Trump and the Musk Deal: When Should the Musk and Sundaram Men Go Together? An Analysis of Musk’s Tweet, Zatko, Skinner and Other Disturbing Cases
Musk and his team tried to use Zatko’s revelations about Twitter this as a chance to maybe, actually get out of the deal. His lawyers filed a new Termination Letter with the SEC on August 29th, noting that Zatko’s testimony was evidence that the parties misled Musk in the merger agreement. Musk claims that there is a false claim in the merger agreement. We haven’t broken any of the agreements we’ve had, said the company.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. At a rally in July, Musk responded by writing “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.”
The people wouldn’t say if all the paperwork for the deal, originally valued at $44 billion, had been signed or if the deal has closed. They said Musk is in charge of the social media platform and has fired three people. Two people wanted to be anonymous because of the nature of the deal.
The same amount that Mr Musk offered in April is now the $44 billion deal, and that may cost more for banks like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America that are putting big money into it.
It is time to talk about the loans. The banks that helped facilitate the deal are currently holding the debt since they usually try to find buyers for the debt. But Musk’s lawsuit and delayed closing made that harder, and they’re stuck with the loans on their balance sheets. When they got into this situation, interest rates were lower. By the time the deal closed, though, the appetite for debt had changed, says Anant Sundaram, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
Professional utility is one of the reasons that I am at the site. The same way a slot machine hooks someone in a way, the same is true of the micro-blogging site. Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Skinner found that rats and pigeons were good at generating compulsive behavior because of unpredictable rewards.
According to the author of a book about gambling machine design, that is what they have said about creating a Skinner box. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. One reason people can self-destruct on the site is that they can’t stay away.
In the morning, Musk was on stage in VA with Chris Anderson for a well timed interview, just hours after he announced his attempt to buy twitter. During the conversation, Musk talked about his obsession with the truth and how he wanted to protect free speech and democracy.
He told employees at an all-staff meeting that his platform should allow all legal speech, and that when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bullshit, free speech matters most.
The Supreme Court is going to take up two cases in order to determine whether or not the social media company is responsible for illegal content.
For a “keyhole view” of what Musk will look like, just look at alternative platforms that promise less restrictions on speech, said the president of Media Matters for America.
On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. There are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse there.
After joining the company’s board he changed his mind and said that he wanted to end permanent bans, except for those that explicitly advocate violence.
Alex Jones was kicked off of the internet for abusive behavior in 2018, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, had her account suspended for making false claims about vaccine safety.
The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by President Trump and is also the author of a book about the 2020 election, has stated that the election was fraudulent.
Facebook, Twitter and the Trump Re-Roam: Trump’s First Tweets in the Era of Digital Marketing and the Challenges of Social Media
Allowing Trump and others to return could set a precedent for other social networks, including Meta-owned Facebook, which is considering whether to reinstate the former president when its own ban on him expires in January 2023.
Musk’s texts show that a friendly relationship was shattered by the fact that he did not like the way Agrawal was writing about the platform, and that he wanted to make it better.
Musk tweeted late Friday that there was no choice but to cut jobs “when the company is losing over $4M/day.” He did not provide details on the daily losses at Twitter and said employees who lost their jobs were offered three months’ pay as severance.
The billionaire has complained about the costs of the company and implied it is overstaffed for its size.
He doesn’t have a choice but to look for alternate sources of revenue since the digital ad market is weak and he wants to make changes to content moderation.
That creates a challenge for brands, which are sensitive to the types of content their ads run against, and that is 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.
Nobody knows what he meant or how he actually meant it. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.
Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.
Twitter: Where Should We Go? When Should We Leave Twitter? When Musk and the SEC Decide to Close the Twitter Ad-Hoc Deal?
In a letter posted to Twitter
(TWTR), Musk said he doesn’t want the platform to become a “free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences,” despite his stated promise to rethink on its content moderation policies and bolster “free speech.”
He said in the Thursday post that he wanted his platform to be warm and welcoming to everyone and that he was able to choose his own experience. We want to build something extraordinary together so we should aspire to be the most respected advertising platform in the world.
Yoel, the Head of Safety and Integrity, has remained at the company. He has encouraged users to follow him on the social media site for the most accurate understanding of what is happening with trust and safety.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an ad buying agency has already gotten requests from a few clients to stop their ads on the social networking site if Musk restores the account.
Musk also reiterated in the letter a lofty earlier statement he had made that the Twitter acquisition is not meant to be a money-making venture for him.
Musk told the SEC he would not be an active participant in the company’s affairs after declining a seat on its board. 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.
Legal experts believed that the deal would be enforced in court. Two weeks before the contentious legal battle was set to go to trial, Musk said he would follow through with the deal on its original terms after all. As the parties negotiated, Musk’s attorneys asked a judge to stay the legal proceedings, prompting pushback from Twitter, which feared that Musk might not stay true to his promise to close the deal.
The parties were given until October 28 to complete the deal or face a new trial.
Elon Musk owns Twitter, and he owns Blind, too: Six months of wrangling over Twitter after the $44 billion merger
“The long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” he said on Tesla’s earnings conference call last week.
Musk is at the headquarters ofTwitter. He talked about implementing some big changes after the $44 billion acquisition. Here’s what’s happened so far:
After the two of them started talking about Musk joining the board, Musk soured on Parag Argawal, who is their current CEO. One current employee who spoke with anonymity said that he had been completely absent for weeks. “He has ghosted us,” said another. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.
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.
After six months of wrangling, it’s all over: Elon Musk owns Twitter. How did that happen? We will lay out every aspect of it and how the billionaire is now controlling the company, with several former executives suddenly escorted out of the building and employees waiting for the first update from their new CEO, who has not yet been named.
Timing the Buyout of Twitter: Peter Zatko’s alleged misdemeanors will come out louder than expected
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. So we thought we’d put together a guide for you, our readers, that can be updated as things continue to unfold. 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.
Peter Zatko was fired from his position as head of security at the beginning of the new century. 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. It’s safe to say that Zatko’s allegations are sure to make a big impact in and out of the social networking site. Congress, for one, has already said it is investigating Zatko’s claims.
The subpoenas ahead of the trial have become a who’s who of the tech industry, including Dorsey, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Tesla, Keith Rabois, and many others. It was surprising but seems likely to have a lot of pertinent information since he was the CEO of the company when it was bought by Musk.
Musk’s side wanted more time and for the trial to start in February 2023. It was important for it to start as soon as possible. The trial will last five days and start on October 17th, according to the Chancellor. Of course, that makes sense if the sides don’t get along, but that is anyone’s guess.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23026874/elon-musk-twitter-buyout-news-updates
The Case for Cashing Blue Checks’ Checks: A Post by Musk on Twitter and a New Insight from the Public Sector
We wouldn’t normally tell you it’s worth reading a 162-page legal filing that gets deep into the weeds of bot measurement procedures. A lot of the legal fighting in the case was clearly written to be read by a wide audience. It is a good yarn.
Cashing blue checks’ checks: Musk on Tuesday said he planned to charge $8 a month for Twitter’s subscription service, called “Twitter Blue,” with the promise to let anyone pay to receive a coveted blue check mark to verify their account. His original plan to charge users 19 cents a month to get a verified account has been changed to $18 a month.
Employees told The Verge’s Alex Heath they were frustrated by the lack of a more detailed response. They’re concerned about layoffs and the future of the social media platform.
Casey was right in positing that Twitter’s poison pill provisions may not be enough to stop Musk. But he also assumed that Musk would just continue to troll the company through his tweets.
The major personnel moves came quickly, and most of the changes that will come will be the first of many decisions the unpredictable CEO will make.
Changing the Twitter Landscape: A Comment on Twitter Harassment, Public Policy and Safety, and the Decline of Social Media Under Musk
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. There was a wave of harassment of Gadde from other 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, “Social media is currently in danger of changing into far right and left wing echo chambers, which will cause more hate and divide our society.”
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
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.
If Musk’s enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters was any indicator, the building should be turned into a homeless shelter because few employees actually worked there.
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.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The daily digest will cover the evolving media landscape.
Musk has destroyed the environment in which he now reigns over, and he is also trying to dismantle the little infrastructure that helps users navigate the daily chaos. Recent news reports, including from CNN, indicate that he plans to strip public figures and institutions of their blue verified badges if they do not pay.
Charging for verified badges might appear at first glance as a business story. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has derided the term blue checks, which they see as representation of snobbery in the conversation, even though there are other conservatives who also have blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.
Twitter Exec: Why Isaacson & Jay Sullivan Didn’t Tweet about Twitter (Invited by Markovian Musk)
WalterIsaacson, Musk’s authorized biographer, said on his website that the best thing one could do was to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking.
Nick Caldwell, general manager of core technology, has changed his Twitter bio to “former Twitter Exec,” and Jay Sullivan, general manager of consumer and revenue products, removed the company and his title from his Twitter bio. There was a report Tuesday that the Chief Marketing Officer had left the company and on Tuesday night she replied to a question with a single blue heart.
There are unconfirmed stories on the internet that Musk has brought in David Sack, an investment firm partner, to help manage the company and come up with new products.
Calacanis earlier this week had a meeting in New York with the marketing and advertising community. There are multiple questions about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features that he has sent to users.
The new owner of the micro networking site plans to create a new moderation council, consisting of people who disagree with him, to figure out how they might change their policies. He has said that the platform’s policies have not changed.
What did Musk have to do to turn Apple around? How he did, and what did he do next-generation computers? An essay by Steve Jobs
Jobs had been developing computers for 20 years, his whole 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 started another computer company, with a forward- thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems, after leaving Apple. He was the same as Steve Jobs. The near bankrupt computer giant would be turned around quickly by him. It took months for him to come up with a plan. When Apple unveiled its iMac to me in May, it was seen as helping the company return to profitability, but it wasn’t until the introduction of non-PC devices like the iPod that it grew into 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. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. After seventeen years, Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around, but it did not post an annual profit. Musk gets a fair amount of credit for what he’s achieved, as well as 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.
Before the Bell: The Fed Opens a Pandora’s Box in Stock Market Predictors’ Prospects for Inflation and Economic Activity
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Didn’t you say you weren’t a subscriber? You can sign up here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
The Federal Reserve is holding a meeting in December. Fed officials say they will be using hard economic data to make their next decision and that analysts can speculate all they want.
The housing, labor and inflation reports will have an outsized affect on the market as investors speculate on what may be the future of interest rates.
What’s happening: No one can change the markets like Federal Reserve Chair Powell, who in just a few words sent stocks plunging and undermined investors hopes of an interest rate pivot. Powell said the Fed had a ways to go in fighting inflation. “It’s very premature, in my view, to think about or be talking about pausing.”
But Powell did add an important caveat. The pace of those hikes could be slowed down by the Fed in 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
The October Employment and Inflation Results from the Prudential Commission on the Second Half of the Millennium (Phase Report)
The October employment report is anticipated to show that the economy added another 200,000 jobs, but at a slower pace than last month.
That means more inflation. Businesses have to pay higher wages to attract employees and they can charge more for goods and services. The hourly wage growth will be looked at by the Fed. Wages rose 5% in September.
The December jobs report is expected to be positive ahead of the Fed meeting. Fed officials would be happy if the unemployment rate remains historically low, even if the report shows a downward trajectory in employment.
The core inflation rate, which excludes food and oil, rose 4.6% in September, much higher than expectations of a 0.4% increase, and it matched the previous month’s pace. Analysts think there will be a small 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 Bank of England and the Fed: An Efficient Predictor of the Growth Rate and Inflation After the First Three Years of the Fed Fickle Housing Crisis
The housing market has been severely impacted by the Fed’s fight to fight inflation, and is among the first areas of the economy to show signs of cooling.
Increased borrowing costs have led to a decline in demand for 30 year fixed-rate mortgages, which averaged 6.93% last week, up from 3 percent a year ago.
“The housing market was very overheated for the couple of years after the pandemic as demand increased and rates were low,” said Powell on Wednesday. “We do understand that that’s really where a very big effect of our policies is.”
The Bank of England raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Thursday, the biggest hike in 33 years, as it attempts to fight soaring inflation.
But the bank also issued a stark warning. It said that economic output is already contracting and that it expects a recession to continue through the first half of 2024 “as high energy prices and materially tighter financial conditions weigh on spending.”
The email added that “to help ensure the safety” of employees and Twitter’s systems, the company’s offices “will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended.”
The layoffs of many staff on Friday will be considered a key factor in their thinking by organizations including the ADL, Color of Change, Free Press and GLAAD.
The WARN Act requires any company with over 100 employees to give 60 days’ written notice if it intends to cut 50 jobs or more at a “single site of employment.”
Twitter: Forgiving the people, not punishing the rich with a blue checkmark: Musk discusses a recent decision to stop advertising on Twitter
In a tweet, the world’s richest man used an expletive to describe his assessment of “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark.” He added: “Power to the people! Blue costs $8/month.
The comments came just hours after General Mills and the Volkswagen Group said that they are pausing advertising on the micro-blogging site in order to be certain about the future of the platform under new ownership.
After the advertising announcements were made, Musk claimed that there had been a massive decrease in revenue at the micro-publishing company.
The Volkswagen Group said it had asked its brands to refrain from paid activities on the platform until further notice.
General GM suspended paying for advertisements onTwitter while it evaluated 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.
Ad buying giant Interpublic Group recommended to its clients that they stop advertising on the platform.
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.
In the meantime, Musk is working to stave off a possible 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.
Twitter, however, is an acquisition and is not necessarily full of Musk fans. 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. The Musk plan to make verification check marks less valuable motivated people to impersonate him, because they knew it would make him angry. And it probably did! Certainly, that would explain why his very first policy change was to increase punishment for impersonation.
Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a reporter that she used his profile photo as well.
“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? She made a joke about it on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform she set up last week.
Twitter Blue: Mario Flipping the Bird, or Why Nintendo of America Becomes a Nintendo Account isn’t Going to Go Live
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.” I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.
Well, because this is the internet and there is drama in the forums. Blue users get a blue check mark, which looks exactly like the check mark verified users get — but Twitter Blue customers don’t have to verify their identity, which is how an account with a blue check mark and the display name “Nintendo of America” managed to put up a tweet of Mario flipping the bird. To a user that might look like Nintendo account to do brand damage.
The first place where the service would be available would be the United States, Canada, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford, a spokeswoman for the company, told The AP that it is coming soon but it hasn’t launched yet.
Like Griffin, some Twitter users have already begun migrating from the platform — Counter Social is another popular alternative — following layoffs that began Friday that reportedly affected about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification could create a disinformation free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.
On Friday, Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity at the micro-Blogging site, sought to alleviate such concerns. The group least affected by the layoffs was the front-line content moderation staff.
Tiny Talk Town Comes from Your Mind: Quiet Quitting Is Not a Conceptual Thing to Make Twitter Work for You
“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.
Quiet quitting is not agreeing to work overtime in a way that doesn’t benefit your employer but still depletes your own feelings of self worth. It’s about not giving too much to the platform than people can expect to get back. If you want to stick around on this new Twitter—whatever it may become—you need to find a way to use it without it using you.
A small group of people are responsible for running a microblogging site. According to internal research, heavy users who are using English generate 90 percent of all the revenue from their account and account for less than 10 percent of monthly users.
It would be easy for a person who follows a lot of people on the social network and uses a lot of blue checks to make a mistake with his own experience. (Same goes for journalists.) Almost half of the users on the social media network don’t reply to their original posts, and most of their replies aren’t original posts at all. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They are called lurkers.
When people were stuck at home and unable to find any information on social media during the early days of the Covid epidemic, lynching wasn’t a practice but a phrase. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Then disengage. It is important to keep an eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. It’s better to save your most original thoughts for another time.
One way to free up cash is to fire lots of people. The problem with doing that, though, is that you lose a bunch of the engineers who could build cool shit to make Twitter more attractive. This is maybe not a major problem, as all tech companies are cutting people loose right now, so Musk can hire new talent on the cheap if he has to.
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 bit of the revenue from Super Follows to make TWo a subscription service, but Apple makes more money from in-app purchases.
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. It is a question that needs to be asked if users want to stay in that environment. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.
Roberts says that B1 is on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. “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.