1 billion, Musk has said. He has also warned that its net cash outflow could be about $6 billion next year without additional cost-saving measures.

Rising interest rates mean the debt will become more and more expensive, at the same time as Twitter’s enterprise value has been damaged.

 

Spoiler

Bankers and experts observing the deal said Musk was unlikely to file for bankruptcy, which would risk him losing control of the business.

Instead, his options include cutting a new deal with lenders, such as a debt-for-equity exchange at a discount to the debt’s face value, or finding alternative ways to fund its interest payments as he plays for time to turn around the business. “It is more likely [Musk] would ask Twitter’s creditors for a forbearance and try and work something out,” said one restructuring banker.

Musk’s personal equity investment in Twitter of about $26 billion would be effectively wiped out in the event of a bankruptcy, alongside other equity stakeholders such as Sequoia Capital, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. In the queue for repayment, their investments would be behind the banks that have loans secured against Twitter’s assets, as well as the company’s unsecured lenders and trade creditors.

“I presume [Twitter] is not going to default on the debt as it is pretty cut and dry what that leads to,” said a banker whose bank holds a large chunk of the debt. He said discussions between the banks and Twitter’s management over the debt repayments were ongoing.

However, bankers say Musk could attempt to improve his position by acquiring Twitter’s debt cheaply, during or outside of a bankruptcy, and later converting it to equity if he turned the site into a profitable company in the future—although this would require a willingness by the banks to sell the debt to Musk at a discount, and means he would have to write yet another check for Twitter if he wanted to stay in control.

Negative sentiment around the future of Twitter since Musk took it over as well as higher interest rates have stymied the banks’ ability to offload the debt to investors. The banks’ large balance sheet exposure could put pressure on them to sell the debt to Musk, either in the event of a bankruptcy or out of court.

“Musk would be last in line [for repayment], but obviously he wields a lot of influence,” said one restructuring banker with knowledge of the Twitter deal, citing the lenders’ desire to stay on good terms with Musk. “The threat of bankruptcy may help him get concessions from creditors, but an actual filing wouldn’t help him much.”

Some financial restructuring at Twitter is already being explored. Bankers are in discussions with Musk to replace about $3 billion of expensive unsecured debt that has an interest rate of 11.75 percent with margin loans, backed by Musk’s stake in Tesla, according to two people close to the matter.

The banks have been stuck holding tens of billions of dollars worth of debt from other deals struck before last year’s sell-off in financial markets—but the Twitter deal stands out given its size and the pace at which the business has deteriorated.

Such a debt swap would hamper Musk’s financial flexibility. About 63 percent of his existing Tesla shares are already pledged as collateral for loans, according to corporate filings. The company limits the amount of stock that its executives can pledge to 25 percent of the value, meaning he could be forced to put up more of his holdings if Tesla stock continued to fall, leaving less to back future borrowing.

Meanwhile, with Tesla’s stock falling 65 percent last year and Musk selling heavily, the value of his stake in the company has plunged to about $50 billion, from $170 billion when he offered to buy Twitter in April last year. That has left him with far less room to raise cash by collateralizing more shares. One alternative would be to exercise some of his stock options, though that would leave him with a large—and immediate—tax bill.

The biggest concern for Tesla investors has been if Twitter continues to bleed cash then Musk may have to sell more stock.

Musk, who was the world’s richest person until December following Tesla’s share price crash, put about $26 billion into the Twitter deal, including his pre-existing 9.6 percent stake in Twitter worth $4 billion. Since late 2021 he has sold almost $40 billion of shares in Tesla, partly to finance the Twitter acquisition.

He has since attempted to raise more money to fund its operations. Last month, his wealth manager, former Morgan Stanley banker Jared Birchall, offered existing equity investors a chance to increase their position at the same price they paid in November.

But Twitter’s value has sunk since Musk took it over. Fidelity, which owns a stake in the social media platform through a listed fund, has cut the value of its holding from $19.7 million in October to $8.6 million after Musk closed the deal.

Technology equity analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities said that Twitter was worth closer to $15 billion today than the $44 billion Musk paid for it.

“That’s why no one is lining up to take on this debt, so the banks are holding it and ultimately they are betting on Musk to do what he did with SpaceX and Tesla,” said Ives, referring to turnarounds Musk orchestrated at each business.

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89,775]

Would be hilarious if he had to file for bankruptcy or just tried to avoid making the payment, and either way, losing control of the company.

Would make for some hilarious tweets by him.

Edited January 17, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[Pig Bellmont 8,719]

27 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Hey, it appears the first interest payment is due at the end of the month.  

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/looming-twitter-interest-payment-leaves-elon-musk-with-unpalatable-options/?comments=1&comments-page=1

 

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

Bankers and experts observing the deal said Musk was unlikely to file for bankruptcy, which would risk him losing control of the business.

Instead, his options include cutting a new deal with lenders, such as a debt-for-equity exchange at a discount to the debt’s face value, or finding alternative ways to fund its interest payments as he plays for time to turn around the business. “It is more likely [Musk] would ask Twitter’s creditors for a forbearance and try and work something out,” said one restructuring banker.

Musk’s personal equity investment in Twitter of about $26 billion would be effectively wiped out in the event of a bankruptcy, alongside other equity stakeholders such as Sequoia Capital, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. In the queue for repayment, their investments would be behind the banks that have loans secured against Twitter’s assets, as well as the company’s unsecured lenders and trade creditors.

“I presume [Twitter] is not going to default on the debt as it is pretty cut and dry what that leads to,” said a banker whose bank holds a large chunk of the debt. He said discussions between the banks and Twitter’s management over the debt repayments were ongoing.

However, bankers say Musk could attempt to improve his position by acquiring Twitter’s debt cheaply, during or outside of a bankruptcy, and later converting it to equity if he turned the site into a profitable company in the future—although this would require a willingness by the banks to sell the debt to Musk at a discount, and means he would have to write yet another check for Twitter if he wanted to stay in control.

Negative sentiment around the future of Twitter since Musk took it over as well as higher interest rates have stymied the banks’ ability to offload the debt to investors. The banks’ large balance sheet exposure could put pressure on them to sell the debt to Musk, either in the event of a bankruptcy or out of court.

“Musk would be last in line [for repayment], but obviously he wields a lot of influence,” said one restructuring banker with knowledge of the Twitter deal, citing the lenders’ desire to stay on good terms with Musk. “The threat of bankruptcy may help him get concessions from creditors, but an actual filing wouldn’t help him much.”

Some financial restructuring at Twitter is already being explored. Bankers are in discussions with Musk to replace about $3 billion of expensive unsecured debt that has an interest rate of 11.75 percent with margin loans, backed by Musk’s stake in Tesla, according to two people close to the matter.

The banks have been stuck holding tens of billions of dollars worth of debt from other deals struck before last year’s sell-off in financial markets—but the Twitter deal stands out given its size and the pace at which the business has deteriorated.

Such a debt swap would hamper Musk’s financial flexibility. About 63 percent of his existing Tesla shares are already pledged as collateral for loans, according to corporate filings. The company limits the amount of stock that its executives can pledge to 25 percent of the value, meaning he could be forced to put up more of his holdings if Tesla stock continued to fall, leaving less to back future borrowing.

Meanwhile, with Tesla’s stock falling 65 percent last year and Musk selling heavily, the value of his stake in the company has plunged to about $50 billion, from $170 billion when he offered to buy Twitter in April last year. That has left him with far less room to raise cash by collateralizing more shares. One alternative would be to exercise some of his stock options, though that would leave him with a large—and immediate—tax bill.

The biggest concern for Tesla investors has been if Twitter continues to bleed cash then Musk may have to sell more stock.

Musk, who was the world’s richest person until December following Tesla’s share price crash, put about $26 billion into the Twitter deal, including his pre-existing 9.6 percent stake in Twitter worth $4 billion. Since late 2021 he has sold almost $40 billion of shares in Tesla, partly to finance the Twitter acquisition.

He has since attempted to raise more money to fund its operations. Last month, his wealth manager, former Morgan Stanley banker Jared Birchall, offered existing equity investors a chance to increase their position at the same price they paid in November.

But Twitter’s value has sunk since Musk took it over. Fidelity, which owns a stake in the social media platform through a listed fund, has cut the value of its holding from $19.7 million in October to $8.6 million after Musk closed the deal.

Technology equity analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities said that Twitter was worth closer to $15 billion today than the $44 billion Musk paid for it.

“That’s why no one is lining up to take on this debt, so the banks are holding it and ultimately they are betting on Musk to do what he did with SpaceX and Tesla,” said Ives, referring to turnarounds Musk orchestrated at each business.

 

 

Mr. No Remote Work isn’t paying his rent for office space and I’m supposed to believe Twitter has a billion dollars in cash reserves? 

[Celery Man 20,991]

Quote

On Slack, a product manager responded to Simon’s enthusiasm for Musk with skepticism: “I take your point, but as a childhood Greek mythology nerd, I feel it is important to point out that story behind the idea of the Midas touch is not a positive one. It’s a cautionary tale about what is lost when you only focus on wealth.”

 

Quote

She had printed out a few lines of Python rather than her actual code repository. (“Python is more at Musk’s level,” she says.) 

 

 

 

Quote

On Slack, some of these workers had formed a channel called #i-dissent, where they asked questions like why deadnaming a trans colleague was considered “bad.” When Musk announced he was buying the company, one of the more active i-­dissenters was thrilled. “Elon’s my new boss and I’m stoked!” he wrote on Linked­In. “I decided to send him a slack message. I figured you miss 100% of the shots you don’t make 😅 🚀 🌕”

This employee was cut during the first round of layoffs. 

 

[wildcat09 29,366]

Quote

The move thrilled employees like Simon who chafed at Twitter’s laid-back atmosphere and reputation for shipping new features at a glacial pace. Simon, who owned a ­portrait of himself dressed as a 19th-century French general, told his team, which managed advertising services, that he wanted to build an “impact-focused, egalitarian and empirical culture, where any team member, with a strong data-driven justification, gets the metaphorical center stage.”

People like this should be shoved into lockers every single day of their lives. Or imprisoned. 

[Pig Bellmont 8,719]

16 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Simon, who owned a ­portrait of himself dressed as a 19th-century French general,

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

1 minute ago, Pig Bellmont said:

 

I'm envisioning Simon as resembling the person in this gif.

 

 

[NoName 16,369]

2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Longform piece put up at the Verge this morning.  Lof of this is already known, but there's some new things in here as well.

https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

This was the Twitter that irked Elon Musk so much that he became convinced he had to buy it. In his view, by 2022 the company had been corrupted — beholden to the whims of governments and the ­liberal media elite. It shadow-banned ­conservatives, suppressed legitimate discourse about covid, and selectively kicked elected officials off the platform. Who better to restore Twitter to its former glory than its wealthiest poster? 

Like Trump, Musk knew how to use Twitter to make himself the center of the conversation. His incessant, irreverent tweeting violated every norm of corporate America, endearing his fans, pissing off his haters, and making him the second-most-followed active account on the site. “At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne,” he tweeted one evening in late 2021. “It gives me solace.”

Musk offered to buy the company for the absurdly inflated price of $44 billion. The move thrilled employees like Simon who chafed at Twitter’s laid-back atmosphere and reputation for shipping new features at a glacial pace. Simon, who owned a ­portrait of himself dressed as a 19th-century French general, told his team, which managed advertising services, that he wanted to build an “impact-focused, egalitarian and empirical culture, where any team member, with a strong data-driven justification, gets the metaphorical center stage.”

Other employees noted the darker motifs of Musk’s career — the disregard he brought to labor relations, the many lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and racial discrimination at his companies — and found his interest in Twitter ominous. On Slack, a product manager responded to Simon’s enthusiasm for Musk with skepticism: “I take your point, but as a childhood Greek mythology nerd, I feel it is important to point out that story behind the idea of the Midas touch is not a positive one. It’s a cautionary tale about what is lost when you only focus on wealth.”

The comment would prove to be ­prophetic. According to more than two dozen current and former Twitter staffers, since buying the company in October 2022, Musk has shown a remarkable lack of interest in the people and processes that make his new toy tick. He has purged thousands of employees, implemented ill-advised policies, and angered even some of his most loyal supporters. Those who remain at the company mostly fall into two camps: people trapped by the need for health care and visas or cold-eyed mercenaries hoping to ascend through a power vacuum.

Today, Musk has become notorious for the speech he suppresses, rather than the speech he allows, from ­suspending ­journalists for tweeting links to his jet tracker to briefly restricting users from linking to their accounts on Instagram and Mastodon.

In three months, Musk has also largely destroyed the equity value of Twitter and much of his personal wealth. He has ­indicated that the company could declare bankruptcy, and the distraction of running it has caused Tesla stock to ­crater, costing him $200 billion.

If “free speech” was his mandate for ­Twitter the platform, it has been the opposite for Twitter the workplace. Dissenting opinion or criticism has led to swift dismissals. Musk replaced Twitter’s old culture with one of his own, but it’s unclear, with so few workers and plummeting revenues, if this new version will survive. As one employee said in December, “Place is done for.”

 

On October 26, an engineer and mother of two — let’s call her Alicia — sat in a glass conference room in San Francisco trying to explain the details of Twitter’s tech stack to Elon Musk. He was supposed to officially buy the company in two days, and Alicia and a small group of trusted colleagues were tasked with outlining how its core infrastructure worked. But Musk, who was sitting two seats away from Alicia with his elbows propped on the table, looked sleepy. When he did talk, it was to ask questions about cost. How much does Twitter spend on data centers? Why was everything so expensive?

Alicia was already tired of Musk’s antics. For months, he had gone back and forth about buying the company where she had worked for more than a decade. He’d tried to back out of the deal, but Twitter sued, and the chief judge of Delaware’s Chancery Court said a trial would move forward if the acquisition wasn’t complete by October 28. Facing what many legal observers called an easy case for Twitter, Musk caved. So here they were, trying to show Musk what he was about to buy, and all he wanted to talk about was money. 

Fine, she thought. If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the ­company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how ­computers work.”

Alicia knew Twitter had problems; when prospective employees asked her why she’d stayed there so long, she would tell them, honestly, that the company was incredibly inefficient. It took a long time to get buy-in on projects, and communication across teams was generally poor. But it operated with a “benevolent anarchy” through which anyone could influence the direction of the product. “You didn’t need someone in a position of power to explicitly grant you permission,” Alicia says. “It was very much a bottom-up organization.”

Unlike some of her colleagues, Alicia wasn’t reflexively anti-Musk. She respected what he had done at his companies and felt hopeful that, as someone who thought of himself as an engineer, he would support her highly technical work. But Musk had a different interest that day. Twitter, he said, should immediately get into video.

“We really should be able to do longform video and attract the best content creators by giving them a better cut than YouTube,” he said, according to Alicia’s recollection. The infrastructure engineers in the room agreed that adding support for longform video was technically possible, but their job was building stuff — not strategy or marketing. It seemed as though Musk didn’t understand the basic organizational structure of a social-media company; it was as if a rich guy had bought a restaurant and started telling the cooks he wanted to add a new dining room. Might he want to speak with the media product team instead? 

Just then, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk’s who had advised him on the acquisition, walked into the room. A fellow native of South Africa, Sacks had worked with Musk at PayPal and later led the enterprise social-networking company Yammer to a $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft.

“David, this meeting is too technical for you,” Musk said, waving his hand to ­dismiss Sacks. Wordlessly, Sacks turned and walked out, leaving the engineers — who had gotten ­little engagement from Musk on anything technical — slack-jawed. His imperiousness in the middle of a session he appeared to be botching was something to behold. (Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The next day, Alicia and her colleagues gathered in the cafeteria of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for a long-planned Halloween party. The room was decorated with miniature pumpkins and fake spider­webs. Employees tried to get in the holiday spirit, but rumors were swirling that Musk planned to cut 75 percent of the company. People were audibly sobbing in the bathrooms. One company leader recalled the surreal moment of crying about the end of Twitter as they knew it, only to look up and see a person in a Jack Sparrow costume amble by. Outside on the balcony, one entertainer blew bubbles for staffers’ children. Another figure, dressed as a scarecrow, seemed to have a handler ­following him. There were whispers: Could it be Musk himself in costume? It turned out to be a hired performer.

As Alicia walked out of the office that evening, she passed Twitter’s head of ­product, Jay Sullivan, who was standing alone, looking solemn. “It’s done,” he said. The deal had closed during the party. 

It took only a few hours before news broke that Twitter’s executive team had walked the plank. Parag Agrawal, the CEO, was out, along with Vijaya Gadde, the head of policy, and Ned Segal, the chief finance officer. They had known what was ­coming and stayed away from the office. Sean Edgett, the general counsel, was also fired; he had been present for the handover and was unceremoniously escorted out of the building during the Halloween party. 

 

The days surrounding the acquisition passed in a blur of ominous, unlikely scenes. Musk posing as the world’s richest prop comic, announcing his takeover by lugging a kitchen sink into the office: “Entering ­Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” (181.2K retweets, 43.6K quote tweets, 1.3M likes.) A fleet of Teslas in the parking lot. Musk’s intimidating security detail standing outside his glass conference room as if guarding the leader of a developing nation. Musk’s 2-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, toddling around the second floor, occasionally crying. 

Employees braced for layoffs, but no word came from Musk. People hunted for information on their unofficial Slacks, Discords, and Signal chats while glued to Musk’s Twitter feed for news like everyone else. “Hey all don’t forget to complete your q3 goals!” one employee wrote darkly on Slack. “Writes, ‘stay employed,’ ” responded a colleague. 

Even Twitter executives were clueless. Chief marketing officer Leslie Berland sent an email encouraging employees to say hi to Musk if they saw him in the office and promised an all-hands meeting would happen that Friday. An invitation for a company­wide assembly appeared on people’s calendars, then disappeared. When employees followed up on Slack, the head of internal communications cryptically said she would “send out a communication when there are further details.” 

Musk brought in a cadre of close ­advisers, including Sacks and his fellow venture capitalist and podcast co-host Jason ­Calacanis; Musk’s celebrity lawyer, Alex Spiro; Steve Davis, the head of his ­tunneling start-up, the Boring Company; and Sriram ­Krishnan, who had previously been a consumer-­product director at Twitter. To employees, this crew would be known by only one name: the Goons.

On Musk’s first full day in charge, October 28, the executive assistants sent Twitter engineers a Slack message at the behest of the Goons: The boss wanted to see their code. Employees were instructed to “print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days” and get ready to show it to Musk in person. Panicked engineers started ­hunting around the office for printers. Many of the devices weren’t functional, having sat unused for two years during the pandemic. Eventually, a group of executive assistants offered to print some engineers’ code for them if they would send the file as a PDF.

Within a couple of hours, the Goons’ assistants sent out a new missive to the team: “update: Stop printing,” it read. “Please be ready to show your recent code (within last 30-60 preferably) on your computer. If you have already printed, please shred in the bins on SF-Tenth. Thank you!”

Alicia was scheduled to meet with Musk around 11 a.m. She felt bad about the anxiety coursing through the office, even if she was sanguine about the process. As a back-end engineer, she was used to being woken up in the middle of the night because something on the platform was breaking — a ­crisis that could impact millions of Twitter users. It took more than a code review to faze her. 

She had printed out a few lines of Python rather than her actual code repository. (“Python is more at Musk’s level,” she says.) The mandate had felt like a stunt, and she’d doubted he would really engage: “I’m not gonna explain the project I’ve spent ten years working on in a fraction of an hour competing with ten other people — I’m just not.” 

She never had to. The meeting was pushed back, then canceled. “We didn’t actually get to show our code to Elon,” she says, laughing. “Which is a shame. I was very much looking forward to it.”

 

The botched code review did little to deter the Goons, who still needed to figure out which of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were needed to keep the site running — and who could be jettisoned. At ten that same night, they told managers they should “stack rank” their teams, a common but cold method of evaluation that forces managers to designate their lowest performers.

Amir Shevat, who managed Twitter’s developer platform and had led large teams at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, was perplexed. Every company did stack ­ranking differently. Should they sort ­workers by seniority? Impact? Revenue generated? No one had an answer. “They said, ‘We don’t know. Elon wants a stack rank,’ ” Shevat says. 

The project succeeded in generating large lists of names, but because different managers had ranked employees ­according to their own methods, the results were incoherent. “If I were to get that list, I would probably throw it in the garbage because it’s completely useless,” Shevat says.

In the meantime, managers and other senior employees began receiving calls late at night from the Goons. “Who are the best people on your team?” they would ask. “Who’s critical? Who’s technical?”

The questions reflected Musk’s certainty that Twitter could be run with a relatively small number of top ­engineers — and almost no one else. Meanwhile, ­managers were fielding worried questions from ­workers, but the only one that mattered — “Will I still have a job here?” — no one could answer. The New York Times reported that one engineering manager puked in a trash can after being told to cut ­hundreds of workers. Even Shevat didn’t know if his position was safe.

Soon another new directive came from above: Large meetings were banned. Musk and the Goons were wary of sabotage from soon-to-be-fired workers and didn’t want to risk any of them getting a ­warning before they were cut. The ­message was “group meetings are no longer a thing,” Shevat recalls. “And if you do that, you risk getting fired.”

Shevat had been scheduled to meet with Sacks at 1 p.m. to walk him through the developer platform’s product road map. (Musk was technically Shevat’s direct manager, but the two never met one-on-one.) Every hour, an assistant messaged Shevat to say the meeting was delayed. When it finally began, around 8 p.m., ­Shevat explained what his team did — they ran the services that allowed outside developers to create apps that connected to Twitter, a feature of any major platform. It would be a crucial component if Musk pursued his publicly stated aspiration to make Twitter a “super-app” like WeChat, which has a thriving economy of mini-apps made by outside engineers.

Shevat thought Sacks seemed bored — he spent most of the meeting checking his phone. “He didn’t want to understand anything,” Shevat says. It made him want to cry, especially since he had actually been eager to work with Musk. “I would have worked really hard for him,” he says.

Similar meetings were taking place across the company. Musk had imported dozens of engineers from his other ­organizations — including Tesla, ­Neuralink, and the Boring Company — to help run Twitter and cull its staff. Two of his cousins, Andrew and James Musk, were added to the employee directory.

Twitter employees were soon either ­sitting around waiting to be fired or placed on Musk projects, pulling all-nighters at the office and trying to meet arbitrary deadlines, even as product plans changed by the day (and were often announced on Musk’s Twitter feed). If they didn’t meet their deadlines, they were told, they’d be fired — a fate that, to some, looked ­increasingly desirable.

 

The following week, on November 3, employees received an unsigned email from “Twitter” relaying that the time for layoffs had started. By 9 a.m. the following day, everyone would receive a note telling them whether they still had a job.

“From ‘Twitter’ looool what fucking cowards,” a former employee said by text. “Your people are Twitter you shits.” 

That night, hundreds of employees gathered in a Slack channel called #social-watercooler, which had become the company’s de facto town square since Musk took over. They posted salute emoji and blue hearts — solidarity for those who were being cut and for those who deeply wanted to be shown the door but were somehow asked to stay. One person posted a meme of Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War, the super­villain who exterminates half the ­living beings in the universe with a snap.

By morning, 50 percent of the workforce had lost their jobs, well over 3,000 people. “The alternation between relief about being done, sadness about [waves at gaps and fires where there was cool people / hope], anxiety that Musk might fuck with severance, and exhaustion at thought of interviewing is a bit much,” wrote the same former employee, “but veering towards relief.”

The worker left a message for Twitter leadership in a main Slack channel before their access was cut: “news articles aren’t comms. Tweets from an account associated with half-baked rants, copy pasted memes, and the occasional misinfo aren’t comms. Secondhand internal sharing and employee sleuthing aren’t comms … I also hope failure of this past week hangs heavy on you to remind you to do better.”

To avoid violating federal labor law, Musk said employees would be paid for the next two months, though they would lose access to Twitter’s systems immediately. But even this played out haphazardly; some workers lost access on schedule, while others lingered in Twitter’s critical systems for months. 

The layoffs wiped out Shevat and his entire team. Alicia kept her position, as she’d expected, but was left with survivor’s guilt. She started quietly encouraging her workers to prepare an exit strategy.

 

Moments of institutional chaos are always someone’s opportunity, and at Twitter, that person was a product manager named Esther Crawford. Before the takeover, Crawford had been focused on products that let creators make money from their Twitter accounts and one that allowed users to show NFTs on their profiles. When Musk arrived, she began angling for a bigger role. She introduced herself to him on the first day as he mingled with employees at headquarters and soon was pitching him on various ways Twitter could be improved.

It worked: Crawford was tasked with relaunching Twitter’s subscription ­product, Twitter Blue. The feature would allow users to pay $8 to get verified and, Musk hoped, wean the company off its dependency on advertisers. The two people who once led the subscription effort were ousted, making Crawford one of the company’s most prominent product leaders. In early November, she posted a picture of herself in an eye mask and sleeping bag at the office: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she said. 

Even the mass layoffs didn’t deter her. “I feel heartbroken that this process has required many good people to leave ­Twitter, but the business was not profitable and drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company,” she wrote on Slack, further alienating herself from colleagues. (Crawford declined to comment.)

Musk had made it clear he wanted to do away with Twitter’s old verification method, which he called a “lords & ­peasants system.” To be verified — a symbol that an account had been vetted as authentic — a user had to be approved by someone at Twitter. Blue check marks mostly went to brands, celebrities, and journalists, reinforcing Musk’s belief that the platform was tilted in favor of media elites.

To correct this imbalance, Musk wanted to implement a crude pay-to-play scheme. After originally proposing to charge $20 a month for verification, he was talked down to $8 after Stephen King tweeted at his 7 million followers, “$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

Twitter’s trust and safety team compiled a seven-page document outlining the dangers associated with paid verification. What would stop people from ­impersonating politicians or brands? They ranked the risk a “P0,” the highest possible. But Musk and his team refused to take any recommendations that would delay the launch.

Twitter Blue’s paid verification system was unveiled on November 5. Almost immediately, fake verified accounts flooded the platform. An image of Mario giving the middle finger from what looked like the official Nintendo account stayed up for more than a day. An account masquerading as the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly tweeted that insulin would now be free; company executives begged Twitter to take down the tweet. The marketing team tried to do damage control. “You build trust by being transparent, predictable, and thoughtful,” one former employee says. “We were none of those with this launch.”

Days after the subscription service debuted, Twitter canned it. Yoel Roth, the head of the team whose warnings had been ignored, resigned. In an all-hands meeting, Musk vowed not to relaunch Twitter Blue until the company had gotten a handle on impersonators. (Shortly after he did, in mid-December, ostensibly with defenses in place, a columnist for the Washington Post managed to get a fake account for a U.S. senator verified.) 

Musk’s blundering left a deep scar. ­Twitter Blue was meant to begin shifting Twitter’s sales away from ads toward subscriptions. But while chasing a relatively paltry new cash stream, Musk torched the company’s ad business — the source of the vast majority of its billions in revenue. The Blue disaster accelerated a rush of advertisers abandoning the platform, including Eli Lilly, and by December, what was left of Twitter’s sales team began offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ad spend to lure back ­marketers. (It did not work.) 

In a series of tweets, Musk blamed the company’s “massive drop in revenue” on “activist groups pressuring advertisers.” To Musk, it was anyone’s fault but his own.

 

The layoffs had left teams in charge of ­Twitter’s most critical infrastructure and user experience with a skeletal staff. Many managers hadn’t been consulted about which of their employees would be fired; after the rapture, they used Google Docs to create lists of workers who still seemed to be active. Then they started angling to rehire some people who had been cut.

A debate broke out in the company’s Slack channels. Luke Simon didn’t like the idea of bringing engineers back. Then he did an about-face, angling to bring four recently fired workers onto his team, but not without reservations he aired on Slack. “This is going to be the challenge,” he wrote. “The engineers I am bringing back are weak, lazy, unmotivated, and they may even be against an Elon Twitter. They were cut for a reason.” Ella Irwin, a vice-president, said she had discussed the issue with Musk and reported that he was a “hard no” on rehiring. 

The weekend after the layoffs, Musk reversed himself. Twitter’s remaining employees were told they could ask anyone who was fired to come back — with approval from leadership. The directive was given on Saturday, and managers were given till Sunday afternoon to share their lists of whom they wanted to un–lay off.

Irwin herself had been fired, but Musk brought her back after Roth resigned. When she’d talked to Musk about taking the job, she brought up her concerns that Twitter executives had historically displayed a relentless focus on juicing the numbers that mattered to Wall Street, often at the expense of making Twitter safer. Musk reassured her that trust and safety would be top priorities and later told her team he didn’t “care about the impact on revenue.” “He’s like, ‘I want you to make the platform safe,’ ” she said. “ ‘If there’s ten other things that come before trust and safety, you’re really not going to be effective as a team.’ ” Irwin believed him. “In my conversation with Elon, what became very clear was he actually really, really, really cares about this, more so than other executives have.”

That commitment was immediately tested by being pitted against his other goal of “freeing” speech on Twitter. In the weeks after Musk took over, hate speech spiked across the platform. Slurs against gay men rose 58 percent, antisemitic language was up by 61 percent, and anti-Black slurs more than tripled, according to some estimates. Twitter claimed the rise in hate speech was temporary, but the basic situation was clear: Trolls were testing the boundaries of Musk’s commitment to open discourse.

Musk said repeatedly that Twitter’s content-­moderation approach should “hew close to the law,” yet speech laws are different in every country. In the U.S., many forms of hate speech and harassment are legal. But Germany has well-known laws against Nazism and Holocaust denial, and the government of India has wide latitude to request the takedown of speech they don’t like. Musk promised he would leave major decisions, such as whether to reinstate Trump’s account, to a council of experts. Then, on November 19, he reneged and made the decision via public Twitter poll.

“The speed at which he moves and expects people to move can be dizzying, for sure,” Irwin says. She still supports Musk. “It’s probably the fastest-moving organization right now that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A former employee saw the Trump ­decision differently: “It shattered the naïve illusion that moderation would be anything more than dancing to the whims of one man’s inflated ego.”

 

On November 10, with just 20 minutes notice, Musk gathered his remaining employees to address them directly for the first time. He spoke frankly about the state of the business and suggested even more layoffs were to come. He also revoked a policy that had promised the entire staff the freedom to work remotely, forever, if they wished. “Basically, if you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted. End of story,” he said.

Slack and Signal erupted. A lawyer pointed out that this would be a fundamental change to their employment contracts, and employees did not have “an obligation to return to office.” One person said, “That’s so low.” And later, “Ok I’m quitting tomorrow 😂”

Alicia decided she too had had enough. She enjoyed working from the office but felt that forcing employees to do so, and on such short notice, was immoral. She told colleagues, first publicly in Slack, then on Twitter, not to resign. “Let him fire you,” she said. Why give Musk what he wanted? Five days later, she was fired. In her termination email, the HR department said her behavior had violated company policy. The next day, she went to the office to retrieve her belongings, sneaking in through the service elevator. She was surprised to feel more relieved than upset. She was free.

Twitter might have had a reputation as a left-leaning workforce, but there had always been a faction that disapproved of its progressive ideals. On Slack, some of these workers had formed a channel called #i-dissent, where they asked questions like why deadnaming a trans colleague was considered “bad.” When Musk announced he was buying the company, one of the more active i-­dissenters was thrilled. “Elon’s my new boss and I’m stoked!” he wrote on Linked­In. “I decided to send him a slack message. I figured you miss 100% of the shots you don’t make 😅 🚀 🌕”

This employee was cut during the first round of layoffs. Soon, all the prominent members of the #i-dissent Slack channel would be gone. The channel itself was archived, while bigger social channels like #social-watercooler were abandoned.

On November 16, Musk emailed his remaining 2,900 employees an ultimatum. He was building Twitter 2.0, he said, and workers would need to be “extremely hardcore,” logging “long hours at high intensity.” The old way of doing business was out. Now, “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” He asked employees to sign a pledge through Google Forms committing to the new standard by the end of the next workday.

But who wanted that? Employees were still waiting to be given a coherent vision for what Twitter 2.0 could be. They lacked basic information about the new company, like how they would be compensated now that Twitter was no longer a public company with easily sellable stock. Employees knew what Musk didn’t want — content moderation, free gourmet lunches, people working from home — but had few clues as to what he did want. Besides, was being fired for not checking a box on a Google Form even legal?

Word quickly spread that a significant number of employees were going to say no to being “extremely hardcore.” After weeks of trying to get rid of as many employees as possible, Musk and his advisers were suddenly in the awkward position of needing to convince a subset of them to stay. They met with small groups of senior engineers to hear their concerns. But to many, Musk’s handling of the initial layoffs, coupled with the lack of details about what staying for Twitter 2.0 would entail, had soured them for good. As one once-loyal engineer put it, “Fuck Elon Musk.”

Hundreds of employees decided not to sign the pledge, effectively resigning. In Slack, they again posted the salute emoji, the unofficial symbol of Twitter 1.0: 🫡

 

Four days later, Musk took the stage at Twitter headquarters. He was dressed in black jeans and black boots with a black T-shirt that read “I Love Twitter” in barely legible black writing. Flanked by two bodyguards, he tried to articulate his vision for the company. “This is not a right-wing takeover of Twitter,” he told employees. “It is a ­moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.”

As employees peppered him with questions, the billionaire free-associated, answering their concerns with smug dismissals and grandiose promises. What about his plan to turn Twitter from a mere social network into a super-app? “You’re not getting it, you’re not understanding,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I just used WeChat as an example. We can’t freakin’ clone WeChat; that would be absurd.” What about rival social platforms? “I don’t think about competitors … I don’t care what Facebook, YouTube, or what anyone else is doing. Couldn’t give a damn. We just need to make Twitter as goddamn amazing as possible.” What about rebuilding Twitter’s leadership team that he’d decimated in his first week? “Initially, there will be a lot of changes, and then over time you’ll see far fewer changes.” 

Twitter employees were used to ­grilling their bosses about every detail of how the company ran, an openness that was common at major tech companies around Silicon Valley. Even employees who still believed in Musk’s vision of Twitter hoped for a similar dialogue with their leader. Some expected it, now that the slackers were gone. But over the course of half an hour, Musk made it clear that the two-way street between the CEO and staffers was now closed.

 

By December, more than half the staff was gone, along with all of Twitter’s major perks, including reimbursements for wellness, classes, and day care. Remaining employees were warned not to take long Christmas vacations. Just when morale seemed to be bottoming out, Musk began doxxing their­ colleagues. 

Only a small inner circle knew Musk had invited the journalist Matt Taibbi to comb through internal documents and publish what he called “the Twitter Files.” The intention seemed to be to give ­credence to the notion that Twitter is in bed with the deep state, beholden to the clandestine conspiracies of Democrats. “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” Musk tweeted.

In an impossible-to-follow tweet thread that unfolded over several hours, Taibbi published the names and emails of rank-and-file ex-employees involved in communications with government officials, insinuating that Twitter had suppressed the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. After it was pointed out that Taibbi had published the personal email of Jack Dorsey, that tweet was deleted, but not the tweets naming low-level employees or the personal email of a sitting congressman. 

“What a shitty thing to do,” one worker wrote in a large Slack channel of former employees. “The names of rank and file members being revealed is fucked,” wrote another. Employees rushed to warn a Twitter operations analyst whom Taibbi had doxxed to privatize her social-media accounts, knowing she was about to face a deluge of abuse.

Soon after, Musk granted access to ­others, including Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, two influential writers who had gained the approval of his social circle, including David Sacks. They published Twitter threads on the company’s handling of covid misinformation and shadow-banning. While the framing was intended to stoke outrage, the internal ­correspondence that was published was more banal. It mostly showed employees having nuanced discussions about complicated, thorny moderation topics and often resisting requests by government agencies to take action. What Musk saw as damning forms of censorship were actually thoughtful conversations about user safety.

Musk followed this with a personal attack on Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. After Musk suggested that Roth was sympathetic to pedophilia — a dog whistle harking back to QAnon and Pizzagate — Roth fled his home and went into hiding. 

At the same time as he was putting Roth at risk, Musk bent the company’s free-speech policies to protect himself. After one of his children was allegedly stalked by a fan in South Pasadena, Musk blamed a Twitter account that tracked ­public data about the whereabouts of his ­private jet — his “assassination coordinates,” Musk said. He then had Irwin suspend the @ElonJet account, the account of its owner, and dozens of others that tracked celebrities’ planes. Several journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and elsewhere were suspended for tweeting the news. After she was publicly connected with the @ElonJet ban, a former employee says Irwin began insisting that instructions to restore accounts only be delivered verbally, so that the moves would not be linked back to her in Twitter’s systems. (Irwin denies this.)

Even Musk’s new ally Weiss denounced the crackdown: “The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases.” Musk responded by unfollowing her.

 

Twitter continues to hemorrhage money, so much so that Musk has stopped paying its bills. The landlords of one of its spaces in San Francisco are suing, ­seeking damages and threatening eviction ­proceedings. Twitter plans to auction off office furniture in January.

On Christmas Eve, Twitter abruptly shut down a data center in Sacramento, one of the company’s three serving regions; it also announced it would significantly downsize a data center in Atlanta. Within hours, Twitter had to redirect a large amount of traffic to its remaining data centers, ­threatening the stability of the platform. Engineers struggled to keep the service running. Outages would happen sporadically, the worst one in January, when the site was down for over 12 hours for users in Australia and New Zealand. But it was nothing near the catastrophe Musk’s critics had predicted. Mostly, Twitter kept humming along.

Meanwhile, more staff deemed non­essential were let go. In London, receptionists were fired just before the ­holiday. In San Francisco, the janitorial staff was laid off without severance. At one point, the San Francisco office got so low on office supplies that employees began bringing their own toilet paper. 

Late in December, Twitter employees noticed a prominent face was gone from Slack: Luke Simon had left the company. No one knew why. Some joked darkly that kissing Musk’s ring wasn’t enough to keep anyone safe anymore. Simon’s ­Twitter account no longer exists. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

The repercussions for Musk’s handling of Twitter are now coming. According to his public-merger agreement and internal Twitter documents, Musk agreed to at least match the company’s existing severance package, which offered two months of pay as well as other valuable benefits. Instead, he laid off employees with the minimum notice required by federal and state law and refused to pay out certain awards. Now more than 500 employees, with Shevat among the highest ranking, are pursuing legal action against Musk for what they are owed, in addition to his alleged discrimination against minority groups in his handling of the layoffs.

“I think leadership doesn’t end after you get fired,” says Shevat, adding that he was already paid out for the acquisition of his start-up and isn’t doing this for the money. “I still feel responsible for my team and for my PMs and for my engineers. So I think that this is my way of showing them what is the right thing to do.”

Originally, laid-off employees were given a 60-day notice. Now that it is up, they are receiving severance agreements asking them to sign away their right to sue Twitter or say anything negative about the company or Musk for life. In exchange, they get one month of pay before they need to find another job during what is the most difficult hiring market in tech in years.

It’s an open secret that many employees who remain at Musk’s “hardcore” Twitter are actively looking for other jobs. Even the most publicly cheerful Twitter workers can’t fully mask the despair. On December 29, one tweeted a selfie, smiling in front of an empty office, with the hashtags #solowork, #productivity, and #findingperspective.

Musk himself is starting to appear defeated. Tesla shares started 2022 trading at nearly $400. By September, Tesla’s stock price had dropped by 25 percent. It plummeted again after Musk bought Twitter and ended the year at $123. Investors are begging Musk to step away; Tesla employees are too. As one person on Musk’s transition team put it, “What the fuck does this have to do with cars?”

Musk claims he always intended to be Twitter’s CEO only temporarily. With the damage he has done in three months — to the company and to his own wealth — those watching the nosedive, whether with ­horror or Schadenfreude, can’t help but wonder how much longer he can wait. His failures at Twitter have already damaged his reputation as a genius. How smart could he really be, the guy who purchased a company for far more than it was worth, then drove what remained of it into the earth?

While both companies flail, Musk remains glued to his feed. It was an outcome Alicia predicted back in April when Musk first floated the idea of buying the company. “He’s too interested in seeking attention,” she said. “Twitter is a very, a very dangerous drug for anybody who has that personality.”

As the year came to a close, Musk’s public statements about Twitter veered from pride in the site’s usage metrics (all-time highs, he regularly assured followers) to what might have been more sober self-assessments of his predicament. “Don’t be the clown on the clown car!” he tweeted on December 27. “Too late haha.”

If he seemed certain of anything, it was the steadily improving technical architecture of Twitter itself. The staff might be vastly diminished, but what it lacked in size it more than made up for in growing technical competence. Bit by bit, Musk said, Twitter’s notoriously fragile infrastructure was improving. 

In some ways, Musk was vindicated. Twitter was less stable now, but the platform survived and mostly functioned even with the majority of employees gone. He had promised to rightsize a bloated company, and now it operated on minimal head count.

But Musk appears unaware of what he’s actually broken: the company culture that built Twitter into one of the world’s most influential social networks, the policies that attempted to keep that platform safe, and the trust of users who populate it every day with their conversations, breaking news, and weird jokes — Twitter’s true value and contributions to the world.

“Fractal of Rube Goldberg machines … is what it feels like understanding how ­Twitter works,” Musk wrote in a short thread on Christmas Eve. “And yet work it does … Even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.”

Four days later, Twitter crashed. More than 10,000 users, many of them international, submitted reports of problems accessing the site. Some got an error message reading, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”

“Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken,” one user tweeted into the apparent void.

But in that moment, Musk found that whatever might be happening in the world at large — to his site, his other companies, his reputation and legacy — that tweet, at least, appeared on his screen as intended.

“Works for me,” he replied.

 

there is gold in this article...

code review:

 

Quote

 

Alicia was scheduled to meet with Musk around 11 a.m. She felt bad about the anxiety coursing through the office, even if she was sanguine about the process. As a back-end engineer, she was used to being woken up in the middle of the night because something on the platform was breaking — a crisis that could impact millions of Twitter users. It took more than a code review to faze her.

She had printed out a few lines of Python rather than her actual code repository. (“Python is more at Musk’s level,” she says.) The mandate had felt like a stunt, and she’d doubted he would really engage: “I’m not gonna explain the project I’ve spent ten years working on in a fraction of an hour competing with ten other people — I’m just not.”

She never had to. The meeting was pushed back, then canceled. “We didn’t actually get to show our code to Elon,” she says, laughing. “Which is a shame. I was very much looking forward to it.”

 

comms:

 

Quote

 

The worker left a message for Twitter leadership in a main Slack channel before their access was cut: “news articles aren’t comms. Tweets from an account associated with half-baked rants, copy pasted memes, and the occasional misinfo aren’t comms. Secondhand internal sharing and employee sleuthing aren’t comms … I also hope failure of this past week hangs heavy on you to remind you to do better.”

To avoid violating federal labor law, Musk said employees would be paid for the next two months, though they would lose access to Twitter’s systems immediately. But even this played out haphazardly; some workers lost access on schedule, while others lingered in Twitter’s critical systems for months.

 

Twitter Blue burn:

Quote

Twitter Blue was meant to begin shifting Twitter’s sales away from ads toward subscriptions. But while chasing a relatively paltry new cash stream, Musk torched the company’s ad business — the source of the vast majority of its billions in revenue. The Blue disaster accelerated a rush of advertisers abandoning the platform, including Eli Lilly, and by December, what was left of Twitter’s sales team began offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ad spend to lure back marketers. (It did not work.)

hate speech, AKA how Elon Musk doesn't understand free speech laws.

 

Quote

 

That commitment was immediately tested by being pitted against his other goal of “freeing” speech on Twitter. In the weeks after Musk took over, hate speech spiked across the platform. Slurs against gay men rose 58 percent, antisemitic language was up by 61 percent, and anti-Black slurs more than tripled, according to some estimates. Twitter claimed the rise in hate speech was temporary, but the basic situation was clear: Trolls were testing the boundaries of Musk’s commitment to open discourse.

Musk said repeatedly that Twitter’s content-moderation approach should “hew close to the law,” yet speech laws are different in every country. In the U.S., many forms of hate speech and harassment are legal. But Germany has well-known laws against Nazism and Holocaust denial, and the government of India has wide latitude to request the takedown of speech they don’t like. Musk promised he would leave major decisions, such as whether to reinstate Trump’s account, to a council of experts. Then, on November 19, he reneged and made the decision via public Twitter poll.

 

Twitter 2.0, AKA how Elon Musk doesn't really have a vision anywhere but in his own head

 

Quote

 

On November 16, Musk emailed his remaining 2,900 employees an ultimatum. He was building Twitter 2.0, he said, and workers would need to be “extremely hardcore,” logging “long hours at high intensity.” The old way of doing business was out. Now, “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” He asked employees to sign a pledge through Google Forms committing to the new standard by the end of the next workday.

But who wanted that? Employees were still waiting to be given a coherent vision for what Twitter 2.0 could be. They lacked basic information about the new company, like how they would be compensated now that Twitter was no longer a public company with easily sellable stock. Employees knew what Musk didn’t want — content moderation, free gourmet lunches, people working from home — but had few clues as to what he did want. Besides, was being fired for not checking a box on a Google Form even legal?

Word quickly spread that a significant number of employees were going to say no to being “extremely hardcore.” After weeks of trying to get rid of as many employees as possible, Musk and his advisers were suddenly in the awkward position of needing to convince a subset of them to stay. They met with small groups of senior engineers to hear their concerns. But to many, Musk’s handling of the initial layoffs, coupled with the lack of details about what staying for Twitter 2.0 would entail, had soured them for good. As one once-loyal engineer put it, “Fuck Elon Musk.”

 

Elon talks to staff, AKA "you're note getting it, you're not understanding"

 

Quote

 

Flanked by two bodyguards, he tried to articulate his vision for the company. “This is not a right-wing takeover of Twitter,” he told employees. “It is a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.”

As employees peppered him with questions, the billionaire free-associated, answering their concerns with smug dismissals and grandiose promises. What about his plan to turn Twitter from a mere social network into a super-app? “You’re not getting it, you’re not understanding,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I just used WeChat as an example. We can’t freakin’ clone WeChat; that would be absurd.” What about rival social platforms? “I don’t think about competitors … I don’t care what Facebook, YouTube, or what anyone else is doing. Couldn’t give a damn. We just need to make Twitter as goddamn amazing as possible.” What about rebuilding Twitter’s leadership team that he’d decimated in his first week? “Initially, there will be a lot of changes, and then over time you’ll see far fewer changes.”

 

Twitter Files, AKA what Musk saw as damning forms of censorship were actually thoughtful conversations about user safety.

Quote

They published Twitter threads on the company’s handling of COVD misinformation and shadow-banning. While the framing was intended to stoke outrage, the internal correspondence that was published was more banal. It mostly showed employees having nuanced discussions about complicated, thorny moderation topics and often resisting requests by government agencies to take action. What Musk saw as damning forms of censorship were actually thoughtful conversations about user safety.

about his time as CEO:

 

Quote

 

Musk claims he always intended to be Twitter’s CEO only temporarily. With the damage he has done in three months — to the company and to his own wealth — those watching the nosedive, whether with horror or Schadenfreude, can’t help but wonder how much longer he can wait. His failures at Twitter have already damaged his reputation as a genius. How smart could he really be, the guy who purchased a company for far more than it was worth, then drove what remained of it into the earth?

While both companies flail, Musk remains glued to his feed. It was an outcome Alicia predicted back in April when Musk first floated the idea of buying the company. “He’s too interested in seeking attention,” she said. “Twitter is a very, a very dangerous drug for anybody who has that personality.”

 

the last paragraphs are really worth reading:

 

Quote

 

In some ways, Musk was vindicated. Twitter was less stable now, but the platform survived and mostly functioned even with the majority of employees gone. He had promised to rightsize a bloated company, and now it operated on minimal head count.

But Musk appears unaware of what he’s actually broken: the company culture that built Twitter into one of the world’s most influential social networks, the policies that attempted to keep that platform safe, and the trust of users who populate it every day with their conversations, breaking news, and weird jokes — Twitter’s true value and contributions to the world.

“Fractal of Rube Goldberg machines … is what it feels like understanding how Twitter works,” Musk wrote in a short thread on Christmas Eve. “And yet work it does … Even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.”

Four days later, Twitter crashed. More than 10,000 users, many of them international, submitted reports of problems accessing the site. Some got an error message reading, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”

“Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken,” one user tweeted into the apparent void.

But in that moment, Musk found that whatever might be happening in the world at large — to his site, his other companies, his reputation and legacy — that tweet, at least, appeared on his screen as intended.

“Works for me,” he replied.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[cactusflinthead 27,601]

This might be the most informative sentence in that story.

"To Musk, it was anyone’s fault but his own."

[HamsterHookah 112]

As Disney (Iger) and Google and Microsoft and Starbucks have all been publicly chided for taking a firmer return to work stance, Musk is now back-tracking a bit on remote work....but it looks like it's not for employee experience but rather to not pay rent? haha this guy.

[locodos 5,389]

IMO Return to work seems to be purely the policy of vainglorious control freaks.  Companies have successful shifted the vast majority of facilities cost to their workers while extending worker hours and availability.  C levels just miss the bowing and scraping.

 

[HamsterHookah 112]

19 minutes ago, locodos said:

IMO Return to work seems to be purely the policy of vainglorious control freaks.  Companies have successful shifted the vast majority of facilities cost to their workers while extending worker hours and availability.  C levels just miss the bowing and scraping.

 

Like with most things in life, the truth probably is in the middle. I'm sure there is inefficiency and unproductivity from WFH, but it's not a panacea and the toothpaste is out of the tube, so striking a balanced chord seems to be the optimal outcome. 

[locodos 5,389]

16 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

Like with most things in life, the truth probably is in the middle. I'm sure there is inefficiency and unproductivity from WFH, but it's not a panacea and the toothpaste is out of the tube, so striking a balanced chord seems to be the optimal outcome. 

Depends on the industry and role, no question some require a physical presence component.  Having worked at a company that had a full set of tools to work remotely since '98 it's amazing to hear old tired rehashes of how it can't work.

Companies that feel the need to control employees physically to ensure work is done have been sloppy in hiring and have poor management.  A company that can only pull from a worker pool of probably half a metro area will be trounced by the same company that can pull the most talented workers from around the world.  I've seen it.  Of course its hard to know if it was the workforce talent or the lack of vision/management.

Edited January 17, 2023 by locodos

[texasdago 7,577]

3 minutes ago, locodos said:

Depends on the industry and role, no question some require a physical presence component.  Having worked at a company that had a full set of tools to work remotely since '98 it's amazing to hear old tired rehashes of how it can't work.

Yup... anyone who has worked for a technology company for any reasonable length of time can tell you WFH is nothing new and it absolutely can work.  I've been on/off WFH since 2003 and was able to occasionally do it before.

[Chopper 17,243]

Quote

Luke Simon, a senior engineering director at Twitter, was ecstatic. “Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer and scientist, and he has a track record of having a Midas touch, when it comes to growing the companies he’s helped lead,” he wrote in Slack.

Probably just a coincidence but my team and I just sold a guy named Luke Simon from the Bay Area on the opportunity to become a prince in Tanzania, and promised to put him first in the line of succession to become king. 

Random thoughts - Morgan Stanley is so often right at the top of banks aiding and abetting a huge con and/or washing huge amounts of money for a cartel. I feel like they may not give a shit about fuck because they're TBTF. Motherfuckers.

It took Bernie Madoff 20+ years to burn through $20 Billion -- with the helpful assistance of Morgan Stanley. Elron's burned through more than that at twitter in just 4 months. Apples to Oranges but it's real money, figuratively lit on fire, nonetheless. 

[HamsterHookah 112]

I don't disagree with y'all, I've worked remote nearly my whole career, I get it. 

[Chopper 17,243]

1. The video carries a tagline saying: “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”
2. The company has warned drivers that they must keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of their vehicles while using Autopilot.
3. The Tesla technology is designed to assist with steering, braking, speed and lane changes but its features “do not make the vehicle autonomous.” 

4. The Tesla technology seems like it would be more stressful to use than teaching a teenager to drive for the very first time. Also, Elron is apparently confused, along with so, so many other basic things in life, about the definition of "autopilot."

 

Edited January 17, 2023 by Chopper

[Genco 3,041]

1 hour ago, HamsterHookah said:

I'm sure there is inefficiency and unproductivity from WFH, but it's not a panacea and the toothpaste is out of the tube, so striking a balanced chord seems to be the optimal outcome. 

 

50 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

I don't disagree with y'all, I've worked remote nearly my whole career, I get it. 

Could've fooled me. You talk exactly like the middle management assholes that stop by my office to chat. 

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13,587]

1 hour ago, longhornmatt said:

I know we’ve already established this many times, but the answer is “fraud” - and not just in the way someone on the internet might use it as hyperbole / smack talk.  He’s an actual fraud.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

My favorite bit:

 

You can't wow the people without a big Koolaide Man "OH YEAH!" finish. 

[HamsterHookah 112]

47 minutes ago, Genco said:

 

Could've fooled me. You talk exactly like the middle management assholes that stop by my office to chat. 

Just making sure you are focused. Doesn't seem like your head has been in the game lately, you know? What's going on, pal? You okay? We've known each other a long time, you can trust me, just want to know how I can help you get back to your old you...

[Brisketexan 105,213]

59 minutes ago, Genco said:

 

Could've fooled me. You talk exactly like the middle management assholes that stop by my office to chat. 

Yeah.......about that.......

[wildcat09 29,366]

1 hour ago, longhornmatt said:

I know we’ve already established this many times, but the answer is “fraud” - and not just in the way someone on the internet might use it as hyperbole / smack talk.  He’s an actual fraud.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

My favorite bit:

 

Member when a couple posters ran in here crying about how the Twitter files proved that Twitter had lied to shareholders? I member.

[NoName 16,369]

Yet again Elon is being cunty
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559180/twitter-blocking-apps-tweetbot

Quote

 

“We have still heard nothing from anyone at Twitter on any level,” Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad tells The Verge. “If there’s some long-standing rule that we’ve been unknowingly breaking for the last 10+ years, we’d love to know what it is so that, if possible, we can comply with it.”

 

so to be clear it took them six days to come up with this statement:

 

Twitter says it’s intentionally blocking apps like Tweetbot

/

 

Spoiler

Twitter says some apps aren’t working because the platform is ‘enforcing its long-standing third-party API rules.’ It still hasn’t explained what rules apps are breaking.

Twitter confirmed that it’s purposefully blocking third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific following days of silence. In a post on Twitter, the company writes that it’s “enforcing its long-standing API rules,” which “may result in some apps not working.”

While the statement confirms suspicions that Twitter had been purposefully locking users out of third-party Twitter clients, it doesn’t even contain a link to the rules that Twitter’s referring to and still doesn’t tell us anything about what’s really going on. This is the first time Twitter’s acknowledging the issue since apps started breaking last Thursday.

Twitter’s vagueness isn’t much of a surprise, given that the company dismantled its communications team as part of CEO Elon Musk’s mass layoffs. One senior Twitter engineer reportedly told employees that the third-party outages are “intentional” but never explained why, according to internal messages obtained by The Information.

The situation has left both developers, who make a living off of these apps, and users, who use them to enhance their Twitter experience, frustrated and confused. While one app, Tweetbot, briefly came back online over the weekend, that was only because co-creator Paul Haddad swapped out its API keys. This put the app in a semi-working state and allowed it to temporarily bypass the ban.

Other Twitter clients, like Albatross and the iOS version of Fenix, continue working, and — again — it’s entirely unclear what these apps are doing that Tweetbot and Twitterific aren’t. It doesn’t look like Twitter’s communicating with developers, either.

“We have still heard nothing from anyone at Twitter on any level,” Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad tells The Verge. “If there’s some long-standing rule that we’ve been unknowingly breaking for the last 10+ years, we’d love to know what it is so that, if possible, we can comply with it.”

The Verge reached out to Twitter with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

selected tweets:

 

[Chopper 17,243]

1 hour ago, Genco said:

 

Could've fooled me. You talk exactly like the middle management assholes that stop by my office to chat. 

"Listen up, we've got a problem. Our clients are getting restless and we need to figure out a way to keep them satisfied. I've been doing some digging and it looks like there are some inefficiencies in our current processes that are holding us back. We need to come up with a plan to make it look like we're doing more than we are, and fast. I've got a feeling that some of our competitors are closing in and we need to stay ahead of the game. Let's all bring our best ideas to the table, think outside the box and come up with a strategy to give our clients the impression that we're on top of things. We could look into automating certain tasks or utilizing multi-threading to speed up the processing time. We could also consider refactoring the code for an existing program to make it more efficient and improve its performance. We'll be meeting next week to brainstorm and solidify a plan, but let's start thinking about this now. Remember, what happens in this room stays in this room."

[Chopper 17,243]

Elron Holmes Musk steps up to the counter at Jason's Deli and orders his lunch as loud as anyone ever has. He's been practicing this moment for 2 weeks.

"I desire a succulent medley of avian comestibles, specifically, a delectable cut of artisanal, grass-fed, free-range, heirloom turkey, nestled between two slices of toasted, locally-sourced, artisanal, whole-grain bread, smothered in a piquant emulsion of hand-crafted, organic, stone-ground mustard and accompanied by a medley of locally-sourced, foraged greens, dressed with a cold-pressed, organic, artisanal vinaigrette, I suppose a side of pseudo-leguminous accoutrements will suffice."*

 

 

*as reported by openai

 

Edited January 17, 2023 by Chopper

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

Cliffs:  Tesla markets Brembo brakes on a certain model.  Camoflauged a lesser brake, but didn't bother to update the spec sheet, option, etc:

https://electrek.co/2023/01/16/tesla-sneakily-downgrades-performance-brakes-puts-cover-hide-it/

Quote

Tesla has clandestinely downgraded its performance brakes on the Model Y Performance and even put a cover to hide the change in a deceptive move.

When going from a Model Y Long Range to Model Y Performance, the biggest difference is arguably the performance brakes.

You also get faster acceleration and higher top speed, but those are basically software unlocked since the powertrain in the vehicles is virtually the same.

There are also bigger wheels, but that’s a positive or negative, depending on how you look at it.

 

Quote

The bigger Brembo brakes are arguably the most significant upgrade for the money to move up to the top-performance version.

However, we now learn that Tesla has downgraded the brakes and has done it in a very sneaky and deceiving way.

ZEV Centric, a company building accessories for Tesla vehicles, spotted and exposed the change.

The company was working on some customers’ Model Ys and some of their own Model Y vehicles and discovered the downgrade:

 

 

Quote

We already have a 2020 MYLR and a 2022 MYP that belong to other members of the company and now have added a company owned 2023 MYP to further develop. We brought all 3 into the office to do some comparisons and a quick tear down. It was at this time that we opted to snap some photos, shoot some video, take some measurements, and reveal what is hiding behind the rear covers. Little did we know that not many people were aware of this downgrade and Tesla still markets it as a performance upgrade on their website.

 

 

Spoiler

The Performance upgrade on the Model Y brings a rear Brembo caliper and a 2mm thicker rotor with additional venting features.

The company spotted this around September when Tesla started to replace that Brembo caliper (right) with a new Mando brake (left):

Tesla lists performance brakes as an upgrade on the performance model compared to the long range. Model Y performance and model Y long range come with identical front brembo brakes (lr painted silver and p painted red), they always have and they still do. 

 

Prior to August 2022, model Y performance came with rear brembo brakes, model y long range had smaller mando. After August 2022, both model Y performance and model Y long range have the same mando in the back. 

 

The language on the website has not changed, it still lists a performance brake upgrade for the performance model, despite all models after August 2022 having the same brakes front and rear. The only difference is the cosmetic red paint. Tesla now needs to clarify that performance brakes means red paint, or better yet, remove the performance framing. 

The company now says that the rotor is 2mm thinner with the downgrade.

Here’s also a comparison of the brake pads on both calipers, which clearly shows the Brembo to be more significant in size:

ZEV Centric, who are brake experts, believes this is a significant downgrade and believes Tesla should provide them with the Brembo brakes since the change was not indicated on Tesla’s Model Y configurator.

Tesla has been known to implement cost-cutting efforts by removing features over the last few years, such as removing passenger lumbar support controls and ultrasonic sensors.

 

[Neonmoon 38,130]

6 hours ago, NoName said:

Fine, she thought. If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the ­company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how ­computers work.”

This part of the article is the chef’s kiss. 

[Baboontyme 2,821]

On 1/16/2023 at 12:54 PM, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

Well, that too. Or pretty much any other way to have handled this would have been better than what was done.

 

I've found Tweetdeck does't show any ads, for what that is worth.  Which is interesting, considering it is owned by Twitter.  It's not mobile-friendly, but for now, it does the trick.

 

@Francisco 2.0 I think I mentioned upthread. Check out Marin Deck. It skins Tweetdeck to make it mobile-friendly. It's not perfect but it's better than Twitter.

 

[Francisco 2.0 32,408]

Act now, and you can get a full year of Twitter Blue at a discounted rate:

 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559959/twitter-blue-annual-subscription-discount-offer

 

Quote

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, one of his aims has been to build up its subscription business, launching a revamped Twitter Blue package that gives subscribers a “verified” checkmark, reduced ads, preferential treatment by its algorithm, and other benefits. The subscription, which is still available only via iOS or the web, now offers a discounted annual subscription for customers, which you can pick instead of the $8 per month web pricing or $11 iOS price that shifts Apple’s 30 percent fee to the consumer. 

 

 

Quote

If you’d like to kick in some extra funds right away, Twitter Blue annual subscriptions are available on the web for $84 per year, saving you a little over 12 percent compared to paying for a monthly web subscription — or 36 percent over paying via iOS. 

It’s not clear if Apple will care if Twitter claws back its cut this way, but Apple has historically carved out exceptions in its App Store Guidelinesfor this sort of thing: “reader” apps and “multiplatform services” can generally let you log into a subscription you’ve already purchased elsewhere without paying Apple’s fees.

 

Spoiler

Twitter’s new annual purchase option was listed on a Twitter support page as of today, but we didn’t spot any other significant changes to the plan. Whether you pay monthly or yearly, your checkmark will take an unspecified amount of time to appear, and you will need to verify a phone number to enable it.

The accelerated payment option is appearing in the shadow of recent reports that Twitter has failed to pay rent on some of its office spaces. It’s being sued for nonpayment in San Francisco, and in Singapore, there are multiple reports that employees were walked out of the office over nonpayment.

There was also a report early Tuesday from the Financial Times, which cites three unnamed sources saying the first installment of interest payments on $13 billion in loans Musk used to finance his $44 billion Twitter takeover could be due as soon as the end of January. The paper mentions that bankers are in discussions with Musk about restructuring some of the expensive unsecured debt with margin loans backed by his stake in Tesla.

Musk, who is now worth $137 billion or so according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has seen his net worth drop sharply recently, falling far enough for Guinness to call it a new world record. At least with this annual subscription, anyone interested in helping Musk’s financial situation — without buying a Tesla, a future rocket trip around the Moon, or a stake in Twitter at the price he originally paid — can do their small part to keep the lights on and the doors open.

 

[Sawbonz 27,583]

11 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Simon, who owned a ­portrait of himself dressed as a 19th-century French general,

[WBT 20,650]

3 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Cliffs:  Tesla markets Brembo brakes on a certain model.  Camoflauged a lesser brake, but didn't bother to update the spec sheet, option, etc:

https://electrek.co/2023/01/16/tesla-sneakily-downgrades-performance-brakes-puts-cover-hide-it/

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

The Performance upgrade on the Model Y brings a rear Brembo caliper and a 2mm thicker rotor with additional venting features.

The company spotted this around September when Tesla started to replace that Brembo caliper (right) with a new Mando brake (left):

Tesla lists performance brakes as an upgrade on the performance model compared to the long range. Model Y performance and model Y long range come with identical front brembo brakes (lr painted silver and p painted red), they always have and they still do. 

 

Prior to August 2022, model Y performance came with rear brembo brakes, model y long range had smaller mando. After August 2022, both model Y performance and model Y long range have the same mando in the back. 

 

The language on the website has not changed, it still lists a performance brake upgrade for the performance model, despite all models after August 2022 having the same brakes front and rear. The only difference is the cosmetic red paint. Tesla now needs to clarify that performance brakes means red paint, or better yet, remove the performance framing. 

The company now says that the rotor is 2mm thinner with the downgrade.

Here’s also a comparison of the brake pads on both calipers, which clearly shows the Brembo to be more significant in size:

ZEV Centric, who are brake experts, believes this is a significant downgrade and believes Tesla should provide them with the Brembo brakes since the change was not indicated on Tesla’s Model Y configurator.

Tesla has been known to implement cost-cutting efforts by removing features over the last few years, such as removing passenger lumbar support controls and ultrasonic sensors.

 

First time a Tesla owner has worked on their car?  Vioalates the TOS, I assume?

[atomheartbevo 89,775]

Musk says he was invited but turned down a trip to Davos.

World Economic Forum says he wasn’t invited.

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-san-francisco-european-union-7a82416400545f313ff46c0180e606d7

[UpperWestside 6,186]

15 hours ago, longhornmatt said:

I know we’ve already established this many times, but the answer is “fraud” - and not just in the way someone on the internet might use it as hyperbole / smack talk.  He’s an actual fraud.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

My favorite bit:

 

I am going to be vocal about what a fraud he is. This guy needs some serious professional help, but no one around him has the bravery to step in and tell him he needs some psychiatric help. Tank Twitter and Tesla, SpaceX and anything else in the portfolio. This is what he will do because his mind does not think rationally and he makes no attempt to even work on that aspect of his insanely narcissistic personality.

[chainsaw 9,873]

13 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Cliffs:  Tesla markets Brembo brakes on a certain model.  Camoflauged a lesser brake, but didn't bother to update the spec sheet, option, etc:

https://electrek.co/2023/01/16/tesla-sneakily-downgrades-performance-brakes-puts-cover-hide-it/

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

The Performance upgrade on the Model Y brings a rear Brembo caliper and a 2mm thicker rotor with additional venting features.

The company spotted this around September when Tesla started to replace that Brembo caliper (right) with a new Mando brake (left):

Tesla lists performance brakes as an upgrade on the performance model compared to the long range. Model Y performance and model Y long range come with identical front brembo brakes (lr painted silver and p painted red), they always have and they still do. 

 

Prior to August 2022, model Y performance came with rear brembo brakes, model y long range had smaller mando. After August 2022, both model Y performance and model Y long range have the same mando in the back. 

 

The language on the website has not changed, it still lists a performance brake upgrade for the performance model, despite all models after August 2022 having the same brakes front and rear. The only difference is the cosmetic red paint. Tesla now needs to clarify that performance brakes means red paint, or better yet, remove the performance framing. 

The company now says that the rotor is 2mm thinner with the downgrade.

Here’s also a comparison of the brake pads on both calipers, which clearly shows the Brembo to be more significant in size:

ZEV Centric, who are brake experts, believes this is a significant downgrade and believes Tesla should provide them with the Brembo brakes since the change was not indicated on Tesla’s Model Y configurator.

Tesla has been known to implement cost-cutting efforts by removing features over the last few years, such as removing passenger lumbar support controls and ultrasonic sensors.

 

So.....not a visionary then. Textbook fraud right?