Moderators: Alyrium Denryle, Edi, K. A. Pital
Let's be blunt -- Glass Onion was based on Musk. Dead Stop.Darth Yan wrote: ↑2023-02-01 09:47pm Musk is basically like Spoilerfrom Glass Onion. He puts on airs of being smart when really he's kind of an idiot who relies on others to do his thing. Musk is certainly good at fooling people into thinking he's smart, but when actually put in difficult situations it kinda shows.
Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads
5:21 AM · Feb 4, 2023
There might be enough people who don't see the scam for Twitter to get a surge of Blue subscribers. Until they realize that the money they get is less than what they are paying.To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified
5:23 AM · Feb 4, 2023
It sounds like any ads that show on the page when you click an individual tweet will send money to whoever posted that tweet. The replies to it, which are the reason you're scrolling down the page and seeing the ads, will get nothing. Unless you click their tweet to read the replies to it.
How bad does Twitter's response to CSAM have to get before it starts looking like they are intentionally allowing it ?Twitter’s internal detection of child sexual abuse materials may be failing.
ASHLEY BELANGER - 2/7/2023, 9:01 AM
Last week, Twitter Safety tweeted that the platform is now “moving faster than ever” to remove child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). It seems, however, that’s not entirely accurate. Child safety advocates told The New York Times that after Elon Musk took over, Twitter started taking twice as long to remove CSAM flagged by various organizations.
The platform has since improved and is now removing CSAM almost as fast as it was before Musk’s takeover—responding to reports in less than two days—The Times reported. But there still seem to be issues with its CSAM reporting system that continue to delay response times. In one concerning case, a Canadian organization spent a week notifying Twitter daily—as the illegal imagery of a victim younger than 10 spread unchecked—before Twitter finally removed the content.
"From our standpoint, every minute that that content's up, it's re-victimizing that child," Gavin Portnoy, vice president of communications for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), told Ars. "That's concerning to us."
Twitter trust and safety chief Ella Irwin tweeted last week that combating CSAM is “incredibly hard,” but remains Twitter Safety’s “No. 1 priority.” Irwin told The Times that despite challenges, Twitter agrees with experts and is aware that much more can be done to proactively block exploitative materials. Experts told the Times that Twitter’s understaffing of its trust and safety team is a top concern, and sources confirmed that Twitter has stopped investing in partnerships and technology that were previously working to improve the platform’s effectiveness at rapidly removing CSAM.
“In no way are we patting ourselves on the back and saying, ‘Man, we’ve got this nailed,’” Irwin told The Times.
Twitter did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Red flags raised by Twitter’s low-budget CSAM strategy
Twitter Safety tweeted that in January, Twitter suspended approximately 404,000 accounts that created, distributed, or engaged with CSAM. This was 112 percent more account suspensions than the platform reported in November, Twitter said, backing up its claim that it has been moving “faster than ever.”
In the same tweet thread, Twitter promised that the company has been “building new defenses that proactively reduce the discoverability” of tweets spreading CSAM. The company did not provide much clarity on what these new defense measures included, only reporting a vague claim that one such new defense against child sexual exploitation (CSE) “reduced the number of successful searches for known CSE patterns by over 99% since December.”
Portnoy told Ars that NCMEC is concerned that what Twitter is publicly reporting doesn't match what NCMEC sees in its own Twitter data from its cyber tipline.
"You've got Ella Irwin out there saying that they're taking down more than ever, it's priority number one, and what we're seeing on our end, our data isn't showing that," Portnoy told Ars.
Other child safety organizations have raised some red flags over how Twitter has been handling CSAM in this same time period. Sources told the Times that Twitter has stopped paying for CSAM-detection software built by an anti-trafficking organization, Thorn, while also cutting off any continued collaboration on improving that software. Portnoy confirmed to Ars that NCMEC and Twitter remain seemingly divided by a disagreement over Twitter’s policy not to report to authorities all suspended accounts spreading CSAM.
Out of 404,000 suspensions in January, Twitter reported approximately 8,000 accounts. Irwin told the Times that Twitter is only obligated to report suspended accounts to authorities when the company has “high confidence that the person is knowingly transmitting” CSAM. Any accounts claiming to be selling or distributing CSAM off of Twitter—but not directly posting CSAM on Twitter—seemingly don’t meet Twitter’s threshold for reporting to authorities. Irwin confirmed that most Twitter account suspensions “involved accounts that engaged with the material or were claiming to sell or distribute it, rather than those that posted it,” the Times reported.
Portnoy said that the reality is that these account suspensions "very much do warrant cyber tips."
"If we can get that information, we might be able to get the child out of harm's way or give something actionable to law enforcement, and the fact that we're not seeing that stuff is concerning," Portnoy told Ars.
The Times wanted to test out how well Twitter was working to combat CSAM. So the organization created an automated computer program to detect CSAM without displaying any illegal imagery, partnering with the Canadian Center for Child Protection to cross-reference CSAM found with illegal content previously identified in the center’s database. The Canadian center’s executive director, Lianna McDonald, tweeted this morning to encourage more child safety groups to speak out against Twitter seemingly becoming a platform of choice for Internet users on the dark web openly discussing strategies for finding CSAM on Twitter.
“This reporting begs the question: Why is it that verified CSAM (i.e., images known to industry and police) can be uploaded and hosted on Twitter without being immediately detected by image or video blocking technology?” McDonald tweeted. “In addition to the issue of image and video detection, Twitter also has a problem with the way it is used by offenders to promote, in plain sight, links to CSAM on other websites.”
While Irwin seems confident that Twitter is “getting a lot better” at moderating CSAM, some experts told the Times that Twitter wasn’t even taking basic steps to prioritize child safety as the company claims it has been. Lloyd Richardson, the technology director at the Canadian center, which ran its own scan for CSAM on Twitter to complement the Times' analysis, told the Times that “the volume we’re able to find with a minimal amount of effort is quite significant.”
What steps should Twitter be taking?
McDonald recommended that Twitter combat CSAM more proactively by implementing tools like age verification systems to prevent anonymous uploads and investigating whether its proactive detection systems are “making full and complete use of available hash databases” to stop previously identified CSAM from spreading.
Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, told Ars that because Twitter has access to the exact same Microsoft PhotoDNA API that the Times used to readily detect CSAM on the platform, Twitter should investigate whether its internal scanning tools might be failing. To get Twitter back on track—as word on the dark web spreads that it’s easy to find CSAM on Twitter—Stamos also recommends rebuilding “the child safety team that was decimated by Twitter’s staff cuts." But Stamos said that won’t be easy.
“These are very hard people to hire, as the number of folks with the technical or investigatory capabilities you need who are willing to do this work is very small, and Musk’s public behavior has probably driven several qualified people away from considering the roles,” Stamos told Ars.
Irwin did not comment on tensions rising from Twitter’s wavering partnerships with child safety organizations but told the Times that Twitter has been expanding its child safety team.
Whether Twitter users can trust Irwin’s word regarding safety issues on the platform was a question raised in December when Musk contradicted Irwin’s statements over another Twitter safety feature that had been providing resources for users who may be considering self-harm or suicide. Musk disavowed Irwin’s statement that the resource temporarily was removed as “fake news,” and then the matter was seemingly quickly dropped, as Irwin continued on as trust and safety chief. No one ever addressed the contradicting reports from Twitter, but Twitter's Community Notes feature supported Musk's comments as the truth, not Irwin's.
Irwin staying on despite having her comments disavowed by Musk is likely a comfort to some child safety organizations that have grown weary of Twitter’s currently low levels of child safety team staffing. NCMEC executive John Shehan told the Times that he was concerned about Twitter’s “high-level turnover,” partly because that turnover makes it harder to truly track the company’s stance on “trust and safety and their commitment to identifying and removing child sexual abuse material from their platform.”
Portnoy told Ars that despite the uptick in moderation in January, NCMEC is still seeing a degradation in Twitter's response time to remove CSAM. NCMEC would prefer to see illegal content removed within minutes or hours, not days, and Portnoy told Ars that Twitter had been moving in that direction when suddenly, NCMEC observed the drop in Twitter response time, just after Musk took over.
"What the heck happened?" Portnoy said. "They were doing really good. Then all this change happened, and now they're not so good."
FTC compliance is coming. EU compliance is coming. Both seem like they will be a big surprise for Musk, because he's creating a culture where staff fear telling him the truth.Inside Twitter 2.0, turmoil leaves employees stretched to the max
Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton
Feb 10
For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)
Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.
It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.
“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.
Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.
An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.
“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”
Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency.
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers.
“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The 8th floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.
“Most weeknights, they are fully booked,” another current employee said.
The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? “Sucks – and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”
Slack – once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything – has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.”
“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”
When Musk or the goons ask questions, employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer.
“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)
Despite the turmoil, remaining employees say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” has managed to improve on its predecessor in at least some ways.
“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”
The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”
At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”
With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other, overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.
“They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on,” one employee said.
Meanwhile, the recent wave of layoffs in the tech industry have contributed to a feeling of paralysis among those who remain at Twitter.
“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.
Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you regulators,’” we’re told.
The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says.
Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines, and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.
He's becoming more like his buddy Putin every day.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2023-02-10 11:51pm First, the news about how Twitter is violating EU law:
Twitter hit with EU yellow card for lack of transparency on disinformation
Want to delete your Twitter DMs? Good luck with that
Now for news about how Musk is treating the remaining workers:
Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count
FTC compliance is coming. EU compliance is coming. Both seem like they will be a big surprise for Musk, because he's creating a culture where staff fear telling him the truth.Inside Twitter 2.0, turmoil leaves employees stretched to the max
Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton
Feb 10
For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)
Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.
It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.
“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.
Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.
Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.
An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.
“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”
Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency.
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers.
“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The 8th floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.
“Most weeknights, they are fully booked,” another current employee said.
The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? “Sucks – and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”
Slack – once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything – has gone dormant. One current employee described it as a “ghost town.”
“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my colleagues on Signal and WhatsApp than I do on Slack. Before the transition, it was not uncommon in the team channel to talk about what everybody did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”
When Musk or the goons ask questions, employees are torn between giving the right answer and the safe answer.
“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)
Despite the turmoil, remaining employees say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” has managed to improve on its predecessor in at least some ways.
“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”
The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.”
At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”
With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other, overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.
“They have to become code archaeologists to dig through the repo and figure out what’s going on,” one employee said.
Meanwhile, the recent wave of layoffs in the tech industry have contributed to a feeling of paralysis among those who remain at Twitter.
“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.
Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you regulators,’” we’re told.
The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says.
Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines, and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.
On the one hand, we are talking about SMS 2FA here. The least secure means of 2FA. One that you should only use if you have no other choice.By
Twitter Inc.
Wednesday, 15 February 2023
We continue to be committed to keeping people safe and secure on Twitter, and a primary security tool we offer to keep your account secure is two-factor authentication (2FA). Instead of only entering a password to log in, 2FA requires you to also enter a code or use a security key. This additional step helps make sure that you, and only you, can access your account. To date, we have offered three methods of 2FA: text message, authentication app, and security key.
While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used - and abused - by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers. The availability of text message 2FA for Twitter Blue may vary by country and carrier.
Non-Twitter Blue subscribers that are already enrolled will have 30 days to disable this method and enroll in another. After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text message 2FA still enabled will have it disabled. Disabling text message 2FA does not automatically disassociate your phone number from your Twitter account. If you would like to do so, instructions to update your account phone number are available on our Help Center.
We encourage non-Twitter Blue subscribers to consider using an authentication app or security key method instead. These methods require you to have physical possession of the authentication method and are a great way to ensure your account is secure.
Learn more about two-factor authentication on Twitter on our Help Center.
Some of those employees will immediately sell any stock they get given (if Musk follows through on this promise). The price they get will make Musk very unhappy./ In an internal memo, he calls the company’s most recent round of layoffs ‘a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution.’
By ALEX HEATH / @alexeheath
Feb 28, 2023, 5:49 AM GMT+13
Elon Musk emailed his remaining employees at Twitter on Monday morning to tell them that, after another round of sudden layoffs over the weekend, those who are left will receive “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24th, according to an internal memo obtained by The Verge.
“This past week, we completed a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company,” Musk wrote. “Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them.”
The short memo, titled “Performance Awards,” is Musk’s first communication to Twitter employees since he laid off hundreds more of them, including several senior loyalists and nearly all of the product team without warning over the weekend. (Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer first tweeted about the memo.)
After several rounds of cuts and demanding that employees be “extremely hardcore,” Musk hasn’t yet shared details about how he will make up for the stock awards that went away when he took Twitter private. In previous internal comments, he has alluded to the system he set up at SpaceX to let employees regularly sell the company’s stock to interested investors. Given Twitter’s distressed financial situation relative to SpaceX, it’s unclear what the appetite for its stock will be in the short term.
Meanwhile, Musk has made it difficult for the people who work at Twitter to know the full scope of his cuts. The company’s internal directory has been offline since he took over. Last week, Musk shut down the ability for employees to use the company’s Slack. After turning off Slack, Musk also disabled Google Chat for work emails without explanation — a move that employees now think was intended to thwart internal communication during the layoffs.
Current and former employees I’ve spoken to estimate that Twitter’s total headcount is well below 2,000 now versus the roughly 7,500 people on the payroll when Musk took over. As one employee who was just laid off told me, “I think he’s just tearing this thing down to the studs and trying to run as lean as possible till the market turns around.”
I know I would sell the stock as fast as I could.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2023-03-01 06:41am Some of those employees will immediately sell any stock they get given (if Musk follows through on this promise). The price they get will make Musk very unhappy.
I've read someone before saying that all Musk's expectations of people working "hardcore" and "believing in the vision" were things that go on in startups. Paying people in stock would fit with that.
So could just being in the room when Mr Musk is in one of his moods, by the sound of it.
Looks like Amazon has figured out how to get money out of Twitter without involving the courts.Musk's Twitter is still $70m behind on payments
March 05, 2023 By Sebastian Moss
Since Elon Musk acquired the company, Twitter has begun to not pay landlords, cleaners, and software companies for services rendered.
Now, The Information reports that the company has for months refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills, despite using the cloud service for key aspects of the social media platform.
This lack of payment caused Amazon to threaten retaliation, with the corporation saying that it would not pay for the advertising it runs on Twitter - thought to be around $1 million in the first quarter for retail, and more when Amazon Studios is taken into account. This may have had some impact, with Twitter paying $10m in AWS costs a few weeks ago.
But The Information reports that there is at least $70 million still outstanding, and AWS is not willing to renegotiate the five-and-a-half year contract it signed with Twitter in 2020.
That contract required Twitter to pay $510m over that period. It was signed when Twitter was expecting to move its main timeline over to AWS, but that never occurred (instead it hosts Twitter Spaces and other services), meaning that Twitter is not fully making use of the contract.
Twitter uses Google Cloud to a greater degree, with its own five-year contract worth $1bn. While Twitter is also looking to reduce its Google Cloud costs, Twitter is up to date on payments - perhaps because it is a larger advertiser, and pays to license Twitter's data so that it shows up in Google Search.
Google has not agreed to any contract renegotiations.
At the same time, Musk has closed one of Twitter's three US data centers, cut back on server capacity, and fired IT and software workers that kept the service online. It has experienced a number of major outages since he took over.
