Twitter as a Keyhole to What the Future of Social Media Will Look Like Under Musk: A Corrupt Letter to the President and The New York Times
Musk has said previously that he doesn’t intend to stay as CEO of the social media company for the long run, but on Tuesday he said that his ability to lead the company was under scrutiny.
In May, Musk said he would reverse the ban if he became the company’s owner.
But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”
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.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.
Such a move could also have ripple effects across the social media landscape. It was when President Trump was initially banned from the service for inciting the January 6 Capitol riot thatTwitter acted as a model for how the industry handles problematic content.
For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group 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. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
There have been mounting criticism of his chaotic leadership at the company, including recent decisions to suspend journalists, introduce a controversial policy banning the practice of linking out to rival platforms, and fire those who disagreed with him.
That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.
The person urged Musk to hire “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view” to lead enforcement, suggesting “a Blake Masters type.” Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Twitter and its Facebook Exodus: Musk, Agrawal, and the Chinese Super-Apps of Social Media and Payments to Millennials
Allowing Trump to come back could set a precedent for other social networks, including Facebook, which is considering reestablishing the former president when their ban on him expires in January 2023.
Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”
The Washington Post reported last week that Musk told prospective investors that he plans to cut three quarters of Twitter’s 7,500 workers when he becomes owner of the company. The newspaper reported documents and sources familiar with the deliberations.
That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.
The exodus of advertisers will further erode the finances of Twitter and cause CEO Musk to sell more stock to cover the cash hole, according to the firm.
He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.
Advertisers want to know that their ads aren’t going to be seen beside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associated with things that would turn off potential customers.
What exactly he meant is, as always, anyone’s guess. During the summer, Musk told his staff to follow in the footsteps of the Chinese super-app, which combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping and ride-Hailing.
Chinese-style super-APPS haven’t caught on in the United States despite the fact that other American tech companies have tried this.
Twitter CEO Jay Sullivan and his deposition after the Musk-TWilson deal: Insider gossip from employees of the Twitter employee-only section Blind
Within weeks of the acquisition agreement, Musk began raising concerns about the prevalence of fake and fraudulent accounts on the micro-blogging service and ultimately tried to end the deal.
And while Musk now finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to hand over daily control of the company he just purchased to the tune of $44 billion, it could please some of his supporters who wish he would get back to work at Tesla and knock off the distractions.
Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick gave the parties until 5 p.m. on Oct. 28 to close the deal or face a rescheduled trial.
Since Musk suddenly proclaimed he actually wanted to buy Twitter again earlier this month, Twitter’s most internally visible leader has been Jay Sullivan, the general manager of consumer and revenue product. He has been holding regular listening sessions with employees, but on Thursday, shortly after employees received a calendar invite for a “quick informal check in” call with him at 7:35PM ET, the meeting was cancelled “until further notice” without explanation.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. An employee who spoke on condition of anonymity said he had been completely absent for weeks. One person said he had ghosted them. 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.
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. That deposition was probably going to be uncomfortable; a judge found that Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. The deposition was delayed as Musk and Twitter worked towards a deal, and Musk received a court order to stop the proceedings so the deal could close by October 28th.
Musk decided he needed to change the company’s leadership so he asked venture capitalists and friends to work with him. The list includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.
Although they came quickly, the major personnel moves had been widely expected and almost certainly are the first of many major changes the mercurial Tesla CEO will make.
Twitter HQ: Where are the bad guys? An employee complains about Musk’s anti-social actions in the n-day New York Stock Exchange
He used the social media platform to criticize the company’s top lawyer. A wave of harassment of Gadde came 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. She was fired on Thursday and the harassing tweeted lit up 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.”
According to the professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Musk’s position on free speech rights has been changed by the note.
She said that no content moderation is a problem for business because it can lead to the loss of advertisers and subscribers.
“You do not want a place where consumers are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
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!”
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.
Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence said that there’s good reason for Musk to not change his mind and keep his ad business at his current company, because the weak economy and months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover has taken a toll on its revenues.
After putting his site at odds with both The Washington Post and his own supporters, Musk apologized and promised to clean up his act.
TheReliable Sources newsletter had a version of this article. The evolving media landscape is chronicled in the daily digest.
In addition to that, Musk has made the information environment he now controls so chaotic that he is trying to disassemble the little infrastructure that helps people sift through 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. The move will have an impact on the landscape. It will make it difficult for users to distinguish authentic and inauthentic accounts.
The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away the blue checks and the authority they give you upon their profile will be a benefit to some conservatives.
Twitter Disturbs: What Elon and his Team have Learned about Software Engineering in the Space-Time Crisis, As reported by Slack and CNBC
The best thing one can do to save social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking is toauthenticate users, says Musk’s authorized biographer.
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 gathering in private for answers to questions about the latest rumors.
In Slack, one employee shared a note they’d received from Leslie Berland, Twitter’s chief marketing officer. “It’s very destabilizing I know and the press swirl is making everything worse,” Berland wrote. Planning is happening and moving as quickly as possible but it isn’t complete. Two things I wanted to make sure you all saw is that Elon has debunked that he was ever planning a 75% layoff and stated it’s false that he is or was trying to rush a layoff before a Nov. 1 vest. Neither of those things are true.”
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.
The turmoil has divided the company into roughly two camps: those waiting nervously to see whether they still have a job after those cuts land, and those who are frantically working to ship new features under a threat of being fired if they don’t.
One thing that made people nervous was the instruction on Friday afternoon that engineers print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written, as Platformer was the first to report. It was part of a set of measures Musk and his team have undertaken in an effort to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest performing employees as a precursor to layoffs.
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.
Building a Website that’s Going to Work for Your Engineers, Not For Your Favors – Or Are You and I Need to Work at Twitter?
If you are feeling depressed and dismayed right now, just want to know that you are not alone. this sucks.
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 finish two major projects within days or weeks. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. 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.
We’re told that the project generated moderate enthusiasm so far. 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 wrote that he may be asked to ship it asap. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even if you worked on something that interests you, it’s still at least worth the effort.
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.
Do good engineering work is what I want to do now. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know the criteria that requires me to be at Twitter. It is not working on a fancy project. The good culture change is shipping and delivering. I would like you to take more time on coding and shipping and less on strategy, planning and documentation. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. Being impactful and changing product and helping our users is the criteria. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You are in charge.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk
A Twitter Exec, the Chief Marketing Officer, and a Twitter Moderation Council: Comments on Musk, Caldwell, Sullivan, and Jay Sullivan
But Musk’s attention can be unnerving, too. One employee who spoke to us said they had mixed feelings about working on a project Musk is known to be focused on.
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. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Chief Marketing Officer helmed had left the company; on Tuesday evening she took to her social media accounts and post a single blue heart.
Calacanis earlier this week tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He has also tweeted questions to Twitter users about the platform’s subscription and bookmark features.
The new owner is going to establish a new moderation council that will be made up of people with differing viewpoints to help determine the policies of the company. He said that the policies of the platform have not changed yet.
Edward Perez, CEO of Twitter, after his first day at retweet, during 1998, and after his resignation from Apple
In May 1998, I visited Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters to hear his plans for reviving Apple. He was the interim CEO for less than a year after he returned to the company that fired him. Greeting me in the boardroom of his suite at One Infinite Loop, he went to the whiteboard and began scrawling out his solution to the company’s business woes. He had a new product plan, a new product, and a workforce revitalized by an inspiring ad campaign.
Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. The company was five years old when he took over. 17 years after being incorporated, Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around, but it did not post an annual profit until 2020. Musk gets a lot of attention for what he’s accomplished, and for his persistence. Musk’s other company, a private company called SpaceX, does not 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.
Edward Perez was the director of product management at retweet and oversaw the product team focused on civic integrity. Joining the company in September 2021, after more than three decades working in election integrity, Perez’s role was to keep Twitter safe during times of great upheaval—such as elections—from a product perspective. Perez feels that he has to speak out as Musk guts staff and allows users to pay to get a blue check on the platform.
Perez is a board member of the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan group devoted to election security and integrity that is concerned about the drama around corporate takeover taking up all the oxygen in the room. He says that the focus on the Musk psychodrama may result in insufficient attention on these election-related issues.
Musk was silent on the poll’s results. In fact, Musk was off the phone for a long time on Monday. But even if Musk doesn’t immediately honor his own poll, the Tesla CEO will likely only continue to face pressure from the carmaker’s investors to hand the reins to someone else sooner than later. Since his deal to buy social media website Twitter closed, the stock price of the company has gone down as investors worry about his priorities. Musk mused about finding a successor to runTesla, without any obvious progress.
Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.
Now, with his decision-making under fire from the same people who had been his supporters and his handpicked #TwitterFiles journalist ghosting his pleas for a public response, Musk may be ready to put his overpriced toy in someone else’s hands for a little while.
If his time as its CEO ended in the same way as his takeover began, it would be appropriate and timely.
“This has been a black eye moment for Musk and been a big overhang on the stock which continues to suffer in a brutal manner since theTwitter soap opera began with brand degradation of Musk a real issue.”
More than 17 million votes were cast in the informal referendum on the chaos of his leadership of Twitter, which was marked by mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts, and the suspension of journalists who cover him.
Elon Musk’s management of Twitter, including the banning of multiple journalists, has “severely damaged” market sentiment around Tesla, and risks sparking a backlash from advertisers and consumers The analyst warned on Monday.
The decision to ban CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan was one of the reasons why the downgrade was made.
Rusch believes it is time for the majority of consumers to stop supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA if they do not see clear communication in an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk.
Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and Musk: Who would you like to run a tech company? What do they tell us about tech CEOs?
Musk’s lieutenants who have been helping run the company since his takeover are the most obvious candidates for a new CEO. The short list likely includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.
Calacanis, who emerged in the tech world as a reporter during the dot com boom, is an early-stage investor who has backed well-known companies such as Uber and Robinhood. He has also launched several media properties and hosts two podcasts (one in partnership with Sacks).
Calacanis tweeted on Sunday night asking, “Who would like the most miserable job in tech AND media?! It’s not crazy enough to run a social networking site. Calacanis ran his own poll asking followers if Sacks or another person should run the company, separately or together. The majority of people voted for something else.
At least one of Sacks and Musk has experience managing a social network. He sold Yammer to Microsoft for over a billion dollars.
Sacks has been particularly clear in its interpretations of Musks talk points, from trying to stir up anger about the fact that Musk’s private jet was not located in public to justifying a feud with Apple. A user asked Sacks what he and Musk disagreed on and Sacks responded with a word: chess.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/tech/twitter-alternate-ceo/index.html
A Twitter Elephant in the Room: Jared Kushner Observed as a Donald Trump Man During the Super World Cup with Musk
Krishnan may be the most obvious choice of the group. He has direct experience working on the Twitter product, having previously helped manage the teams responsible for features of the platform such as search and the home timeline. He also previously worked on mobile ad products for Snap and Facebook.
He has invested in some of the companies that Musk is currently working on, which might help fulfill his goal of making it more than just a social media app.
Krishnan is probably the least controversial member of Musk’s current leadership team, which could help counteract some of the negative attention the company has received.
Some Twitter users have speculated about other possible leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was spotted watching the World Cup with Musk over the weekend.
Kushner is friendly with the Saudi Royal Family, one of Twitter’s largest investors. Prior to working as an advisor in Trump’s White House, Kushner worked for his family’s real estate development company, and last year he said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. The Weekly New York Observer was previously owned by the person who is now known as Kushner.
Many expected him to address the elephant in the room by now because of his tendency for making rapid decisions after polls. But he didn’t. In fact, Musk spent most of Monday conspicuously quiet, refraining from tweeting for a remarkable 18-hour period.
The majority of users voted to allow Musk to re-instate Donald Trump’s account. He said that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Likewise, when Twitter users voted on another of his polls to provide “general amnesty to suspended accounts,” he went ahead and did it. He also heeded user votes in a poll to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.
While it’s unclear how he would restrict voting to only those who pay for the company’s subscription service, such a change could dramatically reduce the number of Twitter users who could vote in polls. It would also skew those who can vote to the users who are willing to pay up for Twitter Blue, which includes the controversial paid verification feature Musk pushed to introduce. Musk’s Monday tweet immediately prompted comparisons to poll taxes.
Musk forced remaining employees to take a pledge to become “extremely hardcore” in their work, and stopped enforcing Twitter’s policy against Covid-19 misinformation.
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.
On Sunday, it was announced that links to other popular social media sites would no longer be allowed, despite being called free promotion by the new policy.
Others who had backed Musk’s bid for Twitter appeared frustrated at the decision. This is the last straw, says Paul Graham, a venture capitalist. I’m done.
Mr. Musk also openly questioned the quality of anyone applying for the role. Beyond the “foolish” crack in Tuesday’s tweet, he previously wrote, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”