Oct 26 (Reuters) - Billionaire Elon Musk said he paid a visit to Twitter Inc’s (TWTR.N) headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday, ahead of a court-ordered deadline to close his $44 billion deal for the social media platform.
“Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” said the caption of a video that Musk tweeted in which he was walking into the Twitter office carrying a sink in his hands.
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Banks have started to send $13 billion in cash backing Musk’s takeover of Twitter in a sign that the deal is on track to close by the end of the week, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Once final closing conditions are met, the funds will be made available for Musk to execute the transaction by the Friday deadline, the report added.
$TWTR/Musk humor on Twitter tonight:
Today’s latest $TWTR/Elon news:
“Chirp chirp bi**h,” Alexander wrote, referencing Twitter’s “bird” branding.
Others who may soon be granted access to Twitter include Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Trump adviser turned possible future federal prisoner Steve Bannon, hate figures Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and InfoWars founder Alex Jones. Musk’s purchase could also mean new prospects for movements and groups banned from Twitter when it was a public company, like the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory movement.
If Musk rolls back Twitter’s bans, it could return the site to the more anarchic days of 2014 or 2016, when Gamergate trolls and attention-hungry right-wing personalities roamed free across the platform and organized harassment mobs against targets like women in the videogames industry or Saturday Night Live star Leslie Jones. That return has the potential of turning off other users, but early signs indicate it’s a risk Musk is willing to take.
My question is why would anyone fake being a $TWTR employee who just got fired and who will knowingly photographed by the Press at the front doors of Twitter.
Elon Musk’s first day owning Twitter leads to havoc and a possible hoax about layoffs
On Elon Musk’s first day in control of Twitter, a person who walked out of the company’s San Francisco headquarters and identified themselves as a data engineer there said they were just laid off. CNBC was not able to immediately verify the identity of that person and one other who made a similar claim.
Reuters) - Twitter-owner Elon Musk said on Friday that he did not have a hand in reinstating rapper Kanye West’s account, which was suspended by the micro-blogging site earlier this month for posting anti-Semitic remarks.
The billionaire said Twitter had restored the account of the rapper, now known as Ye, before the completion of the social media platform’s $44 billion takeover late on Thursday. “They did not consult with or inform me,” Musk said in a tweet.
Ye, who has over 30 million followers on Twitter, has courted controversy in recent months by publicly ending major corporate tie-ups and making outbursts on social media against other celebrities.
Last day as a traded company was yesterday for $TWTR and here is what the daily, weekly, and monthly charts looked like:
In the wake of Elon Musk buying Twitter Inc., a tide of slurs and racist memes swelled on the platform, sparking concern that the site is entering an era of hateful speech.
Twitter has long wrestled with how to enforce content policies fairly on its platform in order to appease the advertisers, users and powerful world leaders that use its service. But as Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist,” took over ownership of the company, some conservative officials, partisan extremists and conspiracy peddlers saw reason to celebrate the change.
“It seems like this is a group of people who think the rules magically changed as soon as he signed on the dotted line,” said Katie Harbath, the chief executive officer and founder of Anchor Change and former public policy director at Facebook.
More:
Overnight and into Friday, racist slurs, anti-Semitic speech and offensive memes surged on the platform, with users egging each other on in far-right message boards such as The Donald, and on messaging apps like Telegram and on internet forums like 4chan.
For hours on Thursday afternoon, a racist slur remained at a low volume on Twitter, with less than a dozen or so mentions every five minutes across the entire platform, according to data from Dataminr, a social media analysis platform. After the news broke that Musk had closed the deal on Twitter, there was a 1,300% increase in the word appearing on the platform in various languages, including Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese. At its peak, the word appeared 170 times every five minutes, according to the data.
Mentions of ivermectin, the deworming drug popular among those seeking alternative treatments for Covid-19 in spite of a lack of strong research to back it up, also shot up 2,900% on Twitter, peaking at 358 mentions every five minutes, according to Dataminr.
“He’ll either need to dramatically reduce expenses, or significantly increase revenue, or both,” said Drew Pascarella, a senior lecturer on finance at Cornell University in New York state.
Can Musk grow the revenue and expand the number of users – there are more than 238 million of them – without alienating advertisers or pushing away the new sign-ups that will help make the platform a truly representative town square?
Advertisers will not want to put money behind a fractious, ultra-divisive platform, and would-be Twitter newbies will not want to join it either.
Twitter’s central role in the media landscape could also be at risk, but only if Musk’s changes made it so toxic as to be unusable, according to one media expert.
“Journalists have also invested a lot of time in curating their feeds to bring them a range of high-quality information about politics, but also about any niche, passion or journalistic beat you can think of,” said Nic Newman, a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “It is hard to see another network that does that as effectively or as efficiently right now.”
But, he added, if the platform lost those attributes or became too divisive, it would become less attractive to the media, which gave the platform great influence relative to its small size. And of course “that’s unlikely to be good business for Twitter either”, said Newman.
A good thread shedding light on $TWTR’s stock based compensation over the years. This also looks at long suffering shareholders who were oblivious to the enrichment by insiders.
Meanwhile back at the Ranch, Boss Man Musk is letting some more hands go which causes fired employees to class action sue Musk about Federal Laws requiring X Amount of days notification before layoffs can take place in America. Hmmm, maybe this is why I cannot get into my account at the moment?
According to the company email, the layoff process will take place via email, and all employees will receive an email by 9 a.m. PT/noon ET on Friday with the subject line “Your Role at Twitter.”
Employees were told, via the company email Thursday, that they would receive a notification to their Twitter email if their employment was not impacted, and they would receive a notification to their personal email with next steps if their employment is impacted.
In the company email, Twitter said its offices are temporarily closed and “all badge access will be suspended.”
Yeah, here we go. The class action lawsuit:
Staff have started sharing messages of support with each other on Twitter, using the workplace hashtag #OneTeam - with one tweeting: “Just lost access to my Twitter email and Slack. This is so unreal.”
Twitter is being sued over the layoffs, according to Bloomberg, which cited a class-action lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court. Staff claim the company is in violation of federal and California law because employees have not been given enough notice.
The company moved to reassure staff last month that there were no plans for mass redundancies after it was reported that Musk wanted to make 75% of the 7,500-strong workforce redundant after his $44bn (£38.4bn) takeover.
Hmmmm, I’m still locked out of my Twitter account, but I was able to scoop this URL to a tweet which shows the change in opinions about Elon Musk in graph form:
Some of the spitballed ideas coming out of Musk’s team show no understanding of Twitter’s more responisble users:
Dear Matt,
Now that free-speech champion Elon Musk has taken the reins at Twitter, will you finally join? And if you do, will you rent a blue check from their new ego validation system?
Thanks,
Freedom of Screech
Hmmm, let me think about that for all of a half a second. Okay, I’m done. Yeah, no. I’d rather eat a bowl of live puppies with dead-kitten sprinkles than join the “new and improved” Twitter. I probably shouldn’t say that, of course. Everyone’s favorite publicity-tapeworm of a billionaire – the man who puts the “a
**” in Asperger’s – will likely acquire Substack and ruin my life one day. Much as he is ruining the lives of the 50 percent or so of the Twitter workforce he’s sacking in yet another of his impulsive man-baby tantrums. Perhaps only someone as capricious and unbalanced as Elon Musk could make me almost feel sorry for Twitter executives, who have now been helping befoul the public square since 2006. Which, to put a time frame around it that Musk might better relate to, was roughly four illegitimate children ago. (Admittedly kind of impressive, fertility-wise – Herschel Walker numbers!) Here’s hoping he pays more careful attention to his new baby than he seemingly has to his old ones.But I’ve resisted joining The Borg since the beginning – despite the pressure of media peers who basically live on Twitter – not for any ideological reasons. Just because undergoing a hive-mind lobotomy has never been high on my to-do list. I don’t need to be more online to ignore what the Village Kvetchers are kvetching about on any given day. I can already do that in meatspace. (Note to Kanye: my use of Yiddish is not an anti-Semitic swipe – don’t get excited.)
Not to brag, but here I am nearly a decade ago, beating the snot out of Twitter for 8,000 words or so, long before blowing snot-rockets at Twitter was cool. I did so in a magazine. (Remember those?) And what was then considered a “conservative” publication, but which would now be considered the house organ of anti-M**A heresy and RINO cuckery, at least by the droogs who are capable of sounding out the large, three-syllable words we sometimes employed.
I once had a conversation with someone who opined that ‘running a newspaper is easy”. Because… you just wait for stuff to happen and then write about it.
I suspect Musk’s idea of how Twitter works is similarly simpleminded, and similarly wrong.
- Goofyhoofy
The Twitter Train Wreck is still in motion and most of Musk’s cult worshippers think everything is going well. I just got back on Twitter after being locked out of my account last week and I’m seeing bad omens everywhere. One thing I notice right off is there are way more ads which don’t interest me in the least. Also, some people I followed have left Twitter for good and I have no idea where they may have migrated to:
At least one Twitter employee was booted from the company’s system in the middle of a call about Twitter Blue, three sources familiar with the meeting told The New York Times. The group, led by project manager Esther Crawford, was discussing updates to the subscription product and issues when one person just dropped off the call, the sources said.
Musk has been criticized over how the layoffs were handled. Several former Twitter employees filed a lawsuit on Thursday in California accusing Twitter of violating the WARN Act, a federal law that mandates businesses with 100 employees or more to give 60 days notice of mass layoffs.
“This is a master class in how not to do it,” Sandra Sucher, a Harvard University professor who studies layoffs, told the Times, noting it was uncommon to see layoffs of this scale done so rapidly without a clear explanation. “If you were going to rank order ways to upset people, telling them you’re going to do it in advance, without rationale, that is a particularly inhumane way to treat them.”