Elon Musk owns Twitter HQ: What can it teach us about the business of Twitter? How did he walk into the company headquarters and announce his resignation?
But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”
Musk is also going to have to contend with potential pressure from regulators, as well as the app store operators at Apple and Google, if he wants to succeed in turning Twitter’s business around. A group of US senators has already called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Musk’s Twitter over potential violations of the company’s 2011 consent decree. And Europe’s Digital Services Act may impose limits on just how free Musk’s “free speech” Twitter can be.
Before we get to Musk’s paywall ambitions. Essentially, he’s told advertisers he wants to de-rank people using Twitter’s free product and make users pay for reach. Your average person won’t pay for reach, but people shilling newsletters, crypto scams, and other annoyances will. That might get Musk the revenue he wants but it also degrades the site and potentially means fewer users stick around, making it more valuable for marketers, and so on and so forth.
“In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences,” he said in the Thursday post. It aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world, that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.
After six months of wrangling, it’s all over: Elon Musk owns Twitter. How did that happen? Several former executives of the company were escorted out of the building and wait for the first updates from their new boss, a billionaire, in control of the company.
The Case for Peter Zatko’s Failure to Publish the Micro-Messaging Service During Musk’s First Year in office
This is a huge story with a lot of fast-moving parts to it. It’s also a story that will likely stretch out over the next few months, maybe even longer. We thought a guide for you, our readers, that can be updated as things continue to unfold, was the best way to give it to you. Because, like Elon, we ❤️ you.
A few days later, Twitter responded the way it always does: your argument is invalid, Twitter hasn’t breached its side of the deal, and so you can’t either.
Musk’s side wanted more time and for the trial to start in February 2023. The social network wanted it to start as soon as possible. The Chancellor said that the trial will last for five days on October 17th. Of course, that assumes the two sides don’t settle, and that remains anyone’s guess.
In early 2022, Peter “Mudge” Zatko was terminated from his position as head of security at the micro-messaging service. He reported in July that Twitter hid security practices, misled regulators about its safety, and failed to accurately estimate the number of bots on its platform. It is very possible that Zatko’s allegations will have a big impact on the world of social media. Congress, for one, has already said it is investigating Zatko’s claims.
The people who have been subpoenaed are some of the most well known in the technology industry, such as Larry Ellison, Jacky Bezos, and many others. The fact that he was the CEO of the company and that he pushed to buy it in the first place are likely to give him plenty of pertinent information.
We wouldn’t normally recommend reading a lengthy legal filing, but it is worth it because of the info it provides about bot measurement procedures. Much of the fighting written to be read by a wide audience has been filled with a lot of spicy legal fighting. It’s a good yarn.
The fate of Twitter after Musk’s departure from Twitter: How worried are your employees? Are you worried about the future of Twitter? An Observation
In his first six months as the leader of the company, Musk reversed ban on users who had previously violated rules, including former President Donald Trump. He stopped enforcement of the Covid-19 misinformation policy and dissolved a third-party content oversight group.
The federal government requires full documentation in writing for any foreseeable risks of “any product or service affecting commerce” when it comes to the consent decree with the social network. Less than two weeks after Musk bought it, he made changes to the social networking site. Do you think there’s full documentation about its risks? It sounds like their lawyers are worried.
Employees said they were frustrated with the lack of a more detailed response. They are worried about the future of the social media platform.
Billions of dollars are on the table from the FTC, over the privacy mistakes dating to before Musk’s ownership. But, the Twitter employee warned colleagues, Twitter could find itself even more legally exposed after the sudden resignation of multiple top Twitter executives charged with fulfilling the company’s FTC obligations, including its chief information security officer and chief privacy officer.
Casey was right in positing that Twitter’s poison pill provisions may not be enough to stop Musk. He thought that Musk would continue to troll the company.
StrengthConsolidating: Less than a week after the acquisition of Twitter, the C-suite appears to have mostly been cleared out through firings and resignations.
Elon Musk Takes Control of Twitter And Immediately-ousts Top Executives: The Case of Agrawal and Musk
The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
The major personnel moves came immediately, and were the first of many changes that the CEO will make.
Text messages reveal that Musk and Agrawal clashed privately before Musk decided to make a bid for the company.
The company’s top lawyer was criticized on the social networking site about the same time. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
“Letting content moderation go a little further is sure to scare advertisers, since they already find brand safety tools to be lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
Yildirim said consumers should not be bombarded with stuff they don’t want to hear about and the platform should take no responsibility.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1132153277/elon-musk-takes-control-of-twitter-and-immediately-ousts-top-executives
The Disruption of Twitter After Musk Takes It To New Level: Post-Newtonian Twitter Discussion with Chairperson Sarah Personette
The New York Stock Exchange halted trading in the shares of the company’s stock before the opening bell Friday because it was expecting it to go private under Musk.
The company’s CEO, Sarah Personette, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday, and seemed 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.
The layoffs began on Friday according to a memo sent to staff. Employees were told in an email Thursday that they would receive a notice about their employment status on Friday.
The data demonstrate the sharp decline of what was once a $4.5 billion advertising business for Twitter. Advertisers began to be concerned about the safety and stability of the platform after Musk took over, given his plans to relax content moderation policies. In early November, Musk said there was a huge drop in revenue.
Jobs’s Road Map to Success: The Case Against Wall Street Impsidy and Musk’s Persistence to Turn Tesla Around
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. He left Apple and founded another computer company with a similar approach to the internet and operating systems. Plus, he was Steve Jobs. He was the one who could turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. The iMac unveiled to me in May would help Apple climb out of the red, but the company’s entry into non-PC devices like the iPod and the iPad became a profit machine. The post-PC future of Apple was not included in Jobs road map in 1998.
Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. 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. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.
The Fed Meeting Report on Stock Markets: Fed Chairman Jerome Powell Caught on the Charges of Inflation and Housing, Labor, and Housing
The story was first published in CNN Business. There was a Bell newsletter before that. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. The audio version of the newsletter can be heard by clicking the link.
What will the Federal Reserve do at its meeting in December? The Fed says that they will use hard economic data to make their next decision, even if analysts can speculate all they want.
That means key housing, labor, and inflation reports will likely have outsized effects on the market as investors speculate about what they might mean for the future of interest rates.
What is happening? No one can move markets like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — with just a few words on Wednesday he crushed investors’ hopes of an interest rate pivot and sent stocks plunging. “We have a ways to go,” said Powell of the Fed’s current hiking regime meant to fight persistent inflation. It is premature to think about pausing in this day and age.
But Powell did add an important caveat. The Fed is likely to slow down those hikes as soon as December. “Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation,” Powell said on Wednesday.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
Premarket Stocks Trading: Precise Measures of the Prices of Products and Services in the U.S. Compared to CPI
The government report is expected to show the economy added another 200,000 positions in October — down from last month, but still a very solid number as demand for employment continues to outpace the supply of labor.
That means more inflation. Businesses need to pay more for their goods and services in order to get employees. The wage growth report will be watched closely by the Fed. Wages increased in September from a year ago.
There is a possible upside: Another jobs report in December is expected ahead of the Fed meeting. If the unemployment rate is historically low, the Fed could be reassured by the reports showing a downward trajectory in employment.
Core CPI prices, which exclude oil and food, rose 0.6% in September month-over-month, matching August’s pace and coming in well above expectations of a 0.4% increase, not a great sign for the Fed. And analysts expect to see another large 0.5% increase in October.
PCE reflects changes in the prices of goods and services purchased by consumers in the United States. The Fed believes the measure is more accurate than CPI because it accounts for a wider range of purchases from a broader range of buyers.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/04/investing/premarket-stocks-trading/index.html
The State of the Housing Market: What’s Happening in the Last Three Years of Interest Rate Adjustment and the Bank of England Deal?
Housing: The housing market has been deeply impacted by the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation, and is one of the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was at a rate of 6.95% last week, up from 3.09 a year ago and leading to a decline in demand.
Powell stated that the housing market was “very overheated” for a couple of years after the P.H. epidemic. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”
The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.
A two year recession is longer than the one that followed the global financial crisis, according to the Bank of England.
Musk has been at the building. He has talked about implementing some big changes as a result of his $44 billion acquisition. Here’s what’s happened so far:
The email said that the company offices would be closed and access to badges revoked so that safety could be ensured.
Several Twitter employees have already filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the layoffs violate the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
If a company has more than 100 employees, it must give 60 days’ written notice if it intends to eliminate 50 jobs or more at a single site of employment.
The Age of Twitter: The Legends, the Peasants and the Millennials: How Successful Are They? A Commentary by Elon Musk on Twitter
The world’s richest man used an expletive to describe what he thought was the current lords and peasants system of social media. He added: “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Many large companies paused their advertising on the platform, including General Mills, which halted its advertising after new owner Musk restored the account of former President Trump and other controversial figures. The platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.
More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January, according to data provided to CNN by digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics, in a striking sign of how far reaching the advertiser exodus has been following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.
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 companies join General Motors, which had previously said it would pause paying for advertising on Twitter while it evaluates the platform’s “new direction.” Toyota previously stated that it was in discussions with key stakeholders and was monitoring the situation on social media.
Ad buying giant Interpublic Group, which works with brands like Coca Cola, recommended to clients to stop advertising on the platform.
That creates a challenge for brands, which are sensitive to the types of content their ads run against, 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.
The pauses also come days ahead of the US midterm elections, as many civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content could spread on the platform and create disruption.
The Twitter Channel Is Not Forgiving: Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue Plan Made a Few Million Dollars, but It Doesn’t Turn a Profit
Musk is attempting to prevent an advertiser exodus. Musk’s team spent Monday “meeting with the marketing and advertising community” in New York, according to Jason Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle.
Some civil rights groups are calling for an advertiser boycott of the platform, citing concerns about the direction under its new owner and reports of hate speech, as a result of the takeover by Musk.
I honestly did not think chaos would engulf Twitter so quickly, but I must admit: this rules. This is so 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.
It isn’t necessarily full of Musk’s fans at this time. That means it’s a much less forgiving environment for Musk. Like, an early subset of Twitter users are Something Awful forum goons — the most prominent of whom is Dril — and they love fucking with people. Plus, Musk’s Twitter Blue plan to devalue verification check marks motivated a bunch of people who didn’t like Musk to go out with a bang by impersonating him, largely because they knew it would make him mad. And it probably did! His first policy change was to make it more difficult to impersonate.
Shenanigans are fun, but it is important to keep in mind that the acquisition of the company is carrying $1 billion in debt and needs to be paid annually. In 2021, the social networking website made $5 billion in revenue, but did not turn a profit. “This isn’t complicated,” says Mike Roberts, a professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “He owes a bunch of money, and he’s gotta raise money somewhere, somehow. What I wonder is about the ability of Twitter to pay this debt.”
Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It takes a cut of revenue from Super Follows, but not as much as Apple takes from in-app purchases.
This is the internet and there is drama in the forums. The blue users have a blue check mark, which looks exactly like the check mark verified users get, but they don’t have to verify their identity, that’s how an account with a display name of “Nintendo of America” managed to put up a photo of Mario. That might be enough to cause brand damage for an unwary user.
Even if the economy were to go through a downturn, I would not think that advertisers would come back to someone with that attitude. The open question to me is if users want to stay in the environment that is just getting a new layer of fraudulent activity. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one of the reasons people stay on the platform.
Roberts says the debt is on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. The appetite for this debt is lower than 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.
In the past week alone, an important social network has laid off half of its workforce; blew up key parts of its product, and launched and un-launched other features to compensate for it; and lost senior executives.
Twitter is out to make money. Musk’s Twitter disappearance a day after the black-box launch of the paid verification feature and its impact on public opinion
The paid subscription service was suspended just two days after its official launch, with the menu option to sign up for the add-on disappear from the app. It wasn’t immediately clear when the offering would be restored.
Hours after the gray badges launched on Wednesday as a way to help users differentiate legitimate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts that had merely paid for a blue check mark, Musk abruptly tweeted that he had “killed” the feature, forcing subordinates to explain the reversal.
“We’re not currently putting an ‘Official’ label on accounts but we are aggressively going after impersonation and deception,” Twitter’s verified support account tweeted on Wednesday evening.
The paid verification feature’s rocky rollout attracted widespread criticism from misinformation experts who had warned it would make identifying trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.
From one businessman to another, for when you have customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.
“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. “Stick with the new Twitter that democratizes every tweet by paid accounts and puts the onus on all users to curate for themselves. You could bring back the 140 characters a person likes on the micro networking site. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is awful.”
GroupM, Twitter, and the ad buy deal: Where are the big guys in Twitter? A response to Musk after Twitter took over Twitter
He downplayed the size of an ad buy, but Musk confirmed on Monday that his company had bought a package to advertise its Starlink internet service on the social network.
GroupM works with many companies. If you’ve ever seen that graphic about how a few brands make pretty much everything you buy at the grocery store, you’ll notice a lot of Venn diagram overlap with GroupM’s list of clients.
GroupM is reportedly concerned about several specific things following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; in a document, it cites the large numbers of Twitter executives leaving or being fired (especially those in charge of safety, security, and compliance), the wave of high-profile impersonations by “verified” users, and also raises concerns about Twitter’s abilities to follow the Federal Trade Commission’s orders. GroupM wants to see things if it wants to get rid of its high risk label, according to a document and a message seen by Platformer. The list includes:
Those requests are not surprising. Companies don’t want to advertise on platforms where their messages are so offensive and distasteful that they can be seen by as many people as possible.
The move to a subscription business is a good one for Twitter, as it is never a great advertising platform, said LarryVincent, associate professor of marketing at USC. 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.
A number of the employees who worked on the campaigns have been laid off, including after another round of exits Monday.
In an article that was published in New York Times last week, former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth wrote that the company could be in dire straits if they did not adhere to the rules of the app store. 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.
There has been a lot of hand-waving from users about moving to other platforms since Musk took over, and several high-profile accounts have announced their exits, including director Shonda Rimes. Musk has claimed that platform usage is at an all-time high, even though there is no clear indication that there has been a broad drop-off in the user base.
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
A journalist ban after a tweet from Musk is reinstated: Elon-going-forbroke behavior in the Washington Post and other social media platforms
“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.
He used this to justify suspending the accounts of journalists who cover the social media site and Musk, among them reporters who work for The New York Times. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll by Musk.
Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.
She cited reports that Musk was threatening some laid off employees with evictions if they talked to the media, and that he was reissuing severance for laid off employees on the same day. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”
The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after posting a message on Twitter tagging Musk and requesting an interview.
In addition to affecting Mastodon, the new policy had also covered links to Facebook, Instagram and Truth Social, and said users may be suspended for displaying their handles for any of those platforms in their Twitter profiles.
A Twitter Star Spikes Again: Red Flags for a Deep Investigation into Musk’s alleged Stalking of the Washington Post and the Mashable News Network
Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, said that technology reporter Drew Harwell was removed from the paper after reporting accurate information about Musk.
CNN said in a statement that it was not surprising that Donie O’ Sullivan had been suspended.
Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.
The Los Angeles Police Department had sent a statement to multiple media outlets regarding the alleged stalking incident, which Musk’s representatives were in contact with.
He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He said he would suppress hate by giving up some accounts of freedom of reach.
She says the new regime has the same problem as the old one, and she doesn’t oppose it in either case.
If the suspension leads to the exodus of highly active media on the platform, then the platform would be changed at a fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, a long time marketing and media executive and former head of global media.
CBS shut down its activity on the platform due to uncertainty about the new management, but media organizations have remained on the platform.
“We all know news breaks on Twitter … and to now go after journalists really saws at the main foundational tent pole of Twitter,” Paskalis said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”
The suspension may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers as they have cut their spending on the platform due to uncertainty about Musk’s direction.
Shortly afterwards, Musk abruptly left a session hosted by a journalist while he was being queried about the reporters’ ousting, causing the Spaces conference chat to go down. Musk later said that Spaces was taken offline to deal with a bug. Late Friday, Spaces returned.
Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. Insider Intelligence said that over the next two years, it is likely to lose 32 million users due to technical issues and the return of banned accounts.
Twitter rival Mastodon has grown eight times its size in a matter of weeks, going from approximately 300,000 users in October to 2.5 million in November, according to a blog post by the platform’s founder, Eugen Rochko.
The Mastodon App Launch Day: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Disruption after Musk’s Tweet Disturbation about his Time at the Large Scale
More than half of the users who responded to the poll said yes when the poll closed on Monday.
In another significant policy change, it has been announced that users will no longer be able to link to platforms like Facebook,Instagram and Mastodon.
Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes with no online survey after he was criticized for his decision to invest in the company.
Musk shut down his private jet’s flight logs on his account on the social networking site, saying he wanted to crack down on certain speech.
A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.
Musk was questioned about his usage of time at other companies while in court. Musk testified in the Court of Chancery over the shareholder’s challenge to his compensation plan.
In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
We are happy to see Mastodon grow into a household name in newsrooms all over the world as we strive to face up to new challenges that arise from rapid growth and increasing demand.
As of Tuesday morning, Mastodon’s app stood at number 8 among free social networking apps on the Google Play Store and at number 11 in the social networking category on Apple’s app store. There are many third-party applications for the Mastodon platform, meaning that it’s a decentralized social network.
What Facebook users have to say about Twitter: A reminder of how centralized platforms can severely limit what you can and cannot say while holding social graph hostage
The Mastodon founder talked in his first remarks since the link ban, and highlighted Musk as the owner and CEO of the popular micro-networking site.
“This is a stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say while holding your social graph hostage,” Rochko wrote.
Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. They did not reply to the request for comment.
Even among the top advertisers that remain, many have dramatically reduced their ad spending on the platform, according to Pathmatics data. HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000. (HBO, which is owned by CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)