Elon's Twitter Circus update
The full story of the Elon-Twitter situation. What has happened since it all started and why is Elon now scared of the FBI? In this episode, we'll find out.you've all read the news stories Twitter
seems to be in chaos after his purchase
Elon Musk has flipped the house upside
down he fired the CEO CFO and head of
policy while also disabanding the board
of directors and that's just the start
next he went after the employees firing
close to 50 of total staff and for those
remaining he issued an ultimatum either
work insane hours or quit
lawsuits are filed advertisers left and
the future of the site became unclear
this is perhaps the first time that we
get to see the inner workings of a CEO
publicly trying to figure out how to run
a large and influential company in real
time
since the peak of his wealth Elon has
lost 200 billion dollars becoming the
first person to do so he also claims to
be in danger after revealing ties
between the FBI and Twitter so what is
going on here
it's now 2023 so let's recap the chaos
and take a look at what's happened since
is Twitter really on a collision course
of bankruptcy or is it gaining a fresh
start let's dive into the story of drama
lawsuits and a lot of tweets to try and
figure this
outfusion TV
foreign
Twitter only having a fraction of the
users of Facebook Instagram or even
Snapchat over the years it has become
one of the most influential platforms
for real world discourse
billions of dollars can be lost over a
single tweet Grassroots movements can be
started over a single tweet the lives of
public figures can be altered over a
single tweet however due to a smaller
user base Twitter has largely been
unprofitable having only two years of
profit in the past 10 years
previous management tried to fix the
issue by any means that they could they
purchased many companies such as Vine
and Periscope and added a few new
features to the platform the results
were mixed at best and the company may
have been facing bankruptcy if nothing
changed this is the point where Elon
gets involved in the company
[Music]
he was always a big Twitter user and a
substantial Twitter critic yet things
quickly changed as he got invited to
join the board of directors leaked text
messages showed that Jack Dorsey the
founder and former CEO of Twitter was
very fond of Elon Jack wrote to Elon
quote you care so much get its
importance and could def help in
immeasurable ways
Jack Dorsey had told musk the previous
year when he was still CEO of Twitter
that he wanted to give musk a seed on
the board but they refused citing that
musk would be too much of a risk yet
just as Dorsey was beginning to
celebrate musk screwed the whole thing
up he criticized Twitter publicly and
parag agril the then current CEO of
Twitter sent Elon a tense message quote
you are free to tweet is Twitter dying
or anything else about Twitter but it's
my responsibility to tell you that it's
not helping me make Twitter better in
the current context next time we speak
I'd like to provide you perspective on
the level of internal distraction right
now and how it's hurting our ability to
do work musk seemed to take this message
to Heart replying harshly quote what did
you get done this week I'm not joining
the board this is a waste of time we'll
make an offer to take Twitter private
this was a very unexpected U-turn Elon
began soliciting bankers and other Tech
billionaires for cash to finance the
Takeover
in the following weeks musk announced
the restructuring plans that according
to his estimates would quintuple Twitter
revenues by 2028
while everything seemed to be going
according to plan on May 13th musk
halted the deal citing more bot activity
on the site than he was first told about
some argued that this might serve as a
pretext for must to bargain for a lower
price or exit the deal altogether after
all he was paying a huge premium for a
stock in a declining Market
on the 12th of July Twitter sued mosque
essentially forcing him to complete the
agreement
the move seemed to work as on October
4th Elon proposed the completion of the
deal before the beginning of the trial
scheduled for October 28th and so after
months of back and forth Mars caused the
majority owner of Twitter and yet the
drama had only begun
[Music]
due to large deficits in the Twitter
budget musk's priority became putting
the company's finances in order first
not only did Twitter lose money for
years but while financing the
acquisition musk had to take on a 13
billion loan
analysts project that he's likely to pay
around one billion dollars in interest
payments alone every single year
all of this is in addition to selling
almost 20 billion dollars in Tesla
shares in 2022 3.4 billion of which was
in November alone with that said musk
had to either cut expenses or increase
revenues and his plan seemed to involve
both
right from the get-go he did not
hesitate to dissolve the entire board of
directors sacked several top Executives
and fire hundreds of employees
by the time the first week had ended
less than 50 of the entire Workforce was
left
musk was trying to patch a four million
a day loss since the average engineer at
a big tech company has a salary of
around a hundred thousand dollars per
year at the end of the day millions of
dollars would be saved even with a
severance package and a possible lawsuit
or two many employees took to social
media to protest the way that they've
been treated even launching a class
action lawsuit according to them musk
needed to give a 60-day notice to some
employees but he would counter that the
severance package that he offered was
much larger than required by law
adding to all of the chaos many top
management positions stepped down while
some employees were almost forced to
sleep at the office to make up for the
loss in manpower to compensate for that
musk brought in Engineers from Tesla
SpaceX and the boring company they were
responsible for figuring out how to make
the infrastructure of the company
lighter in resources playing a key part
in determining who goes and who stays
due to that many employees were laid off
by mistake and later asked to return as
managers realized that they didn't have
the Personnel to execute some new
features they were planning
yet the cost cutting didn't end there
According to some reports around 5 000
contractors were laid off as well with
heavy cuts to the content moderation
team on November 7th 90 of Twitter
India's staff was fired
to further save costs in January of 2023
Twitter staff Cuts occurred in Brazil
Australia as well as other locations
meanwhile in the US a data center in
Sacramento was shut down and another one
in Atlanta is downsizing
in elon's mind there's just too many
people working at Twitter for what's
actually needed well I think you could
just stand back and say without knowing
how many employees Twitter has at all
and say how many people are really
needed to run Twitter like they say you
don't know what their employee account
number is at all how many people needed
to keep the site operational like let's
say if excluding product correct
Evolution you basically have to keep the
service going and uh you have to have
customer sort of a support function to
take down a material that is in
violation of the law how many people
what's the minimum number of people
that's in the hundreds probably exactly
it's not it's not like a giant number
yeah Twitter saw is like 2 000 people
right yeah we still have two thousand on
the 9th of December Reuters would report
that Twitter would be sued for
disproportionately fine female staff
the drama intensified even more two
weeks later as Elon issued an ultimatum
to the rest of his Personnel he would
call it hardcore mode and his aim was to
push staff to create a so-called Twitter
2.0 it was simple either work those
insane hours or quit and get a hefty
Severance the move was supposed to kick
off the creation of a new culture within
Twitter where only the passionate
survive within the company the move was
not as popular as 1 200 employees
rejected the proposal and left but now
this left the company with a critically
low amount of people
concerns from former staff grew that the
site could soon break because of the low
levels of Engineers
musk would have an all hands on deck
meeting on the 10th floor of a Twitter
San Francisco headquarters he would call
all Engineers who could quote actually
write software and show him examples of
recent code they were responsible for he
even encouraged staff to fly to San
Francisco the same day if need be
ironically Twitter employees had been
locked out of the building until Monday
for fear of sabotage so there was some
confusion about how people would get in
in the first place it really was crunch
time
massive and very messy layoffs as well
as the general chaos created fear among
advertisers on the platform General
Mills General Motors Pfizer and Audi had
all suspended their advertising activity
for fear of damaging their brand due to
exposure to unsafe content on the 9th of
December Twitter would announce the
rollout of new controls for Brands to
prevent their ads from appearing above
or below tweets that contain any key
words that they want to avoid
according to the New York Post around 50
percent of the top 100 advertisers such
as at T and Wells Fargo still have not
returned as of January 2023
[Music]
to rely Less on advertisers Elon has
been trying out different strategies
many of them were scrapped even before
being implemented such was the case with
transforming Twitter into a blockchain
based platform where quote you have to
pay a tiny amount to register your
message on the Chain which will cut out
the vast majority of spam and Bots there
is no throat to choke so free speech is
guaranteed end quote
one particularly interesting
conversation happened between Elon Musk
and none other than Sam Beckman freed
Sam was willing to finance Twitter for
five billion dollars if musk agreed to
let him quote do the engineering for the
social media blockchain integration end
quote in light of recent news and an
arrest it seems that Twitter dodged a
bullet by rejecting this idea
foreign
as far as ideas that did become a
reality musk asked users to pay an 8 a
month subscription fee if they wanted to
keep their verification
this was supposedly to cut out spam and
ensure legitimate use on the platform
but many thought that this method was
heavy-handed as it crippled the
functionality of other users
I don't want to try to achieve with this
sort of enabling everyone to be payment
verified with with Twitter blue is to
try to get as many people payment
verified as possible it's only eight
bucks a month that effect will be over
time that the verified users will be
will pretty much always be at the top of
of comments and search and you won't
really see you'll have to scroll far to
see the unverified users which will be
the Bots and controls and whatnot
from a strictly Financial view the move
made sense since there are more than 420
million verified users even at a low
conversion rate this new income stream
could have made a difference to the
bottom line however the launch was a
complete disaster
Elon didn't foresee human nature
possibly due to reduced or non-existent
teams to control the rollout the feature
became a tool for Mass impersonation
at first it was funny to watch the Chaos
online as more people started joining in
on the trend impersonating Mario Pepsi
and some very recognizable people and
companies before long the trend ended up
causing a lot of damage
there was one very famous example the
stock of Eli Lillian Co a huge
pharmaceutical company flash crashed due
to a troll impersonating their account
letting people know that insulin was now
free
the real account of the company had to
quickly come out and clarify that the
other tweet was a troll
although some say that this was well
deserved for the company it became clear
that if this trolling reached the sphere
of politics or even geopolitics the
consequences could be less amusing after
the chaos this method of verification
was promptly scrapped and is now
undergoing review
musk would also clash with apple which
he accused of trying to sabotage Twitter
he contemplated the idea of building his
own smartphone but just two days later
he would say that it was a
misunderstanding and had been resolved
EU Regulators are looking at the
situation closely as Twitter no longer
has a data Protection Officer putting it
in violation of the gdpr standard
cutting down on moderation staff also
doesn't help with EU regulators
Twitter has also disbanded their
Brussels office due to concerns over if
the company would be able to abide by EU
rules
there's also a bunch of new feature
ideas that are being thrown about to
name a few making the algorithm open
source dividing Twitter into different
tiers and giving priority ranking to
tweet there's also talk of the relaunch
of Vine and a feature that allows users
to pay to talk to celebrities
in February of 2023 it was also
announced that long-form tweets would be
available features include bold
underline and italic font choices
one concept that's been particularly
underlined by mask is the concept of
transforming Twitter into an X app think
of it like a western WeChat it would
offer services such as messaging social
networking peer-to-peer payments and
e-commerce shopping quote I think
there's a real opportunity to create
that you basically live on WeChat in
China because it's so useful and so
helpful to your daily life and I think
if we could achieve that or even close
to that with Twitter it would be an
immense success end quote the big reason
that musk is running after this idea is
simple WeChat makes a lot of money by
simply taking a small cut out of all the
transactions that users make at a
reasonable volume this becomes a very
lucrative business yet the success of
the plan would fully rely on the
confidence that people have in posts on
social media this is one of the main
reasons that super apps work in China as
58 of users trust content brand posts on
social media
in the United States this figure is only
20 and this puts the whole plan into
question
the Twitter files Saga was a politically
charged dramatic reveal of the behind
the scenes workings of Twitter Elon Musk
began to reveal them to the public in
early December the topic began with the
suppression of a story regarding Joe
Biden's son Hunter Biden who left his
laptop at a repair shop according to the
New York Post that broke the story the
laptop included unsavory images of
illegal activities emails hinting at
possible corruption and much more
this all blew up on Twitter 20 days
before the 2020 election and it was
immediately crushed by Twitter
themselves
in December of 2022 Elon Musk and
journalist Matt taibi and Barry Weiss
released documents of the internal
happenings at Twitter during the peak of
the hunter Biden Story the release
largely didn't paint Twitter in a
positive light
the second league suggested that a
secret group at Twitter who were high up
in the chain of command such as the head
of legal and the head of trust and
safety made decisions behind everyone's
back without overview and these
decisions were in regards to moderating
Twitter certain Trend topics were
blacklisted certain topics weren't
allowed to go viral since then multiple
Twitter files have been posted detailing
the alleged Shadow Banning of right-wing
personalities and internal
Communications when Trump was banned
from Twitter and here comes the
controversy because people on the right
say that this was a Smoking Gun and the
trust and safety team at Twitter were
essentially the ones running the show
while people on the left say that
there's really nothing to see here
some more Twitter files claim that up to
80 FBI agents were being deployed as a
form of mass surveillance on Twitter
a Twitter executive confirmed and
described how they gave data to the FBI
it was also claimed that there are
multiple branches of the US government
involved in social media manipulation
and surveillance and now to the latest
batch of the Twitter files the 9th
9th claims both the FBI and CIA have
moderated content on the social media
platform the documents which were
released on Christmas Eve in a series of
tweets are part of owner Elon musk's
effort to document how the company was
run before he took over Twitter files
all revolves around alleged
Communications and coordination between
Twitter and other government agencies
including the FBI independent journalist
Matt taibi is the one behind this latest
Twitter thread that was posted on
Saturday and he wrote on Saturday quote
the files show the FBI acting as a
doorman to a vast program of social
media surveillance and censorship
encompassing agencies across the federal
government from the state department to
the Pentagon to the CIA taibi claims
that Twitter kept in contact with so
many agencies including the Department
of Defense and the FBI that it lost
track taibi also describes regular
meetings of Executives with FBI
personnel and other agencies
interestingly it was also stated that
there are a dozen former FBI agents that
became Twitter Executives some of whom
were paid by the FBI while at Twitter
and Twitter as a whole got a bunch of
money from the FBI
the FBI has since hit back saying that
this is all essentially misinformation
but strangely they haven't refuted any
of the claims to date
after these Revelations Elon stated that
he is now in quote crazy Danger
it is all just insane but the FBI and
other government agencies being involved
in surveillance somehow doesn't surprise
me
left and right media Outlets have
differing opinions on the validity and
importance of these leaks and I'm not
even American so I'm going to just end
this here
Elon admitted that he never had the
ambition to be the CEO of Twitter and
wants to give the job to someone else at
the end of last year Elon put up a poll
on Twitter asking users if they wanted
him to step down they said yes a clear
successor hasn't been determined yet
[Music]
so in conclusion with Twitter what
happens next is anyone's guess
it's a messy chaotic situation that's
going to be an uphill battle Elon
tweeted that bankruptcy is still not out
of the question for Twitter according to
the New York Post in early 2023 the
value of Twitter is expected to be down
by 50 to 70 percent according to One
Source that spoke to the publication
musk's loans quote ought to be marked
down by 70 of their value
to add to this Twitter's head of HR and
Engineering are leaving
the whole Fiasco may impact elon's other
Ventures
shareholders of elon's other companies
worry about his involvement in too many
projects at once
and to some degree public opinion on
Elon has shifted for example as outlined
by Bloomberg a large number of people
who bought Teslas were left-leaning they
felt neutral to positive about the Tesla
brand but as Elon exposed more and more
of his personality over Twitter they now
have a bitter taste in their mouth and
as a whole it's affecting Tesla's brand
image
Tesla stock has tumbled 70 since its
peak partly from macroeconomic
situations but this situation certainly
isn't helping
whatever the case it's clear that elon's
Twitter takeover has gotten off to an
extremely Rocky start but predicting
where this one goes is extremely murky
if he chooses the wrong successor
Twitter will crash and burn but if his
successor does an amazing job Twitter
could Thrive surprising a lot of people
I think it's too early to tell at this
stage but I'll be watching closely
interestingly Twitter has Rose to the
number one spot on the App Store under
the US News category at the start of
2023 so perhaps it's a tiny but a
fleeting sign that things may not be a
complete failure let's wait and see
though so what do you guys think feel
free to let me know in the comments
below
so that's about it from me I'll play you
out with a new track I made over on the
second Channel admittedly I've been
having too much fun making music over
the past few months so my name is Togo
and you've been watching cold fusion and
I'll catch you again soon for another
episode cheers guys have a good one
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