Elon Musk (yet another authoritarian)

[Farfromgeneva]

That one ^ was pure Peter Brown stuff. Nicely done Elon.

He is, after all, Petey Brown.

No matter how many times he denies this - His lexicon and style make it a no-brainer

The real question is will original Petey return after his sentence is up Thursday? Or will we all have to endure Petey-in-stereo

Thank goodness for the IGNORE (FOE) function.

I’m begging for the free for all here so I can let my inner monster loose on folks like this. You guys haven’t seen nothin out of me yet.

[Farfromgeneva]

The whole thing's been a dumpster fire. Letting go key staff, having to try and hire some back, parts of the platform having technical issues, insulting and calling out staff via twitter when they were the ones in the right. Ruling via tweet. Good thing we don't let politicians do that...

Now that money has a cost again, for the first time since a 35yr old was in college, we’re going to see the difference between a professional manager and a guy with an idea since Silicon value abrogated every fiduciary responsibility then ever had over the last decade.

This is going to show you a public market premium for Musk, Tesla, cough cough, is a major mistake.

[Farfromgeneva]

The great manager speaks, well, posts a link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rmination/

Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees Wednesday morning: Commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.

Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form.

Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday was told they would receive three months of severance pay, the message said.

In the midnight email, which was shared with The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

The pledge email, paired with a new policy mandating a return to the office, is expected to lead to even more attrition at a company whose staff Musk had already reduced by half.

Layoff spree in Silicon Valley spells end of an era for Big Tech

It also comes as Musk says he is tabling Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over as Twitter’s owner and CEO, while the company sorts out issues with the feature following a botched rollout.

A week ago, Twitter debuted the product, which gives users a blue check-mark icon next to their name for a fee of $7.99 a month, and promises to reduce the number of ads they see by half as well as giving their posts additional visibility. By Friday, the option disappeared amid a rash of fake accounts impersonating everyone from President Biden to basketball star LeBron James.

Elon Musk acquires Twitter and fires top executives

Sign-ups were paused Thursday night and the service wouldn’t “relaunch” until Nov. 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid,” Musk announced via a tweet late Tuesday.

But inside Twitter, staff were using the additional two weeks to conduct a postmortem on the launch, trying to understand why the impersonations spiraled out of control, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The launch — and its backtrack — was the culmination of a whirlwind couple weeks of ownership for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion late last month. People familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, as well as internal and externally compiled data reviewed by The Post, showed the new service failed to gain much traction during its brief stint — skewing toward just a few niche communities and threatening Twitter’s core advertising revenue.

Power users are most likely to subscribe, but they are also the company’s primary advertising base — a key driver of revenue. Twitter would need to charge $44 a month to recoup the advertising value generated by the top segment of U.S. power users if it relied only on subscriptions, according to an internal document reviewed by The Post. The more active the user, the higher the subscription price would need to be, according to the documents — which warned of the opportunity cost of cutting ads and high subscription prices needed if Twitter were to make up for the revenue generated by ad-consuming power users.

Meanwhile, those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation and users hawking adult content such as pornography, a review of Twitter data compiled by a software developer showed.

About 150,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue — which encompasses Blue Verified — at the time of the pause, according to one of the people with knowledge of internal matters, a figure corroborated by internal data on tweets from Verified accounts and an external analysis. That’s just 0.06 percent of the roughly 250 million people estimated to use Twitter each day.

That subscriber figure would bring in only $14.4 million annually in revenue — while threatening the ad revenue generated from super users who pay for Twitter Blue who will see fewer advertisements, a trade-off that was warned about in the internal document predating Musk’s takeover.

Musk has tweeted that new subscribers would see “Half as many ads.”

Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment on the Twitter Blue developments.

Musk purchased the site late last month and has since ousted Twitter’s leadership, made himself CEO and laid off half the workforce. He now needs to find ways to drive new revenue sources, as Twitter is expected to owe roughly $1 billion in annual interest — plus recoup the investments of Musk’s many equity partners.

Already advertisers are proving wary, something exacerbated last month when Musk tweeted a conspiracy-laden article about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi. The Blue Verified debacle, where some major brands were impersonated, only added to their concerns.

The Post reported this week that a fake tweet using the name and logo of Eli Lilly may have cost Twitter millions, after the pharmaceutical giant paused ad spending on the site. Other companies including General Motors, Volkswagen and General Mills said they were pausing advertising after Musk took over — some brands acting in conjunction with calls from civil rights groups to do so.

While trying to appease advertisers, Musk has also turned his focus to subscription models and potential paywalls.

Twitter Blue — which previously allowed users to edit tweets, among other features — had around 100,000 subscribers before the new launch including paid verification, according to the website Platformer.

Twitter earned about 79 percent of its U.S. ad revenue from just 10 percent of its most valuable users, according to the internal document reviewed by The Post. Its top 1 percent of U.S. users — who are in turn the ones most likely to shell out $8 — earn the service more than $40 each month in revenue, the document shows.

Twitter’s paid verification service is here. What you need to know.

Only a smidgen of the 150,000 Twitter Blue subscribers are fake or joke accounts, according to data compiled from Twitter’s public data feed for software developers. A large portion of the most-followed accounts that got “verified” via Twitter Blue, according to the data reviewed by The Post, are from a few specific subcommunities on Twitter: pornography, cryptocurrency advocates and overseas accounts, particularly from the Middle East.

The data was compiled by Berlin software developer Travis Brown and reviewed and verified by The Post.

According to the data, most of the members of a list of some 135,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were ordinary users with a few hundred followers who had been on the site for more than six years. (It’s not clear how many had subscribed to the earlier, pre-Musk iteration of the Twitter Blue program.)

Twitter, unlike many other social networks, allows sexually explicit imagery. Many of the adult performers on Twitter use the site as the top of their marketing funnel to attract new paying customers, with their Twitter display names advertising the price of a subscription on other paid sites such as OnlyFans where they show their content.

Twitter is rushing to launch a paid video feature that could let their customers pay on Twitter instead of elsewhere, The Post reported earlier this month — though the site’s internal watchdog flagged the product as “high risk.” A previous adult-content-focused subscription service product was shelved, before Musk’s ownership of Twitter, after the company realized it could not guarantee it wasn’t monetizing child sexual abuse material, Platformer reported in August.

Nearly 10 percent of overall Twitter Blue subscribers talk about cryptocurrency on their profile pages, including popular crypto news and accounts that promote crypto investments that they predict will rise, according to The Post’s review.

One major group of new Twitter Blue subscribers are right-wing influencers. Some 150 accounts that disproportionately interact with at least five prominent right-wing influencers signed up to gain verification this way."

Maybe you can provide guidance here. Does new ownership allow contract, or employment at will, to change with a change of control?

Years ago my firm lost a couple of guys who took business with them. Boutique firm with like 60-80 employees and $25-$30mm in rev, the founder “CEO” (because he had no functional or even managerial value way before getting to that point) send around NDA/non competes a few days later. Didn’t offer anything in exchange but two months severance for a 12mo gardening leave-totally moronic. But I’m one of the last ones to sign because I don’t feel like giving up rights where towhees walked and got paid to walk cleanly by new employees, I didn’t agree to this 3yrs prior when I joined and viewed the change as material to my being there (“never trust a dude or his business when they say “we’re a family business”-code for we do what we want and pretend to follow standard protocols within the labor marketplace but not really, we just chase revenues) and he calls me into his office with a stack of f**king signed docs, all but 5-6 including mine and lays it on. I extracted a little bit more but was wildly offended and felt like the type of duress that would invalidate any contract as not if free will. Never was an issue after I left but never forgave the guy for that and for claiming they had been working on doing this for months before it went down with the employees-total bs and offensive personally.

Anecdote is slightly different than Musk move but my point is doesn't an employee have to offer something in exchange for extracting a pound of flesh post commencement of employment? I mean I was making around [ $200 > xxx < $500 ] at the time and it was bonus heavy but consistent in a range based on unit P&L, like 2.5-3:1, so that really poisoned the well for me going forward and had attorney friends tell me it was bull**it.

[youthathletics]

The whole thing's been a dumpster fire. Letting go key staff, having to try and hire some back, parts of the platform having technical issues, insulting and calling out staff via twitter when they were the ones in the right. Ruling via tweet. Good thing we don't let politicians do that...

Notice that the folk on the forums who insisted that Musk would bring "free speech" to twitter....and we all pointed out nope, that's not going to happen......are gone....

who said that?

It’s a public square

Ah, TLD remembers.....the exchange you and I had a few months ago, YA. Do you? Remember how I told you that this whole thing is about $$$$, and your'e nuts if you think that twitter pre or post Elon has a single thing to do with free speech, or being "a town square".

But I was mostly referring to Pete.

Well....duh, who doesn't understand that money is job #1 in a business. That's like saying I told you that you needed air to breath. And yet both can be true....you can make money while still providing a service that aligns with the vision of your acquired product. The guy has been in the owners chair for less than a month, and people are running around with hair on fire that it's not perfect as he claimed....


As of midnight last evening...seems Twitter 2.0 is locked in. We'll see what happens next....and god forbid he makes money and changes things to make it more like his vision.
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status ... I4fs30ABDQ

[wgdsr]

The great manager speaks, well, posts a link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rmination/

Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees Wednesday morning: Commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.

Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form.

Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday was told they would receive three months of severance pay, the message said.

In the midnight email, which was shared with The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

The pledge email, paired with a new policy mandating a return to the office, is expected to lead to even more attrition at a company whose staff Musk had already reduced by half.

Layoff spree in Silicon Valley spells end of an era for Big Tech

It also comes as Musk says he is tabling Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over as Twitter’s owner and CEO, while the company sorts out issues with the feature following a botched rollout.

A week ago, Twitter debuted the product, which gives users a blue check-mark icon next to their name for a fee of $7.99 a month, and promises to reduce the number of ads they see by half as well as giving their posts additional visibility. By Friday, the option disappeared amid a rash of fake accounts impersonating everyone from President Biden to basketball star LeBron James.

Elon Musk acquires Twitter and fires top executives

Sign-ups were paused Thursday night and the service wouldn’t “relaunch” until Nov. 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid,” Musk announced via a tweet late Tuesday.

But inside Twitter, staff were using the additional two weeks to conduct a postmortem on the launch, trying to understand why the impersonations spiraled out of control, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The launch — and its backtrack — was the culmination of a whirlwind couple weeks of ownership for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion late last month. People familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, as well as internal and externally compiled data reviewed by The Post, showed the new service failed to gain much traction during its brief stint — skewing toward just a few niche communities and threatening Twitter’s core advertising revenue.

Power users are most likely to subscribe, but they are also the company’s primary advertising base — a key driver of revenue. Twitter would need to charge $44 a month to recoup the advertising value generated by the top segment of U.S. power users if it relied only on subscriptions, according to an internal document reviewed by The Post. The more active the user, the higher the subscription price would need to be, according to the documents — which warned of the opportunity cost of cutting ads and high subscription prices needed if Twitter were to make up for the revenue generated by ad-consuming power users.

Meanwhile, those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation and users hawking adult content such as pornography, a review of Twitter data compiled by a software developer showed.

About 150,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue — which encompasses Blue Verified — at the time of the pause, according to one of the people with knowledge of internal matters, a figure corroborated by internal data on tweets from Verified accounts and an external analysis. That’s just 0.06 percent of the roughly 250 million people estimated to use Twitter each day.

That subscriber figure would bring in only $14.4 million annually in revenue — while threatening the ad revenue generated from super users who pay for Twitter Blue who will see fewer advertisements, a trade-off that was warned about in the internal document predating Musk’s takeover.

Musk has tweeted that new subscribers would see “Half as many ads.”

Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment on the Twitter Blue developments.

Musk purchased the site late last month and has since ousted Twitter’s leadership, made himself CEO and laid off half the workforce. He now needs to find ways to drive new revenue sources, as Twitter is expected to owe roughly $1 billion in annual interest — plus recoup the investments of Musk’s many equity partners.

Already advertisers are proving wary, something exacerbated last month when Musk tweeted a conspiracy-laden article about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi. The Blue Verified debacle, where some major brands were impersonated, only added to their concerns.

The Post reported this week that a fake tweet using the name and logo of Eli Lilly may have cost Twitter millions, after the pharmaceutical giant paused ad spending on the site. Other companies including General Motors, Volkswagen and General Mills said they were pausing advertising after Musk took over — some brands acting in conjunction with calls from civil rights groups to do so.

While trying to appease advertisers, Musk has also turned his focus to subscription models and potential paywalls.

Twitter Blue — which previously allowed users to edit tweets, among other features — had around 100,000 subscribers before the new launch including paid verification, according to the website Platformer.

Twitter earned about 79 percent of its U.S. ad revenue from just 10 percent of its most valuable users, according to the internal document reviewed by The Post. Its top 1 percent of U.S. users — who are in turn the ones most likely to shell out $8 — earn the service more than $40 each month in revenue, the document shows.

Twitter’s paid verification service is here. What you need to know.

Only a smidgen of the 150,000 Twitter Blue subscribers are fake or joke accounts, according to data compiled from Twitter’s public data feed for software developers. A large portion of the most-followed accounts that got “verified” via Twitter Blue, according to the data reviewed by The Post, are from a few specific subcommunities on Twitter: pornography, cryptocurrency advocates and overseas accounts, particularly from the Middle East.

The data was compiled by Berlin software developer Travis Brown and reviewed and verified by The Post.

According to the data, most of the members of a list of some 135,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were ordinary users with a few hundred followers who had been on the site for more than six years. (It’s not clear how many had subscribed to the earlier, pre-Musk iteration of the Twitter Blue program.)

Twitter, unlike many other social networks, allows sexually explicit imagery. Many of the adult performers on Twitter use the site as the top of their marketing funnel to attract new paying customers, with their Twitter display names advertising the price of a subscription on other paid sites such as OnlyFans where they show their content.

Twitter is rushing to launch a paid video feature that could let their customers pay on Twitter instead of elsewhere, The Post reported earlier this month — though the site’s internal watchdog flagged the product as “high risk.” A previous adult-content-focused subscription service product was shelved, before Musk’s ownership of Twitter, after the company realized it could not guarantee it wasn’t monetizing child sexual abuse material, Platformer reported in August.

Nearly 10 percent of overall Twitter Blue subscribers talk about cryptocurrency on their profile pages, including popular crypto news and accounts that promote crypto investments that they predict will rise, according to The Post’s review.

One major group of new Twitter Blue subscribers are right-wing influencers. Some 150 accounts that disproportionately interact with at least five prominent right-wing influencers signed up to gain verification this way."

my guess everyone is headed to a subscription service. that'd take awhile.

probably depends on how spot advertising goes the next quarter or 2. even still, he has to be looking at those nearly half a billion people and salivating.

the long hours threat probably couldn't come at a better time for him. many already do (though at home), lot of layoffs in the valley and more coming. fewer new startups and companies on the curve growing thru employment (probably). he's a big stock options guy even in his private company, so can throw in enticements that aren't $$. of course, he will lose more regardless of the email, just a question of whether their resume hits. twitter will be @ job fairs and recruiting like madmen. newbies vs experienced engineers % will go up.

a whole lot of things have to hit. why can't this be shorted!!! maybe in vegas.

[a fan]

The whole thing's been a dumpster fire. Letting go key staff, having to try and hire some back, parts of the platform having technical issues, insulting and calling out staff via twitter when they were the ones in the right. Ruling via tweet. Good thing we don't let politicians do that...

Notice that the folk on the forums who insisted that Musk would bring "free speech" to twitter....and we all pointed out nope, that's not going to happen......are gone....

who said that?

It’s a public square

Ah, TLD remembers.....the exchange you and I had a few months ago, YA. Do you? Remember how I told you that this whole thing is about $$$$, and your'e nuts if you think that twitter pre or post Elon has a single thing to do with free speech, or being "a town square".

But I was mostly referring to Pete.

Well....duh, who doesn't understand that money is job #1 in a business. That's like saying I told you that you needed air to breath. And yet both can be true

Let me clarify: this is ONLY about money. How's that? And I already told you why.....Musk needs friends on the Republican side to not pull the plug on all the government help Tesla gets. He's playing the American right wing.

But he MUST "censor" posts, just like the last guy. Twitter can't turn into a hate-filled Nazi sh*tshow like the right wing wants without advertisers bailing.

....you can make money while still providing a service that aligns with the vision of your acquired product. The guy has been in the owners chair for less than a month, and people are running around with hair on fire that it's not perfect as he claimed...

No, folks are MOCKING the idiotic idea that Musk would turn twitter into a huggy-bear 'town square". And the chickens have come home to roost.

They're mocking Musk for not doing what he claimed he'd do. And they're mocking FoxNation for being dumb enough to think that he would.

So for example: if this is a free market of ideas, What the heck does Musk need a committee that decides who gets to post and who doesn't for?

If he has a group of people who do that, and who delete and ban users? How the F is this any different from the last owner? It's not. It's hilariously not.

[youthathletics]

Let me clarify: this is ONLY about money. How's that? And I already told you why.....Musk needs friends on the Republican side to not pull the plug on all the government help Tesla gets. He's playing the American right wing.

But he MUST "censor" posts, just like the last guy. Twitter can't turn into a hate-filled Nazi sh*tshow like the right wing wants without advertisers bailing.

So for example: if this is a free market of ideas, What the heck does Musk need a committee that decides who gets to post and who doesn't for?

If he has a group of people who do that, and who delete and ban users? How the F is this any different from the last owner? It's not. It's hilariously not.

That is a far stretch, I might consider buying what you are selling IF twitter was his only business. The govt' and Musk have a relationship that is advantageous to both sides...I believe you are grasping by insinuating he is pandering to the r's. Starlink is in the benefit of 'global' support for Ukraine, but its no fun if we do not pick apart everyone, no?

No duh....again. Where did anyone say all censoring was off the table and we are now going full dark web #LetItRip

You speak as if engineering and coding has reached the end of the line and no further advancement in algorithms and AI can be furthered. WHy the shortsightedness? Or maybe you just turned into a pessimist, b/c you were an optimist for so long.

[youthathletics]

Musk trolling Bloomberg: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/159 ... pibnDJcG_Q

[MDlaxfan76]

I'm clearly not keeping up with your logic, youth.

I think there's all sorts of things that could be done technologically/algorithmically to reduce the harm, eliminate the false identities, etc and make Twitter a reasonably open marketplace of ideas and information, with no particular bias other than transparency of identity and responsibility for false, damaging, harmful information.

But unless there's either an economic imperative, which there really hasn't been, or a regulatory imperative, which there has been zero in the US, to reduce harm, there's no way we should expect it to happen.

So, yeah, if the intent was really to allow whatever voices say whatever they want and no one is liable for harm...then, of course, it'll be a cesspool...and the advertisers will find better ways to reach their consumers without jeopardizing their brands or their employees.

What had been happening across the social media landscape was a growing recognition that the harm was getting understood better and better by the regulators, as well as the general public, thus advertisers. And in anticipation of backlash social media has been moving to try to reduce harm, albeit at a snail's pace.

This is just like cigarettes, the lies about harm will continue, and the lobbyists will buy the politicians...until it is stopped.
Meanwhile, the changes that the industry had been attempting are not much more than akin to adding a filter to the end of cigarette and claiming cigarettes are now 'safer'.

It's no secret why TikTok has a very different offering in China for younger users, but wide open in the US. They know that they'll get shut down in China if they don't act responsibly (as defined by the government) but will do anything and everything to make a buck in the US.

Musk will do so as well.

[a fan]

That is a far stretch, I might consider buying what you are selling IF twitter was his only business. The govt' and Musk have a relationship that is advantageous to both sides...I believe you are grasping by insinuating he is pandering to the r's.

Did you notice that the R's on the board have stopped complaining about EV subsidies? Same goes for FoxNation?

Starlink is in the benefit of 'global' support for Ukraine, but its no fun if we do not pick apart everyone, no?

You keep confusing things----I'm not mocking Musk or criticizing him. I'm mocking FoxNation for turning him into a hero, after hating him for years because he represents change, progress, and the Green New Deal.

You think this turnaround is a "coincidence"? Do you also think it's a coincidence that Musk moved Tesla to Texas where he's in a R State (protected from R .gov harm), yet has access to the liberal brain power needed to run his company? Okay. You do you. That's too many coincidence for me. He's a smart dude.

Where did anyone say all censoring was off the table and we are now going full dark web #LetItRip

Are you serious? Petey for starters. FoxNation to finish. I've got several Facebook friends I know in real life who have returned to twitter, claiming Musk wouldn't censor anymore. They simply don't understand that THEY are the product.

You speak as if engineering and coding has reached the end of the line and no further advancement in algorithms and AI can be furthered. WHy the shortsightedness? Or maybe you just turned into a pessimist, b/c you were an optimist for so long.

I don't understand your first sentence. At all.

[youthathletics]

That is a far stretch, I might consider buying what you are selling IF twitter was his only business. The govt' and Musk have a relationship that is advantageous to both sides...I believe you are grasping by insinuating he is pandering to the r's.

Did you notice that the R's on the board have stopped complaining about EV subsidies? Same goes for FoxNation?

Starlink is in the benefit of 'global' support for Ukraine, but its no fun if we do not pick apart everyone, no?

You keep confusing things----I'm not mocking Musk or criticizing him. I'm mocking FoxNation for turning him into a hero, after hating him for years because he represents change, progress, and the Green New Deal.

You think this turnaround is a "coincidence"? Do you also think it's a coincidence that Musk moved Tesla to Texas where he's in a R State (protected from R .gov harm), yet has access to the liberal brain power needed to run his company? Okay. You do you. That's too many coincidence for me. He's a smart dude.

Where did anyone say all censoring was off the table and we are now going full dark web #LetItRip

Are you serious? Petey for starters. FoxNation to finish. I've got several Facebook friends I know in real life who have returned to twitter, claiming Musk wouldn't censor anymore. They simply don't understand that THEY are the product.

You speak as if engineering and coding has reached the end of the line and no further advancement in algorithms and AI can be furthered. WHy the shortsightedness? Or maybe you just turned into a pessimist, b/c you were an optimist for so long.

I don't understand your first sentence. At all.

Got it...seemed like you where mocking Musk, mea culpa.

My last sentence was referencing advancement in censoring via coding/AI....arguing that Twitter v2.0 can still be an open forum and censor.

[a fan]

Got it...seemed like you where mocking Musk, mea culpa.

No problem. I'm sure I wasn't being clear...again.

I do think it sucks that Musk did this.....I'd rather have him focus on stuff like what you mentioned.....Starlink.

But that's a selfish want....he can do what the F he wants.

My last sentence was referencing advancement in censoring via coding/AI....arguing that Twitter v2.0 can still be an open forum and censor.

Tech isn't there yet. But I get your point.

[PizzaSnake]

The great manager speaks, well, posts a link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rmination/

Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees Wednesday morning: Commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.

Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form.

Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday was told they would receive three months of severance pay, the message said.

In the midnight email, which was shared with The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

The pledge email, paired with a new policy mandating a return to the office, is expected to lead to even more attrition at a company whose staff Musk had already reduced by half.

Layoff spree in Silicon Valley spells end of an era for Big Tech

It also comes as Musk says he is tabling Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over as Twitter’s owner and CEO, while the company sorts out issues with the feature following a botched rollout.

A week ago, Twitter debuted the product, which gives users a blue check-mark icon next to their name for a fee of $7.99 a month, and promises to reduce the number of ads they see by half as well as giving their posts additional visibility. By Friday, the option disappeared amid a rash of fake accounts impersonating everyone from President Biden to basketball star LeBron James.

Elon Musk acquires Twitter and fires top executives

Sign-ups were paused Thursday night and the service wouldn’t “relaunch” until Nov. 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid,” Musk announced via a tweet late Tuesday.

But inside Twitter, staff were using the additional two weeks to conduct a postmortem on the launch, trying to understand why the impersonations spiraled out of control, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The launch — and its backtrack — was the culmination of a whirlwind couple weeks of ownership for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion late last month. People familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, as well as internal and externally compiled data reviewed by The Post, showed the new service failed to gain much traction during its brief stint — skewing toward just a few niche communities and threatening Twitter’s core advertising revenue.

Power users are most likely to subscribe, but they are also the company’s primary advertising base — a key driver of revenue. Twitter would need to charge $44 a month to recoup the advertising value generated by the top segment of U.S. power users if it relied only on subscriptions, according to an internal document reviewed by The Post. The more active the user, the higher the subscription price would need to be, according to the documents — which warned of the opportunity cost of cutting ads and high subscription prices needed if Twitter were to make up for the revenue generated by ad-consuming power users.

Meanwhile, those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation and users hawking adult content such as pornography, a review of Twitter data compiled by a software developer showed.

About 150,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue — which encompasses Blue Verified — at the time of the pause, according to one of the people with knowledge of internal matters, a figure corroborated by internal data on tweets from Verified accounts and an external analysis. That’s just 0.06 percent of the roughly 250 million people estimated to use Twitter each day.

That subscriber figure would bring in only $14.4 million annually in revenue — while threatening the ad revenue generated from super users who pay for Twitter Blue who will see fewer advertisements, a trade-off that was warned about in the internal document predating Musk’s takeover.

Musk has tweeted that new subscribers would see “Half as many ads.”

Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment on the Twitter Blue developments.

Musk purchased the site late last month and has since ousted Twitter’s leadership, made himself CEO and laid off half the workforce. He now needs to find ways to drive new revenue sources, as Twitter is expected to owe roughly $1 billion in annual interest — plus recoup the investments of Musk’s many equity partners.

Already advertisers are proving wary, something exacerbated last month when Musk tweeted a conspiracy-laden article about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi. The Blue Verified debacle, where some major brands were impersonated, only added to their concerns.

The Post reported this week that a fake tweet using the name and logo of Eli Lilly may have cost Twitter millions, after the pharmaceutical giant paused ad spending on the site. Other companies including General Motors, Volkswagen and General Mills said they were pausing advertising after Musk took over — some brands acting in conjunction with calls from civil rights groups to do so.

While trying to appease advertisers, Musk has also turned his focus to subscription models and potential paywalls.

Twitter Blue — which previously allowed users to edit tweets, among other features — had around 100,000 subscribers before the new launch including paid verification, according to the website Platformer.

Twitter earned about 79 percent of its U.S. ad revenue from just 10 percent of its most valuable users, according to the internal document reviewed by The Post. Its top 1 percent of U.S. users — who are in turn the ones most likely to shell out $8 — earn the service more than $40 each month in revenue, the document shows.

Twitter’s paid verification service is here. What you need to know.

Only a smidgen of the 150,000 Twitter Blue subscribers are fake or joke accounts, according to data compiled from Twitter’s public data feed for software developers. A large portion of the most-followed accounts that got “verified” via Twitter Blue, according to the data reviewed by The Post, are from a few specific subcommunities on Twitter: pornography, cryptocurrency advocates and overseas accounts, particularly from the Middle East.

The data was compiled by Berlin software developer Travis Brown and reviewed and verified by The Post.

According to the data, most of the members of a list of some 135,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were ordinary users with a few hundred followers who had been on the site for more than six years. (It’s not clear how many had subscribed to the earlier, pre-Musk iteration of the Twitter Blue program.)

Twitter, unlike many other social networks, allows sexually explicit imagery. Many of the adult performers on Twitter use the site as the top of their marketing funnel to attract new paying customers, with their Twitter display names advertising the price of a subscription on other paid sites such as OnlyFans where they show their content.

Twitter is rushing to launch a paid video feature that could let their customers pay on Twitter instead of elsewhere, The Post reported earlier this month — though the site’s internal watchdog flagged the product as “high risk.” A previous adult-content-focused subscription service product was shelved, before Musk’s ownership of Twitter, after the company realized it could not guarantee it wasn’t monetizing child sexual abuse material, Platformer reported in August.

Nearly 10 percent of overall Twitter Blue subscribers talk about cryptocurrency on their profile pages, including popular crypto news and accounts that promote crypto investments that they predict will rise, according to The Post’s review.

One major group of new Twitter Blue subscribers are right-wing influencers. Some 150 accounts that disproportionately interact with at least five prominent right-wing influencers signed up to gain verification this way."

“to make sure that it is rock solid,”

Yeah, like Ellie’s head.

[Typical Lax Dad]

The great manager speaks, well, posts a link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rmination/

Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees Wednesday morning: Commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.

Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form.

Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday was told they would receive three months of severance pay, the message said.

In the midnight email, which was shared with The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

The pledge email, paired with a new policy mandating a return to the office, is expected to lead to even more attrition at a company whose staff Musk had already reduced by half.

Layoff spree in Silicon Valley spells end of an era for Big Tech

It also comes as Musk says he is tabling Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over as Twitter’s owner and CEO, while the company sorts out issues with the feature following a botched rollout.

A week ago, Twitter debuted the product, which gives users a blue check-mark icon next to their name for a fee of $7.99 a month, and promises to reduce the number of ads they see by half as well as giving their posts additional visibility. By Friday, the option disappeared amid a rash of fake accounts impersonating everyone from President Biden to basketball star LeBron James.

Elon Musk acquires Twitter and fires top executives

Sign-ups were paused Thursday night and the service wouldn’t “relaunch” until Nov. 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid,” Musk announced via a tweet late Tuesday.

But inside Twitter, staff were using the additional two weeks to conduct a postmortem on the launch, trying to understand why the impersonations spiraled out of control, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The launch — and its backtrack — was the culmination of a whirlwind couple weeks of ownership for Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion late last month. People familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, as well as internal and externally compiled data reviewed by The Post, showed the new service failed to gain much traction during its brief stint — skewing toward just a few niche communities and threatening Twitter’s core advertising revenue.

Power users are most likely to subscribe, but they are also the company’s primary advertising base — a key driver of revenue. Twitter would need to charge $44 a month to recoup the advertising value generated by the top segment of U.S. power users if it relied only on subscriptions, according to an internal document reviewed by The Post. The more active the user, the higher the subscription price would need to be, according to the documents — which warned of the opportunity cost of cutting ads and high subscription prices needed if Twitter were to make up for the revenue generated by ad-consuming power users.

Meanwhile, those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation and users hawking adult content such as pornography, a review of Twitter data compiled by a software developer showed.

About 150,000 users were subscribed to Twitter Blue — which encompasses Blue Verified — at the time of the pause, according to one of the people with knowledge of internal matters, a figure corroborated by internal data on tweets from Verified accounts and an external analysis. That’s just 0.06 percent of the roughly 250 million people estimated to use Twitter each day.

That subscriber figure would bring in only $14.4 million annually in revenue — while threatening the ad revenue generated from super users who pay for Twitter Blue who will see fewer advertisements, a trade-off that was warned about in the internal document predating Musk’s takeover.

Musk has tweeted that new subscribers would see “Half as many ads.”

Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment on the Twitter Blue developments.

Musk purchased the site late last month and has since ousted Twitter’s leadership, made himself CEO and laid off half the workforce. He now needs to find ways to drive new revenue sources, as Twitter is expected to owe roughly $1 billion in annual interest — plus recoup the investments of Musk’s many equity partners.

Already advertisers are proving wary, something exacerbated last month when Musk tweeted a conspiracy-laden article about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi. The Blue Verified debacle, where some major brands were impersonated, only added to their concerns.

The Post reported this week that a fake tweet using the name and logo of Eli Lilly may have cost Twitter millions, after the pharmaceutical giant paused ad spending on the site. Other companies including General Motors, Volkswagen and General Mills said they were pausing advertising after Musk took over — some brands acting in conjunction with calls from civil rights groups to do so.

While trying to appease advertisers, Musk has also turned his focus to subscription models and potential paywalls.

Twitter Blue — which previously allowed users to edit tweets, among other features — had around 100,000 subscribers before the new launch including paid verification, according to the website Platformer.

Twitter earned about 79 percent of its U.S. ad revenue from just 10 percent of its most valuable users, according to the internal document reviewed by The Post. Its top 1 percent of U.S. users — who are in turn the ones most likely to shell out $8 — earn the service more than $40 each month in revenue, the document shows.

Twitter’s paid verification service is here. What you need to know.

Only a smidgen of the 150,000 Twitter Blue subscribers are fake or joke accounts, according to data compiled from Twitter’s public data feed for software developers. A large portion of the most-followed accounts that got “verified” via Twitter Blue, according to the data reviewed by The Post, are from a few specific subcommunities on Twitter: pornography, cryptocurrency advocates and overseas accounts, particularly from the Middle East.

The data was compiled by Berlin software developer Travis Brown and reviewed and verified by The Post.

According to the data, most of the members of a list of some 135,000 Twitter Blue subscribers were ordinary users with a few hundred followers who had been on the site for more than six years. (It’s not clear how many had subscribed to the earlier, pre-Musk iteration of the Twitter Blue program.)

Twitter, unlike many other social networks, allows sexually explicit imagery. Many of the adult performers on Twitter use the site as the top of their marketing funnel to attract new paying customers, with their Twitter display names advertising the price of a subscription on other paid sites such as OnlyFans where they show their content.

Twitter is rushing to launch a paid video feature that could let their customers pay on Twitter instead of elsewhere, The Post reported earlier this month — though the site’s internal watchdog flagged the product as “high risk.” A previous adult-content-focused subscription service product was shelved, before Musk’s ownership of Twitter, after the company realized it could not guarantee it wasn’t monetizing child sexual abuse material, Platformer reported in August.

Nearly 10 percent of overall Twitter Blue subscribers talk about cryptocurrency on their profile pages, including popular crypto news and accounts that promote crypto investments that they predict will rise, according to The Post’s review.

One major group of new Twitter Blue subscribers are right-wing influencers. Some 150 accounts that disproportionately interact with at least five prominent right-wing influencers signed up to gain verification this way."

“to make sure that it is rock solid,”

Yeah, like Ellie’s head.

They will have to work that hard to get interest coverage to 1.0x

[Kismet]

Question - will elmopetey (Petey's new alias) turn back into a pumpkin tonight at midnight when the real Petey exits the penalty box?

Or will everyone have to endure them both now?




Thank goodness for the ignore function.

[PizzaSnake]

Shocking, I tell you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rto-order/

""Musk did not say why he revised his return-to-office order. One Twitter staff member said the numbers of employees seeking to leave had alarmed Twitter’s managers, who had formed “war rooms” to determine which employees should be asked to stay on.

“Wow, this is a lot of people saying goodbye,” one current employee said Thursday, referring to internal posts on the company’s Slack channels. Musk had set a 5 p.m. deadline Eastern time for staffers to sign the pledge to work harder or leave with severance.""

What a little beetch Ellie is turning out to be. See ya, punk-asz!!

[PizzaSnake]

"Mr. Musk’s team also held meetings with undecided employees who are key to Twitter’s operations to try to persuade them to stay, three people said. In his pitch, Mr. Musk said that he knew how to win and that those who wanted to win should join him, one person who spoke with him said.

In one of those meetings, some employees were summoned to a conference room in the San Francisco office while others called in via videoconference. As the 5 p.m. deadline passed, some who had called in began hanging up, seemingly having decided to leave, even as Mr. Musk continued speaking, two people familiar with the meeting said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/tech ... k-ftc.html

Look like a bunch of qwitters, Ellie...

[SCLaxAttack]

Nobody remaining except those with Twitter sponsored H-1B visas.

[PizzaSnake]

Nobody remaining except those with Twitter sponsored H-1B visas.

Pay cuts coming Monday…

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/tech/twi ... index.html