The clusterfrack inside Twitter continues today. The lastest from Gergely Orosz who had his blue checkmark removed by Elon’s Army after Gergely began reporting what his sources inside Twitter are showing him via emails and texts:
“Less than an hour as a deadline”.
Nothing says “you are important” to someone as being fired, then three days later being told “you are a replaceable cog, but we will take you back, but only if you say yes in the next 60 minutes, otherwise you’re dead to us.”
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Running a media company is easy, Goof, if you are a Superior Being with adoring acolytes who will do your dirt work and never question your authority.
Meanwhile, Musk, Zuck, and Bytedance have got to be blinking at this news:
Supposedly, new “users” are up while advertisers are down. And loads of Liberal Tesla owners are saying they will sell their cars and never support an Elon endeavour again after his “Vote Republican” yammering on Twitter yesterday.
Another concern among advertisers has been Musk’s own tweeting, including his now-deleted tweet amplifying a baseless conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi. “Do the same rules apply to Elon as to everyone else on Twitter?” reads one part of the Twitter advertiser FAQ. The answer is simply, “Yes.”
It also restates Musk’s claim that Twitter won’t change its content moderation policies [until it forms and convenes]
(Elon Musk says Twitter will have a ‘content moderation council’ - The Verge) a “content moderation council of widely diverse viewpoints.” It’s unclear if Musk knows that Twitter already has a Trust and Safety Council of outside experts.
The maker of Jeep SUVs and Ram pickup trucks has joined the flock of companies pausing paid advertising on Twitter after Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk bought the social media platform.
Stellantis NV on Monday confirmed it had pulled paid advertisements after last week, saying it would exercise “vigilance” under the new leadership through its ad agencies.
“We’re pausing paid advertising posts," spokeswoman Diane Morgan said in a statement, “until we have a clearer understanding of the future of the platform under its new leadership.”
An interesting Wall Street Journal story about Tesla:
The electric-vehicle pioneer is hugely reliant on China. The world’s largest EV market ac-counted for about 24% of Tesla’s revenues in the first three quarters of this year, but the company’s bigger dependence is in production. The Shanghai plant is its largest manu-facturing and export hub, with room to make more than 750,000 Model 3s or Model Ys—roughly two-fifths of its global capac-ity. Not coincidentally, the rise of this factory has mirrored the increase in Tesla’s margins over the past couple of years. The company also needs China’s battery materials: It gets lithium compounds from Chinese suppliers Ganfeng and Yahua, for example.
If I was a troublemaker, I think I would start putting a “Free Taiwan” hashtag at the end of every Tweet, and seeing what effect that might have on Mr. Free Speech. Heh.
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This headline from CNBC: “Elon Musk took over a struggling business with Twitter and has quickly made it worse”
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Headline from the Atlantic: Elon Musk Is Bad At This
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Woah! Canada’s Globe and Mail Headline: “Elon Musk has gone too far. It’s time to boycott Tesla”
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$STLA Stellantis discontinues advertising on Twitter:
DETROIT/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Stellantis said on Monday it is pausing all paid advertising posts on Twitter as it waits to see what the platform will look like under the leadership of its new owner Elon Musk.
“We’re pausing paid advertising posts until we have a clearer understanding of the future of the platform under its new leadership," the automaker said of Twitter in a statement to Reuters. Stellantis was created from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot maker PSA.
$STLA daily, weekly, and monthly charts
On the eve of completing his takeover deal for Twitter late last month, Elon Musk made a public pledge to advertisers that the looser content moderation policies he had in mind for the platform would not foment hate speech and turn Twitter into a “free-for-all hellscape.”
While Musk explores how to boost Twitter’s revenue through subscriptions—including charging users $8 monthly to unlock special features including a blue check mark—for the time being, advertising continues to account for 90% of Twitter’s overall revenue.
But only a few weeks into Musk’s tenure, Twitter has already seen a worrying surge in hate speech, as a wave of layoffs last week leaves the company with a skeleton crew to guard against online trolls who are testing the boundaries of what is permissible on the platform.
And despite Musk’s assurances, a growing list of companies are pulling their ads from Twitter for fear of being associated with its service’s expanding chorus of hateful voices.
Twitter owner Elon Musk told employees on Thursday that he is not sure how much run rate the company has and that bankruptcy is not out of the question, the Managing Editor of tech newsletter Platformer tweeted.
Musk is participating in an all-hands meeting with Twitter employees, a source told Reuters.
“From one entrepreneur to another, for when you have your customer service hat on,” Cuban tweeted at Musk. “I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark [accounts] in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again. Hope this helps.”
A stack of a billion $1 bills would be 68 miles high, but it would probably fall over. If you put 44 stacks of them together and banded them somehow maybe they would stand up, and then you could light them on fire and watch them burn. The fire would probably last longer than Twitter will after Musk finishes with it.
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Well a stack of 1000 44 million dollar stacks would be about 10 by ten and would still be about 360 feet tall. This would be unstable. While this might be a good metaphor for something, 10,000 stacks of 440,000 one dollar bills would be about 30 by 30 and be about 39 feet tall. It would be pretty stable, but the outside surface area to the internal volume ratio would be fairly low. As such the internal bills would have little air to support combustion and the fire would last a lot longer and might even go out. So the comparison to Twitter might not hold up.
Cheers
Qazulight
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And the blowback will now be much more severe from advertisers.
Look what happened to $LLY Eli Lilly tonight:
$8.00 to damage any corporation’s name. Cheap.
Update:
Ole Musky has got to be feeling like Vladmir Putin right about now:
Elon Musk dragged his feet before shelling out $44 billion to buy Twitter, and by all appearances he now doesn’t know what to do with it. The billionaire’s plans seem to change by the hour—from his overhaul of the blue-check verification system, to the way he actually implements his “free speech” principles—leaving users, and Twitter’s remaining employees, frequently in the dark.
Things were easier when the world’s richest man was simply a Twitter troll, lobbing grenades at its leadership and making juvenile references to the numbers “420” and “69.” But now the trolls have come for Musk.
The chaos is wreaking havoc on the platform, and creating challenges for Musk as he works to salvage his investment. Internally, he has spoken candidly about the bleak situation, claiming in an email to employees early Thursday that there is “a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn” unless it can dramatically boost revenue from premium subscriptions.
The $8.00 Rudy Fake thread must be read for a laugh. And Jesus is back and on Twitter taking names?:
Musk has pointed out that these accounts are being taken down after they’re reported, but that has just been an unwinnable game of Whac-A-Mole. People have already impersonated LeBron James, ESPN analyst Adam Schefter, Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, video game companies Nintendo and Valve, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, and, in several cases, Musk himself. There’s also a verified Jesus Christ. On Thursday, someone posing as the verified account of Musk’s car manufacturer Tesla shared an infamous photo of him with convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, presenting the pair as the “amazing founders” of the company.
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$8.00 is a cheap price to pay for fraudulent identification from a master manipulator of Twitter.
Elon Musk‘s new vision for Twitter seems to be going swimmingly — if the plan was to immediately roll back his long-awaited double verification scheme and have the few employees he has left spend the past 24 hours battling an increasing tide of misinformation, that is. Twitter Blue is officially live, and with it comes the Musk-given power to be anyone you want to be for a mere $8 a month. But as Twitter’s new owner continues to espouse the app’s democratization of status, a new wave is coming that even the tech CEO might find difficult to battle: good old-fashioned shame.
Twitter’s short-lived double verification, which placed an official tag underneath verified accounts, was an effort to prevent disinformation and flag “real accounts” to users. But after quickly rolling that feature back, the only way to tell the legitimacy of an account is by clicking on its verified badge. If you were verified before Twitter Blue was released or because you’re a public figure, a flag will appear with the words “This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category.” If you’ve paid for your verified badge, the flag reads, “this account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue.”