Comments on the Musk Deposition and the “Stirtrum” of the S&P Co-investor in General Relativity

Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He announced he’d honor the contract his lawyers negotiated after all just days before the deposition was to take place. A judge found that Musk probably deleted some Signal messages that could have been relevant to the case. Musk received an order stopping the proceedings from happening so the deal could be finalized by October 28th.

Musk updated his Securities and Exchange Commission submission to say that he wouldn’t be a passive stakeholder in the company’s affairs. Gone was the language that he would restrict his holdings to just 14.0 percent of the company. In retrospect, this was the first clue that he may attempt something more impactful than just buying some stock of serving as a board member.

Twitter Insights on Musk’s “Self-Admissed” Bid in the ‘Tote-Up’ Experiment

The trial is scheduled to start on October 17th. “The parties have not filed a stipulation to stay this action, nor has any party moved for a stay,” the Delaware Chancery Court judge overseeing the case, Kathaleen McCormick, wrote on Wednesday as reported by the Wall Street Journal. I continue to push on towards the beginning of our trial on October 17 But given the current negotiations, Bloomberg notes that the trial is “almost certain” to be put on hold.

Since Musk took over Twitter in late October, there has been a constant barrage of erratic decisions and turmoil at the company. Musk has ruled using what seem to be his ever-changing whims, with no checks on his decisions. Nearly all of Twitter’s top executives have either been fired or quit since Musk took the reins.

Many employees of the company noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially began talking about Musk joining the board. One current employee who asked not to be identified said that he had been completely absent for weeks. “He has ghosted us,” said another. According to The vee, both the anonymous message board BLIND and the employee-only section of Slack have similar comments about Argawal.

The people who supported Musk’s bid were upset by the decision. Venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote of the policy, “This is the last straw. I give up.

The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, with the most recent ones getting over 50 million dollars, Insider reports.

The Case of Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Twitter: How the billionaire took over control of a Chinese app after the Supreme Court decision

The Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will decide the liability of Twitter in regards to illegal content.

Musk has mused about using social media to create an app. This is a reference to the Chinese app, which originally started out as a messaging platform but has grown to encompass a wide range of businesses. In June, Musk told employees that they were basically living on the messaging platform in China. “If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.”

After six months of wrangling, it’s all over: Elon Musk owns Twitter. How did that happen? We will cover every detail of how the billionaire is in control of the company and how several former executives were escorted out of the building, while employees waited for the first updates from the new CEO.

An Update on Peter Zatko’s Allegation that Twitter Made a Claimed Approch to the Detection of Bot Traffic

This is a huge story with a lot of fast-moving parts to it. It’s also a story that will likely stretch out over the next few months, maybe even longer. We have put together a guide for you, our readers, that can be updated as things happen. We are like you.

When you asked for it to be thrown out, the way it usually responds is that your argument is invalid, and so on and so forth.

It is said that Zatko supports the allegations that there was a lie made by Musk about the measurement of the amount of bot traffic on the site. All of the accusations were called a false narrative.

Peter “Mudge” Zatko was fired in early 2022 from his position as Twitter’s head of security. In July, he filed a whistleblower report saying Twitter has hidden negligent security practices, misled federal regulators about its safety, and failed to properly estimate the number of bots on its platform. Zatko is a long-tenured and well-respected voice in the hacker and security community, and his allegations are sure to have a huge impact in and out of Twitter. Congress, for one, has already said it is investigating Zatko’s claims.

The tech industry has become who it is because of the subpoenas ahead of the trial. Dorsey was a surprise but seems likely to have plenty of pertinent information, given both his tenure as Twitter CEO and the fact that Dorsey reportedly pushed hard to convince Musk to buy the company in the first place.

We wouldn’t normally tell you that, but reading a 162-page legal filing is worth it. This case has been filled with legal fighting that was written to be read by a wide audience. It’s a good yarn.

Twitter Blue: Could Twitter be the future of Twitter? Musk’s first all-hands meeting with the Cascading Reality of Twitter

Could Twitter Blue be the future of Twitter? Musk thinks so. He believes he can turn Twitter subscriptions into a $10 billion business by 2028, which would be double the entire company’s current revenue. Of course, that also includes huge user growth: Musk estimated Twitter could have 600 million users in 2025 and 931 million in 2028. The company currently has 217 million users.

Musk reassured advertisers that he wasn’t buying the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape” and that he was trying to help humanity.

The first all-hands meeting after Musk went public was weird. After serenading employees with Backstreet Boys and Aretha Franklin, the company said it would continue to evaluate the offer.

Employees told Alex Heath that they were frustrated that there was no more detailed response. They are worried about the future of the social media platform and the possibility of layoffs.

But even a free speech maximalist like Musk needs to convince shareholders that his buyout offer is in their financial self-interest. Otherwise, what are we really doing here?

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.

The poison pill provisions might not be enough to stop Musk. But he also assumed that Musk would just continue to troll the company through his tweets.

Musk Takes Control Of Twitter And Immediately-Oscillates Top Executives: The High-Dimensional Case Of A Black Hole

The deal will not be finalized by a deadline set by a Delaware judge. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.

The changes the CEO will make are likely to be the first of many major changes, although they came quickly.

The text messages that were revealed in court were from April when Musk clashed with Agrawal, before he made a bid for the company.

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. A call for Musk to fire Gadde was among the calls for harassment that included racist and misogynistic attacks. After she was fired, the harassingTwitter lit up once more.

The message appeared to be aimed at addressing concerns among advertisers — Twitter’s chief source of revenue — that Musk’s plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and drive away users.

He said that there’s a possibility that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers.

It’s also a realization that having no moderation is bad for business, so it’s a big deal.

Yildirim said that “you do not want a platform where consumers are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1132153277/elon-musk-takes-control-of-twitter-and-immediately-ousts-top-executives

Twitter Takes It All Back: The Tesla CEO of the New York Stock Exchange Amended by Musk’s Twitter Message to Adversaries

And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

Top sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.

Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.

According to The Washington Post, Musk told potential investors that he would cut 3 quarters of the workers at Twitter when he becomes the company’s owner. The paper cited sources familiar with the deliberations.

Thursday’s note to advertisers shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue, especially a need for Twitter to provide more “relevant ads” — which typically means targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing users’ personal information.

The process has been frightening and disorienting, according to conversations with eight employees today and over the weekend. In the absence of official communications, workers have been hunting for clues in Slack and gathering in private Discords to share the latest rumors.

The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit roughly a quarter of the staff, heavily impacting teams including sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.

Musk told the engineer that he had been fired. Platformer is not releasing the engineer’s name due to the harassment Musk has directed at former microfiche employees.

Musk has brought more than 50 employees from Tesla into Twitter to help with the transition, CNBC reported. One employee we spoke with said they had received a call from a Tesla engineer late at night who quizzed about their team and which engineers at the company are most highly regarded.

What Should I Do Now? Tell Us What You Want to Do, and How to Help Us Make Sense of Changes in Twitter and Slack

since no leadershippy type appears willing or interested in filling the void: if you’re feeling bleak and dismayed right now, just want you to know you’re not alone. This is really bad.

In other Slack channels, employees are sharing contact information in case they suddenly lose access to their communications, another employee told us.

Engineers have been pressed by Musk to complete at least two major projects within days or weeks. The new changes to the service would require users to pay a monthly fee to keep their verification badges. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. Our colleague at The Verge Alex Heath reported that, in the case of changes to Blue, the features must ship by November 7th or the team will be fired.

The project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far, we are told. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to be part of the project after Musk gave it the go-ahead Sunday night.

Other employees are being encouraged to go build something — anything — and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. “At best: you will get some feedback. The director told the person that they should ship it asap. You will be asked to stop and work on other things. At least you did something you love in this case.

Similarly, on Monday, Behnam Rezaei, senior director of software engineering at Twitter, sent a note to his team acknowledging “big changes” were coming. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. Some good and some bad.

So if you ask what should I do now: do good engineering work. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know the criteria for being at the micro-bagging site. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. The good culture change is shipping and delivering. I would encourage you to not spend as much time on planning, documentation, strategy, and coding. Code and ship 5x as usual if you would like to be in a special group this week. Sexy isn’t the criterion for building what Elon thinks is sexy. Being useful and helping users is what’s important to us. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be improved. Do it. You are in charge.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk

Employers are notified via email when their employment is impacted: a CNN investigation into a lawsuit by Manu Cornet in the wake of Musk’s frightening attention

Musk can be frightening with his attention. A worker said they had mixed feelings about working on a project Musk is known to be focused on.

The email that CNN obtained states that if your employment doesn’t change, you’ll receive a notification via email. “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”

Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

One of the plaintiffs named in the suit, Manu Cornet, tweeted their participation: “Was not planning on doing anything like this initially… But… Look, I am going to get my money back.

The WARN Act requires that an employer with more than 100 employees must provide 60 days’ advanced written notice prior to a mass layoff “affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment.”

The California Social Media Company that Defends Elon Musk, the Richest Man in the World, is Sufficient to Labor Laws

“Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has made clear that he believes complying with federal labor laws is ‘trivial,’” Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement to CNN. “We have filed this federal complaint to ensure that Twitter be held accountable to our laws and to prevent Twitter employees from unknowingly signing away their rights.”

The lawsuit was filed in order to make sure employees understand that they have an avenue for seeking their rights, and to remind them that signing away their rights is not a good idea.

The company told employees in a letter that they would find out the day after 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. Many workers on the social media site used blue heart and blue bird emblems to show their support for each other.

Barry C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent have not received any recent such notifications from Twitter.

Meta Platforms Inc., parent of Facebook, recently posted a revenue decline in its second quarter and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Weak earnings reports from both Alphabet and Microsoft caused Meta’s disappointing results.

The platform’s new owner had a warning after some celebrities changed their account names to make them angry in response to Musk’s decision to offer verified accounts for $8 a month.

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. There will be no warning now that it is rolling out widespread verification.

Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a reporter that she used his photo as well.

Not all the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

“Okey-dokey”: A Screen Name Adaptation of Musk’s Twitter Stunt and the New Blue Verification Checkmark

Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. “Okey-dokey.” She said she made her point after she had had fun.

Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. The program was free of charge, with many of the recipients accounting for journalists. “It simply meant your identity was verified. A harder time would be had by scammers.

The service will first be available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. There was no indication when it would be available, and it wasn’t available Sunday. Esther Crawford, who is an employee of the company, told the AP that it is coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.

It’s possible the company could remove current verified users of blue checks, something that hasn’t happened yet, in order to make it harder for people to find information during Tuesday’s elections.

Twitter CEO Yoel Roth: ‘What’s going on at the bank?’ The CEO blames Musk and his “investors”

“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. I appreciate that if you want to do something that you think will improve on something, you can do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”

In a Friday morning email, Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity, sought to allay the concerns. He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.

“The saying ,’if you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem, but if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem’ might apply here,” said Wu, explaining that the investors and other lenders could take over the company if Twitter went through a bankruptcy proceeding, with Musk still serving as its chief executive. Musk would be able to modify his debt in order to make the company more stable.

Investment firm Wedbush Securities said the deal represented “one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history,” pegging Twitter’s fair value at closer to $25 billion.

Adding even more pressure on the company is the mayhem unfolding internally, with the departure of a slew of top executives, some of whom were responsible for things like the safety of the platform and complying with federal regulations.

Monday was the culmination of the leadership of Musk at the company. He is trying to cut costs by cutting the staff and reducing the free offerings.

“In addition to potential financial returns, my sense is that Musk and his co-investors are ideologically driven, that they’re really driven by values,” Wu said.

The core problem at the company is that it has only one way of making money: online advertising.

It’s an unfortunate reality for the company right now, as it’s terrible to be in the online advertising business. The tech industry has been adversely affected by a large decline in ad spending. Facebook owner Meta has laid off 11,000 people. Snap let go of 20% of its staff. Tech companies that rely on ads are feeling the squeeze.

What Elon Musk and the NFL Will Learn from Twitter’s Failure to Cooperate with Arbitration Demands for the Elections: The Case of Tobac and Musk

So far, the program’s launch has had the exact opposite effect. The blue check for sale option is under scrutiny after a number of accounts posing as sports figures, like President Trump, were used to spread deception.

Imagine, Tobac said, if an emergency service account with a blue check was opened by an impersonator and began dispending harmful advice about, say, where to seek shelter during a natural disaster.

She is worried that the country will be confused in the run-up to the election, as the country awaits the final results of several key races.

“Right now, we have people making jokes, impersonating the president, impersonating Nintendo and Elon Musk is laughing at those jokes because he thinks they’re funny right now,” she said. “What’s not going to be funny is someone impersonating an election official and meddling and causing interference within the election results.”

Twitter has not commented publicly on the arbitration demands, but Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer representing hundreds of former Twitter employees, last month made a court filing accusing the company of failing to cooperate with the arbitration process. There was no response to a request for comment from the company, which last year laid off much of its media relations team.

“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee.

After haphazardly establishing a ban on links out that put his site at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, Elon Musk’s doxxing, banning, and moderation outburst ended — predictably — with an apology and a promise it “won’t happen again.”

Musk has been under fire from the people he had supported and from a journalist who ghosted his pleas for a public response.

His $44 billion takeover of the company — that he tried desperately and unsuccessfully to get out of — started with a poll, and it would be both appropriate and timely if his time as its CEO ended the same way.

Musk’s poll asking users whether he should resign as CEO came after a massive backlash to Twitter’s abrupt suspension of several journalists who cover him, as well as Twitter’s decision to ban, and then un-ban, links to other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon, a fast-growing Twitter rival that has octupled in size since October.

Growing criticism of Musk culminated in Sunday’s poll that served as an effective, if unscientific, referendum on Musk’s handling of the company since he closed his purchase of Twitter in late October.

Musk stopped enforcing the policy against Covid-19 misinformation and forced remaining employees to become extremely hardcore in their work.

Over a matter of days, Twitter launched, and then was forced to un-launch, a paid verification feature that was instantly manipulated by satirical accounts impersonating verified major brands, athletes and other public figures on the platform.

Twitter announced a new policy on Sunday that took many users aback: It said tweets including links to other social media sites would no longer be allowed, calling such posts “free promotion.”

After they announced the layoffs, it was necessary to backtrack and keep some staff on payroll for longer. California employees were employed until January 4, to avoid running afoul of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. For another month, former staffers in New York will be employed under state laws. But as those deadlines pass, Twitter’s silence has become deafening.

A third has yet to receive any details of severance, even though they have been chasing Twitter for information since they were fired in November. They were promised details of the package at least twice before the deadline, but each time the deadline passed without any information.

A former employee from the office that was open for less than a week before it was closed has not yet heard from them. The former employee was unsure of what recourse they might have against the company.

Some decided to wait until their official status expired on January 4, others took legal action.

“I think at this point Twitter figured it would cost too much to try to take all these laptops back with nowhere to store them—they haven’t been paying rent in a while you know,” says Frank Meng, a machine-learning engineer in Canada laid off by Twitter in November. He found out only last week from one of the private group chats that returns might at last be happening.

According to Eric Frohnhoefer, he hasn’t heard anything about his Apple MacBook Pro M1 Pro laptop from his former company in order to return it. “It’s still sitting in a closet,” he says. Like the laptops of many remote employees who have been let go or fired by Musk, his was locked up and rendered useless.

The survey seen by WIRED describes badges, authentication tokens, corporate credit cards, company-issued cell phones, and laptop chargers as items that can be returned. According to the form, stands, keyboards, and monitors don’t need to be collected. What ex-workers should do with laptops is not made clear.

A shipping box for returnable items can be sent to an address that is being asked for in the survey.

Within 30 days of submission, instructions and a box would arrive, after three hours of linking to the form, when WIRED wrote to an email address shared by an ex-worker. A laid-off worker says they aren’t rushing to fill it. “Elon can wait.”

Why is Musk’s engagement numbers going down? An engineer’s discussion of his Facebook page and Twitter account at the Y Combinatorics Laboratory

A group of engineers and advisers were brought into a room at the headquarters to look for answers. Why is his engagement numbers going down?

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said that he said this was ridiculous. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. They said Musk was at his peak popularity in the search rankings, indicating by a score of 100. He has a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

The decline in engagement and views may be related to the view count feature. The smaller the buttons, the harder it was to easily tap them.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

The company says that some parts of the site may not be working as expected. There were some consequences of the internal change that we made.

How does Twitter Fire? One employee’s experience on putting out fires at a Slack employer and why Twitter isn’t an open culture

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. The majority of our time is spent putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and improved efficiency without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

One of the employees said that there was times when he was awake late at night and said things that made no sense. We have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person, after he comes to us and says that one person can’t do it on the platform. It doesn’t make sense.

Slack — once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything — has gone dormant. One current employee thought it was 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 few people that are just ass-kissers and brown-nosers that are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists, according to an employee.

The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

Is Twitter Going to Elon? Employees and Platformer Worst Concerned by Musk’s Twitter IPA Outage and Facebook Flavor Failures

“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 must learn where he doesn’t know things and let those that do know take over.

The employee said he doesn’t like to think that he doesn’t know anything about technology. You can not be the smartest person in the room all the time.

With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.

“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 any chance to walk away.

The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. One person says the FTC compliance is concerning.

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple of hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk’s tweets to be made more visible on the timeline than any other user’s, have also roiled the user base.

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. The company decided on February 1st that it will no longer allow free access to the API and that it would stop third-party clients from using it. The company has been working to create an open source platform for developers.

“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. The code stack is very brittle. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

Justine de Caires is a former senior software engineer at the company who was the lead plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit filed after the mass layoffs at the company. “I think we definitely could have had something to learn from Elon.”

The company has only over 500 full-time engineers. It was predicted from the beginning that the losses would make the service more vulnerable to catastrophic outages.

This opened the way for a single engineer to be on a project that was linked to many critical systems that both users and employees depended on.

When he left, he didn’t… but he did. He was there to help me deal with the uncertainty of the tech work market

Bim Ali was working as a program manager for the Redbird core technology team when Musk took over that company. During the months of intense uncertainty that followed, Ali stuck with the company, attempting to tune out the deluge of news about the on-again, off-again deal to focus on her health and the health of her child.

Ali said that he loved his team and that he loved contributing. She said that leaving was not made sense because that maternity leave might not be assured as a new hire at a different company.

Many workers claim they were promised more generous packages, but they never materialized. While some have quickly found jobs, others have struggled with a tech job market that’s at its bleakest point in recent memory. In some cases, employees are balancing the uncertainty of unemployment with health problems and other family obligations, as well as maternity leave or parental leave, according to former employees who have spoken to CNN.

“We were on the Twitter-coaster, the Elon Musk chapter, for seven months. And during that time, he was in, he was out, it was happening, it wasn’t happening.”

“I wasn’t a software engineer or an executive,” said Michele Armstrong, a former senior audio video engineer, who was laid off seven months after joining the company. “I made a decent wage in San Francisco, but if I don’t find another job, I will have to move out of my apartment because I was paid just enough to live in San Francisco … but I wasn’t one of the people that could sock away a bunch of money.”

The day news broke that Musk had agreed to buy the company, she was in the first phase of training for her new job. “It was very welcoming,” Armstrong said of the company. “I was respected, and I hadn’t had that anywhere else working in tech.”

“I thought, well then, I don’t have anything to worry about because I’m a significant contributor,” Armstrong said, who added that she had previously considered starting to look for another job but “then he said that and it kind of changed my mind.”

“The market is hot garbage right now. I was sitting down earlier this week after being rejected a bunch of times, and I felt like I could go be a firefighter or something.

Like Ali, some employees said that even if they’d wanted to leave, it simply didn’t feel like an option for personal reasons. Many workers were interested in working for Musk despite his reputation as a controversial figure on the social media platform.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/tech/elon-musk-twitter-employees-year-of-uncertainty/index.html

Arbitration and Loss: What Do We Have to Learn From Twitter Workers? Rejoinder about De Caires and the Global Social Movement Against Arbitration

It’s not easy to get rid of half of your compensation which is comprised of equity vest, but De Caires said losing part of your package meant getting less money. They and other workers are now hoping to recoup those alleged losses through their arbitration claims.

Ali said a lot of them put in a lot of effort because they love the company. There were some excellent workers atTwitter, we were part of a global movement to tell everyone what is happening, how it is affecting you, and how it is affecting you globally. And I think that we all should be compensated fairly for what we’ve done.”