Musk incorporates X.AI
0 0 Mark Devlin Mark Devlin2023-04-17 16:22:562023-04-17 16:22:56Musk incorporates X.AIARK buys more Tesla stock
ARK buys 69,356 Tesla shares, adding to the 1.3 million shares the firm purchased in December and January. This latest purchase adds about $12.6 million to ARK’s holdings in the electric vehicle company, based on the stock’s (TSLA) current market value.
Musk’s cost-cutting hurts Goldman Sachs
Musk’s “cost-cutting exercise” contributes to a rapid growth in delinquencies of commercial real estate loans for Goldman Sachs. After Musk’s attempt to avoid taking over Twitter, he began seeking ways to cut costs, which included not paying rent. Now, Twitter’s landlord, Columbia Property, is suing and defaulted on its loan from Goldman Sachs as a result. (Goldman Sachs was part of a group of banks that provided $1.7 billion in loans to Columbia Property. The loan was secured against seven office buildings in San Francisco and New York, two of which accommodate large Twitter offices.)
Massive Twitter outage
Many users find they cannot tweet, retweet, quote tweet and direct message on Twitter, with users recieving messages such as:
You are over the daily limit for sending tweets
Some users could not access their direct message, with the tab only showing the message “something went wrong.”
Musk sends a brief email to Twitter staff, instructing them to “pause new feature development” in order to ensure “system stability and robustness”.
Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 8, 2023
Report: Twitter has 180,000 US subscribers
According to The Information, only 180,000 people in the US have paid for a Twitter Blue subscription, 0.2% of the website’s monthly active users. The publication said it saw the information on a document that also revealed that 62% company’s paying users reside in the US, meaning Twitter has approximately 290,000 subscribers worldwide. Musk told Twitter employees last year that he wants half of the website’s revenue to come from subscriptions. One avenue the company is considering to earn more from its subscription services is to offer a higher-priced membership tier that allows users to browse the website with zero ads.
Tesla lost $140m on Bitcoin in 2022
According to SEC filings, Tesla lost $140m on its Bitcoin investments in 2022, losing $204m overall, although it gained back $64m through trading. The company holds $184m in Bitcoin, having offloaded most of its initial £1.5 billion purchase a few weeks after it was purchased in early 2021.
Musk denies Twitter use hurts Tesla, expects share price recovery
On an Earnings Call with investors [transcript], Musk rejects that his political influencing on Twitter is hurting Tesla’s brand.
Since Elon started political influencing, polls from Morning Consult & YouGov show Tesla brand favorability declining in 2022 and division along partisan lines. Such brand damage can impact demand. Does Tesla track favorability and how will any brand damage be mitigated?
Musk replies by citing his own popularity on Twitter:
Well, let me check my Twitter account (pause as he appears to actually pull out his phone). So I got 127 million followers and it continues to grow rapidly. That suggests that I’m reasonably popular. Now I might not be popular with some people, but for the vast majority of people, my follower count speaks for itself. I have the most interacted social account maybe in the world – certainly on Twitter.
And then talking about his impact on the brand:
I think Twitter is actually an incredibly powerful tool for driving demand for Tesla…I would really encourage companies out there of all kinds, automotive or otherwise, to make more use of Twitter and to use their Twitter accounts in ways that are interesting and informative, entertaining, and it will help them drive sales just as it has with Tesla.
Musk says he expects Tesla’s share price to recover over the long-term, though warned that he anticipated a “pretty difficult recession” in 2023 which could lead to setbacks.
We think demand will be good despite, probably, a contraction in the automotive market as a whole…There’s going to be bumps along the way and we’ll probably have a pretty difficult recession this year, probably. I hope not, but probably.
The Twitter Files 11: How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
Musk, through Taibbi, releases The Twitter Files: How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In, which further details Twitter’s relationship with Intellignce angencies, such as the FBI.
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files
How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
Taibbi says that in August 2017, when Facebook decided to suspend 300 accounts with “suspected Russian origin”, that Twitter’s leaders were sure they didn’t have a Russia problem, noting that while Facebook had issues with “hundreds of accounts”, Twitter only had issues with around 25. The company’s PR strategy was to deflect to Facebook’s problems. Public Policy VP Colin Crowell:
Twitter is not the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling right now – the spotlight is on FB
In September 2017, after a manual examination, Twitter informed the senate it suspended 22 possibel Russian accoutns and 179 others with “possible links” to those. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia – ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee – held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.”
After meeting with congressional leaders, Crowell wrote:
Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.
Cromwell also said that Democracts were taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who that week said:
It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.
Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force” to proactively self-investigate. Bu despite forming a “Russia Taks fForce”, which worked with data shared form Facebook, investigatinge accounts supposedly tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), the research came to nothing.
Oct 13, 2017: No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend).
Oct 14, 2017: First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT.
Oct 20. 2017: Built new version of the model that is lower precision but higher recall which allows to catch more items. We aren’t seeing substantially more suspicious accounts. We expect to find ~20 with a small amount of spend.
Oct 23, 2017: Finished with investigation… 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.
According to Taibbi, the Taks Force’s failure deepened the company’s PR crisis: Following Warner’s press conference, stories sourced to the Intel Committee “poured” into the news, inlcuding a story Politico that said “Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes.” Johns Hopkins Professor (and Intel Committee “expert”) Thomas Rid:
Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB… they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform.
In Washington weeks after the first briefing, Twitter leaders were told by Senate staff that “Sen Warner feels like tech industry was in denial for months.” Added an Intel staffer said there was “Big interest in Politico article about deleted accounts.”
As this pressure rose, Taibbi says the company changed its tune and Twitter “pledged to work with them on their desire to legislate”. However, even as Twitter prepared to change its ads policy and remove RT and Sputnik to placate Washington, congress turned the heat up more, apparently leaking the larger, base list of 2700 accounts.
Reporters started to call Twitter about Russia links. Buzzfeed, working with the University of Sheffield, claimed to find a “new network” on Twitter that had “close connections to… Russian-linked bot accounts.” but the company internally did not want to endorse the Buzzfeed/Sheffield findings, saying “it will only embolden them”. Twitter apologised to the for the same accounts they’d initially told the Senate were not a problem.
Taibbi says this This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. The company settled on it’s prosture: In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.” Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Crowell, in an email to the company’s leaders:
We will not be reverting to the status quo.
The Twitter Files: Part 7 – The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
Musk, through Schellenberger, releases The Twitter Files 7: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop. The documents aim to show that the FBI and the intelligence community (IC) discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.
1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7
The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 19, 2022
Schellenberger recaps that Biden’s laptop was confiscated by the FBI on Dec 20, 2019, after the agency was alerted by JP Isaac, the owner of Delaware computer store, where Biden had left the laptop for repairs. Even though Isaac had discovered evidence of criminal activity, the FBI had still not contacted him by Aug 2020, so he contacted Rudy Giuliani, who is under FBI surveillance. In early October, Giuliani gives the information to the Post.
At 7pm. October 13, after learning that the Post will publish the story, Biden’s lawyer contacts Isaac. At 9.22pm, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends ten documents to Yoel Roth, Head of Trust & Security at Twitter, through Teleporter, a secure, one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.
The Post’s story is published on October 14. Despite it being factually correct, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the Post’s article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.
Schellenberger says that during 2020 the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Roth to dismiss reports of Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation. They also approached Facebook. Shellenberger shows documents where Chan says there was no new intelligence to support this conclusion. Twitter staff also noted that there was little Russian activity on the site.
[W]e haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context).
On several ocassions Roth pushed back on the FBI’s claims, and resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside the normal search warant process. In July 2020, Chan arranges for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections. On August 11, 2020, Chan shares information with Roth relating to the Russian hacking organization, APT28, through Teleporter.
Schellenberger notes that there were so many ex-FBI staff at Twitter that they had their own Slack channel. High-profile hires included Jim Baker (Head Counsel), who played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump, and Dawn Burton (Director of Strategy), the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump.
In Sept 2020, Roth participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential “Hack-and-Dump” operation relating to Hunter Biden. Schellenberger says the goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it
By mid-Sept, 2020, Chan & Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from FBI & Twitter could communicate. They also agree to create a “virtual war room” for “all the [Internet] industry plus FBI and ODNI” [Office of the Director of National Intelligence].
On Sept 15, 2020 the FBI’s Laura Dehmlow, who heads up the Foreign Influence Task Force, and Chan, request to give a classified briefing for Baker, without any other Twitter staff, such as Roth, present.
On Oct 14, shortly after The Post publishes the laptop story, Roth says:
It isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else…My personal view on this, unsubstantiated by hard evidence as yet, is that this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation.
The same day and the next, in response to Roth, Baker repeatedly insists that the Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy. Schellenberger:
It’s inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The Post had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019.
By 10am, Oct 15, Roth accepts the hacking story:
The suggestion from experts – which rings true – is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware (and was coincidentally reviewed in a very invasive way by someone who coincidentally then handed the materials to Rudy Giuliani). Given the severe risks we saw in this space in 2016, we’re recommending a warning + deamplification pending further information.
In Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work.
Schellenberger notes that the FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it paid Twitter over $3 million for its staff time from Oct 2019.
The Twitter Files 4 – The Removal of Donald Trump (Post Jan 7)
Following the release of The Twitter Files Part 3, which detailed senior Twitter staff’s actions up to January 7, 2021, Musk, through Shellenberger, releases The Twitter Files Part 4: The removal of Donald Trump: January 7. The files details how Twitter staff created justifications and unique policy changes so they could ban President Trump from the platform, while having no consideration for free speech issues.
On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
– create justifications to ban Trump
– seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
– express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban
This #TwitterFiles is reported with @lwoodhouse
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 10, 2022
After Jan 6, Michelle Obama; tech journalist Kara Swisher; the Anti-Defamation League, and many others called for Trump to be banned from Twitter. At that time, CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia and left the handling to Yoel Roth (Global Head of Trust and Safety) and Vijaya Gadde (Head off Legal, Policy & Trust).
Schellenberger notes that in 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to Democrats and that Roth had previously tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE”.
On Jan 7, Dorsey emails employees to say Twitter should remain consistent in its policies, including the right of users to return to Twitter after a temporary suspension. Around 11:30am PT Roth shares with colleagues that Dorsey had approved a system where five violations (“strikes”) would result in permanent suspension.
GUESS WHAT. Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.
At this point, Trump had four strikes.
On Jan 8, Twitter announces a permanent ban on Trump due to the “risk of further incitement of violence”. Twitter says its ban is based on “specifically how [Trump’s tweets] are being received & interpreted”, despite the company saying in 2019 that it did “not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”
Shellenberger notes that the only serious concern expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization.
This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope… This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world…
Roth then asks colleagues to add “stopthesteal” & [QAnon conspiracy term] “kraken” to a blacklist of terms to be deamplified. Roth’s colleague objects that blacklisting “stopthesteal” risks “deamplifying counterspeech” that validates the election. Other employees note that Kraken is the name of a cryptocurrency exchange and allowlist it. Other struggle with shared screenshots of Trump’s tweet.
Around noon, a confused senior executive in advertising sales sends a DM to Roth.
jack says: ‘we will permanently suspend [Trump] if our policies are violated after a 12 hour account lock’… what policies is jack talking about?”
Roth replies:
*ANY* policy violation
The executive then asks if Twitter is dropping its “Public-interest exceptions” policy, which allows the content of elected officials, even if it violates Twitter rules, “if it directly contributes to understanding or discussion of a matter of public concern”. Six hours later, at 7:18pm, Roth replies:
In this specific case, we’re changing our public interest approach for his account to say any violation would result in suspension.
At 12:27am Roth pushes for a permanent suspension of Rep. Matt Gaetz even though it
doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh)…I’m trying to talk [Twitter’s] safety [team] into… removal as a conspiracy that incites violence.
Around 2:30, comms execs DM Roth to say they don’t want to make a big deal of the QAnon ban to the media because they fear “if we push this it looks we’re trying to offer up something in place of the thing everyone wants,” meaning a Trump ban.
After an engineer expresses concerns that Trump’s account is being treated differently to others, Roth says:
To put a different spin on it: policy is one part of the system of how Twitter works… we ran into the world changing faster than we were able to either adapt the product or the policy.”
The Twitter Files 3 – The Removal of Donald Trump (Pre-Jan 6)
Musk, through Taibbi, releases the third installment of The Twitter Files, titled THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP Part One: October 2020-January 6th.
The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th.
3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
Taibbi provides internal Twitter messages indicating that as the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with Twitter’s rules, and began to speak of “vios” (violations) as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.
As described in Twitter Files 2, a core group, working above and outside of Twitter’s standard content moderation rules, would make ad hoc decisions on VITs (Very Important Tweeters).
Messages from Yoel Roth (Head of Trust & Safety) show he met weekly with the FBI, DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Regarding the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ban, Roth told those agencies:
We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML (f*ck my life).
Based on alerts sent by the FBI, Roth flagged tweets with warning labels. Taibbi says he could not find any such requests from Trump’s team or Republicans:
Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.
In addition to issues with Trump, Taibbi also recounts a long discussion about a joke made by Mike Huckabee about mailing in fake ballots and conversations promising to hit the actor James Woods “hard” in future, even though he had not violated any rules. Meanwhile, disputed pro-Biden tweets were approved.
Regarding Trump, Taibbi says that Twitter attached automated control “bots” to his account, which triggered automated moderation actions. Taibi says that all these bots and rules were abandoned on January 6.
The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes
Around 3:30 PST on Jan 6, Roth “bounced” (put in a 12 hr timeout) three of Trump’s tweets. A company-wide email was sent by Gadde explaining that future violations would result in a permanent suspension.
After Trump tweeted “Go home with love & in peace” mid-riot, Twitter staff wrote:
What the actual f*uck? Sorry, I actually got emotionally angry seeing that. Turns out I’m not a full robot. Who knew?
Taibbi concludes:
By the end of the first day, the top execs are still trying to apply rules. By the next day, they will contemplate a major change in approach.
Taibi says more files will be released over the coming days.
The Twitter Files 2: Twitter’s Secret Blacklists
Musk, through Weiss, releases The Twitter Files Part 2, subtitled ‘Twitter’s Secret Blacklists (also called, as a joke, ‘Part Deux’ by Musk), detailing how Twitter executives and staff used internal committees and tools to blacklist and restrict access to certain Twitter accounts in secret.
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Such actions were called Visibility Filtering (VF) and included blocking searches of individual users; limiting the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; blocking select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page and from inclusion in hashtag searches. In internal messages, Twitter employees also spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.
Users did not know about these techniques. In 2018, Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said:
We do not shadow ban.
Twitter employee:
Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool. We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,
Weiss details several accounts that were restricted, including conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was set to “Do Not Amplify”; Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children, was put on a “Trends Blacklist”; and the right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino was restricted using a “Search Blacklist”.
The Files include details about two internal committes: The first group, known as the SRT-GE (Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team) decided whether to limit the reach of certain users. It often handled up to 200 “cases” a day. The second, which was only for the largest, most politcally-sensitive decisions, was known as SIP-PES (Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support), which included Gadde, Yoel Roth (Global Head of Trust & Safety), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others. This group operated outside of Twitter’s normal abuse ticketing system,
This latter group restricted the account of @libsoftiktok, subjecting its owner to six suspensions for ‘Hateful Conduct’, despite the committe knowing that LTT has not directly engaged in behavior that violated the Hateful Conduct policy. Weiss contrasts this with Twitter taking no action over posts that revealed the account owner’s home photo and address.
Over 1000 staff leave Twitter after Musk’s ultimatum
Fortune magazine estimates that Twitter loses 1000-1200 staff, out of 2700 remaining, including multiple ‘critical’ engineering teams after Musk send a mail asking staff to commit to hardcore work or leave the company. A former emplyee said the resignations will affect the company’s perfomance.
I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers. There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.
The estimated 2,500 who are said to remain, have been locked out of their offices until Monday at least over fears they could sabotage the site. Many staff shared their departures on social media, including Twitter staff in Boston, who counted down their final seconds in the company.
It’s been a ride pic.twitter.com/0VDf5hn2UA
— Matt Miller (@brainiaq2000) November 17, 2022
Following the mass resignations, Musk sends an email asking ‘anyone who actually writes software’ to meet him at the Silicon Valley office on Friday at 2pm:
Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commands have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code,” Musk wrote in the first of three emails reportedly sent around midnight PT Friday.
Musk ‘rehires’ Ligma and Johnson
Musk ‘rehires’ Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson, the two fake employess who pranked news networks by claiming to be laid off Twitter employees. Ligma later claimed he had been hired and fired by FTX.
Welcoming back Ligma & Johnson! Important to admit when I’m wrong & firing them was truly one of my biggest mistakes
Important to admit when I’m wrong & firing them was truly one of my biggest mistakes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022
SpaceX buys Twitter Starlink ad campaign
Musk confirms SpaceX purchased a $250,000 ad campaign on Twitter to promote Starlink services in Australia and Spain, which will place SpaceX’s ad on top of the main Twitter timeline for a full day. Users will see the ad the first three times they open Twitter when the ad campaign is scheduled. The ad buy is the first for any of Musk’s companies, including Tesla, which does not engage in traditional advertising.
SpaceX Starlink bought a tiny – not large – ad package to test effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia & Spain. Did same for FB/Insta/Google.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022
Musk sells $3.95 billion of Tesla stock
Regulatory filings show Musk sold nearly $4 billion worth of Tesla shares, bringing his total sold since April to $19 billion. He sold $7 billion in August. These three most recent blocks of Tesla stock sales represent only 4% of the shares that Musk owns outright through a trust, and less than 3% of his holdings if options that he has to buy additional shares are included.
Musk’s filings did not disclose the reason for those earlier stock sales. But after someone on Twitter asked him if he was done selling Tesla shares, he responded “Yes” and then pointed to the possibility of being forced to buy Twitter as the reason for those sales. Shares of Tesla are down almost 50% this year.
Musk: Twitter usage at an all-time high
Musk says Twitter’s usage is at an all -time high:
Twitter usage is at an all-time high lol, I just hope the servers don’t melt!
I just hope the servers don’t melt!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 8, 2022
He later posts two charts that show Twitter’s mDAU (number of monetizable daily active users) at over 255 million glabal users, of which over 45 million are in the United States.
Twitter fires 50% of staff by email
Twitter begins laying off up to 50% of its workforce, sending a mail titled Your Role at Twitter to the personal emails of laid-off employees.
Today is your last working day at the company.
Those laid off will remain employed by Twitter and receive compensation and benefits until the first week of January 2023, though the date may vary. Affected employees are locked out of their Twitter systems, such as email and Slack, and have been told that they will receive their non-negotiable severance offer within the week, when they are required to hand in their badges and company laptops or computers. In other emails the company acknowledges the impact of the layoffs:
We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.
Musk wants $1 billion Twitter infrastructure cut
To stem loses of $3 million per day, Musk asks Twitter’s teams until November 7 to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings. Internal company messages titled, ‘Deep Cuts Plan’, ask for between $1.5 and $3 million per day savings from servers and cloud services. Critics say the cuts could cause outages duing times of high demand. Source:
[Musk] is willing to introduce that risk to meet these goals
Some employesss ordered to work in the office every day of the week to meet the deadline.
Musk dissolves Twitter’s board of directors
SEC filings [doc] show that Musk has dissolved Twitters Board of Directors and has become the company’s sole director.
Item 5.02: Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers.
On October 27, 2022, and as a result of the consummation of the Merger, Mr. Musk became the sole director of Twitter. In accordance with the terms of the Merger Agreement, effective as of the effective time of the Merger, the following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the Merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou.