Twitter, Trump, and Tesla: Musk, SpaceX, and Platformer have no interest in the free-for-all hellscape approximation

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

Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has suggested he’ll change the way Twitter’s moderation works, potentially relaxing the kinds of policies that saw former President Donald Trump permanently banned from the platform.

By bringing Trump and other controversial figures back to the platform, Twitter may have greater appeal to the right-leaning advertisers that do business on alternative platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.

Musk moved his deposition from September to October 6th and 7th. He announced he would obey the contract his lawyers negotiated just days before the deposition was to take place. The judge found that Musk probably deleted the Signal messages that were relevant to the case. Musk got a court order to halt proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th as the deposition was delayed as they worked toward a deal.

If Friday was the beginning of the end for the company then Monday was the beginning of the beginning. Musk has discussed putting the entire site behind a paywall, Platformer has learned. The company is trying to get back some workers it laid off just hours ago, and some workers think that the unprofitable Blue subscription could hurt the company in the long run.

The Supreme Court will decide whether or not to consider the liability of Twitter for illegal content, as it faces challenges to its free speech stance in court.

Musk is interested in creating an “everything app.” He talked about using social networking site to create it. This is a reference to the Chinese-language messaging app that started as a messaging platform but has evolved into more than just a messaging platform. “You basically live on WeChat in China,” Musk told Twitter employees in June. If we can replicate that withTwitter, we’ll be a success.

Musk did not give a public notice of the layoffs. Even so, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statute requires employers with at least 100 workers to disclose layoffs involving 500 or more employees regardless of whether a company is publicly traded or privately held.

“If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email,” a copy of the email obtained by CNN said. “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”

The memo states that Omnicom wants to be assured that the issues on the platform won’t impact compliant processes, operations, products, brand safety and client investment, but due to the lack of senior leadership now in these.

According to the lawsuit, some employees were laid off and that they are in violation of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

The WARN Act requires that an employer with 100 or more employees give 60 days’ advance written notice of mass layoffs.

What Steve Jobs had in his life: How Apple went from a profit machine to a computer giant. And what did he do?

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was intimately familiar with the company he was suddenly running because he had founded it and led the team that created its flagship product. In his years away from Apple, he had founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems. He was also Steve Jobs. If anyone were to turn around the computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. The company was five years old when he took over. Musk came up with a brilliant plan to turn the company around—but it didn’t post an annual profit until 2020, 17 years after incorporation. He gets a lot of credit for what he’s accomplished, as well as for his persistence. The other company that Musk has is privately held and doesn’t report earnings. It takes years to launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can end up killing people.

If employees got a letter saying they were being laid off, they would be told by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The email didn’t say how many jobs would be lost.

He removed the board of directors and then installed himself as the sole board member. Many employees of the micro-messaging service took to the social networking site Thursday night to express support for eachother, often using blue heart icons in replies to each other.

Barry C. White said Thursday that no recent notifications have been received by the Employment Development Department.

The Facebook CEO’s Disappoint: Management, Operations, and Ads on the Social Platforms Meta, Pfizer and Mondalez

The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers — mainly TikTok — are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, has suffered its second revenue decline in as many quarters and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.

This doesn’t solve the bigger problem of revenue. Advertising is the major source of revenue for the company, accounting for almost 90 percent of its revenue last year. The rest of the company’s income came from other streams, such as data licensing.

The remarks came after General Mills and the Volkswagen Group, two of the largest advertisers on the social-media company, said they were suspending advertising on the platform in the wake of Musk’s acquisition.

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

The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the moves, also said Pfizer and Mondalez are pausing ads on Twitter. The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

General GM said it would pause paying for advertising on the social network while it looks at the platform’s new direction. Toyota, another Tesla competitor, previously told CNN that it is “in discussions with key stakeholders and monitoring the situation” on Twitter.

Twitter Shutdown and the Effects of Massive Commissioning and Murder on Marketing Efforts: A Brief History from Musk and Calacanis

Interpublic Group, a giant ad buying firm, has recommended clients to stop advertising on the platform.

The type of content that brands are sensitive to is an issue made more complicated by social media. Most marketers bristle at the thought of having their ads run alongside toxic content such as hate speech, pornography or misinformation.

Many civil society leaders are worried that misinformation and other harmful content will get on the platform and cause a disruption, so the pauses come days before the elections.

Musk is trying to avoid a possible advertiser exodus. Musk and his team went to New York on Monday to talk to the marketing community, according to Calacanis.

The mass layoffs of staff on Friday will make the election integrity policies that are technically still active meaningless, as a key factor in their thinking.

Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.

Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.

Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.

The CEO of a tech company went too far: What do they tell employees about their jobs? A personal story about how managers lost their jobs after Musk layoffs

Managers were trying to preserve their jobs for pregnant women, employees with cancer, and workers on visas, according to a former employee.

Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. The company went too far. Managers were told to ask laid off employees if they wanted to keep their jobs immediately after the layoffs were made public.

It began as a rumor about Blind, a app that allows employees of companies to chat without being detected by their coworkers. Within a day, it was posted in public channels.

I wanted to let people know that we have the chance to ask people who were left off if they will come back. One such message from a manager to employees read that they needed to put together names and rationales by 4 pm on Sunday. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers over the past day in an effort to get them back, Platformer is told.

Workers who are recalled will need to consult with lawyers about their options. Some people are in revolt about certain aspects of the organization that have been broken after the disastrous Musk layoffs process.

Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. One person that I spoke to said that any technical manager should expect to manage 20 individual contributors and spend at least half their time writing code. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.

The employee told me that the teams that are working on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days. The majority of the company is sitting. No organization chart, no priorities, and no idea who your manager is are some of the things that have not been established.

What Have We Learned about Musk? Employees’ Concerns About the Impersonation and Health of a Fortune 500 Company: The Decade of Musk’s Decree

Employees looked to some strange sources to learn what they were supposed to do. After a number of celebrities and high profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a policy that anyone found doing that would be banned without warning. I’m told that the news of Musk’s decree was new to the policy team and they began discussing how to implement it.

The health team was told to listen to David Sacks, a Musk adviser, because they lost half their colleagues. Sacks is a partner of a venture capitalist who was helping to manage the Musk transition.

The vice president told the employees that the most recent Podcasts covers the current layoffs and provides some insight into why it is happening. I think it is worth listening to so that we can understand the macro environment.

The health benefits of most employees became a huge concern for them. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

At least some teams began to hold meetings where employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like and what their priorities will be.

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

It is important to not join other media properties that have struggled with the model of a subscription-based business. Musk has had difficulties with his attempts right out of the gate. An updated, $8-per-month version of the Twitter Blue subscription service that allowed users to buy a verification checkmark had to be halted after just two days when it was abused to impersonate prominent people (notably Musk himself), businesses, and government agencies. Musk said in November that he would re-launch the service on November 29, but on Monday suggested that he might wait more until there was high confidence of stopping impersonation.

The new Blue is likely to have bigger problems. The existing version only had a little over 100,000 active subscribers. The new version is more expensive, and it doesn’t seem to be worth much to most regular users. The company is not sure how it will persuade enough people to subscribe.

The company was postponing the launch due to a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US elections.

But Musk doesn’t mind. When our own Tom Warren took a screenshot of the tweet, a user replied, “The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid $8. Twitter keeps the money and suspends the account. It’s genius and I hope more folks do this. It is free money for the social networking site. Musk replied to the user with a bag of money and a bullseye, as well as a smiling face and sunglasses.

It could not be learned how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall; Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.

Twitter is GOOD Again: Why Elon Musk is Locked in Here with Weakly Underestimating Brands? A View from Mark Cuban on Twitter Blue

I honestly did not think chaos would engulf Twitter so quickly, but I must admit: this rules. This is very hard to own. Awoooou (wolf howl), Twitter is good again. We’re no longer locked in here with Elon Musk — Elon Musk has locked himself in here with us.

Shenanigans are fun, but here’s the thing to keep in mind: Twitter is loaded with debt from the acquisition and needs to pay roughly $1 billion a year on it. In the year of 2021, Twitter made $5 billion in revenue, but didn’t turn a profit. Mike Roberts is a professor at the Wharton Business School. “He owes a bunch of money, and he’s gotta raise money somewhere, somehow. I wonder about the ability of the site to pay the debt.

You don’t necessarily have to give up the money with Tips, because it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.

Because this is the internet and there is forum drama. The blue users get a blue check mark, which looks exactly like the check mark verified users get, but there is no need to verify their identity with the account that has a display name of Nintendo of America. That looks like the real Nintendo account to an unwary user.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. I don’t know if users want to stay in that environment, it is just an environment with new layers of hoaxing and scam. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban is one of the reasons that people stay on the platform.

Roughly half of the company’s revenue would need to come from subscriptions, according to an email sent by Musk to employees. But in the last few days, Twitter Blue, the premium tier for $7.99 a month that Musk has been pushing, has been through tumultuous changes in the short time it’s been live. Just days after the launch, Blue has been suspended, though who knows if that will change in an hour.

And it’s risky debt to boot, B1 rated, which is “on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum,” says Wharton’s Roberts. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” And when Moody’s rated Twitter’s debt, it cited Twitter’s governance — i.e., Elon Musk — as a major driver of risk.

According to an internal memo, one of the world’s biggest ad firms is telling its clients to stop spending on social media sites.

Internal Warnings About Twitter: Elon Musk, Esther Crawford, and the Clumpy Boss-Fragmentation of Blue

As the significance of all this began to register with Musk, he tweeted that satirical accounts must now include “parody” in both their name and bio. But if any of the fallout had come as a shock to Musk and his team, they can’t say they weren’t warned.

It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. And while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, sources said, she declined to implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. (Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.)

The first recommendation from the document was that bad actors should pay to leverage increased amplification to achieve their goals, and that it was P0 to indicate a concern in the highest risk category.

The team found that assassination of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials and other high profile individuals represented another P0 risk. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

On November 1st, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Twitter’s Bland Insider Warnings for Child Sexual Exploitation: The Case of Elon Musk and its Unauthorized Contributor

The team noted that taking the verified badge and related privileges from high profile users unless they pay would be a bad idea, as this would cause them to leave for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. At the moment, it’s unclear how the loss of what may have been thousands of moderators will affect the service. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.

The company is making important changes to their child safety system, and one of their contractors has just been de-hired without notice. Child sexual exploitation material on the platform has been a problem for years, and this is particularly worrisome.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

The Goons: Telling Engineers Not to Publish Code on Platformer, Gmail, and Slack After Musk’s Cuts

Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplaces, and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.

Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as Platformer was first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.

Replied another: “In 2 weeks Twitter has gone from being the most welcoming and healthy workplace I’ve ever known to the most openly hostile and degrading I’ve ever known.”

Employees show their support for one another. Those who have been working on Musk’s orders are referred to as the ‘goons’ by the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers.

This was more than just a code freeze, it was a complete break with previous practices, that enabled engineers to commit code but not deploy it. Since Musk took over, they have been fairly common, and for most of the time. A freeze is done to reduce the chance that a bug will disrupt the system.

This time, however, engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”

On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. I am wondering if there is a ticket I can reference. asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer pushed back on Musk’s criticism, and offered a detailed thread about why Twitter loads more slowly in some places than others. The engineer who commented on the affair said that the man had no idea he was talking about, and Musk fired him at the end of the day.

Digital Media Buys in India: When Twitter Goes Globally and Why It is Not a Risky Place to Buy a Smartphone

The experience in India is not great. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

In India, we have a high concentration of low power phones that perform worse in general as compared to the big boys like iPhones and such.

The code is frozen. Some people think that Musk is paranoid that some disgruntled engineers might sabotage the site on their way out.

On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. A fake account pretending to be Eli Lilly said it would be free of Diabetes Drugs and it took six hours to take it off the internet.

Large digital platforms have professionals who build relationships with advertisers. The value of the ad platform decreases when there is no one at the desk to respond to brands.

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. Adding any commentary or questions will help me raise as many issues as possible.

T-Mobile requested that the campaigns be paused due to brand safety concerns, according to an employee. (Three days later, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded simply “no.”)

GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. They understand that our policies remain in place, but they feel that the ability to scale and manage infractions at fast pace is uncertain at this time.

–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)

Why Twitter Couldn’t Detect Any New Cracks in GroupM, and Why it Could Be Done Like Facebook? Comment on Musk’s Takeover of Twitter

Some people said that two-factor verification stopped working after Musk announced he would start severing up to 80% of the things in his company. They reported that the site slowed down and that they could not download their archives.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.

GroupM works with a number of companies. GroupM has a lot of overlap in its list of clients with the graphic showing how many brands make pretty much everything you buy at the grocery store.

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

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

LarryVincent a professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business said that he had always thought a move to a subscription business would make sense for the micro- media company. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.

An obvious reason for the decline in engagement is the glitchy product, which has puzzled users with its disappearing mentions and shifting priorities, and the fact that random Tweets are appearing from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

It is not certain if capturing the online world’s attention will translate into growth in subscription payments or other revenue.

Why is Elon Musk’s Twitter audience so small? The engineer’s frustration with the Twitter platformer and his right-wing critics

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers decreasing?

According to multiple sources, he said, “This is ridiculous.” “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name because of the harassment that Musk has directed at ex-Twitter employees.

The view count feature is said to be contributing to the decline in engagement and views. The smaller buttons were made more difficult to use, because they couldn’t accommodate the display of views.

He wrote, “Shows how much more alive the medium is than it may seem, as over 90 percent of users read but don’t reply or like.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

How do you go about it at work? Employee perspectives on Twitter, where Slack has gone dormant and how the Landlord sued

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. From my perspective, we usually move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The Landlord of the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter has sued them for nonpayment of rent. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” Employees have to reserve the beds on the eighth floor in advance.

Slack — once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything — has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.”

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)

“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. He needs to learn how to let people know that he does not know things.

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. Most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at the chance to walk away.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

Twitter pauses, wells fargo goes public: protests against the ad-hoc bans on paid advertising on micro-blogging sites

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.

Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands didn’t reply to the request.

The pushback continues. Civil society and civil rights groups renewed calls for companies to join a group of advertisers who have stopped advertising on the micro-blogging site. The latest effort came after a research report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the coalition, raised concerns about ads “appearing next to toxic content” from previously banned accounts.

In his first months in charge, Musk rolled back bans on users who had previously violated Twitter’s rules, including former President Donald Trump. He stopped the enforcement of the Covid-19 misinformation policy after dissolving a third party content oversight group.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html

Tracking Ad Spending of Top Advertisers with a Micro-Messaging Service like Pathmatics (Revised Version)

According to Pathmatics data, many top advertisers have dramatically reduced their ad spending on the platform. In September, they spent over $12 million on ads, but for January, it spent just over $54,000. Warner Bros. Discovery did not respond to a request for comment.

The laid-off engineering manager for monetization, who had reported directly to Musk, wrote on Saturday that he believed they could improve ads in two to three months. I’ve confirmed that Musk gave the aggressive deadline just before Kadluczka and others in the ads, consumer, and sales orgs were laid off last Friday.

How much do you know about what goes on inside of the micro-messaging service? I’d love to chat confidentially. You can reach me via [email protected] or through the contact form on my Linktree. Then we can set up a secure thread on Signal.