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For Trump, that required the contracts that did not have terms allowing whoever he owed money to also recover the court costs.
Hopefully we don't see anyone attacked over tweets that were undeleted.from the things-keep-breaking dept
Thu, May 25th 2023 01:31pm - Mike Masnick
A whole bunch of media articles are noting that Twitter users who deleted tweets have noticed in recent weeks that the deleted tweets have magically returned. There seems to be little rhyme or reason for which deleted tweets have returned, but it’s definitely happening to many users. In some cases, people said they had deleted tens of thousands of tweets, only to find them all come back.
Twitter has said nothing, and people are generally guessing what happened. A former Twitter employee says that maybe some servers were moved between data centers, and that they “didn’t properly adjust the topology before reinserting them into the network, leading to stale data becoming revived.”
This is the kind of thing that happens when you kick nearly all of the institutional knowledge that held your newly owned website together out the door.
Anyway, for most people this isn’t that big of a deal, but there is real potential for harm. There are many reasons why people might delete old tweets, and some of them may be to protect themselves. There could be legal reasons to delete a tweet. Or reasons to protect against harassment.
Having such tweets come back to life (without notification) creates a real risk that actual harm could occur. This is the kind of thing that a good engineering team, working with a good trust & safety team would, you know, strive to prevent, in order to keep the users of a platform safe.
But, it’s been made abundantly clear that this is not something that Elon Musk cares about. Putting people in danger is fine, just so long as he continues to be the center of attention.
If he was fired, that means Musk is still getting rid of the people with the institutional knowledge needed to keep Twitter running. Also Musk not talking about it is unusual.LadyTevar wrote: ↑2023-05-26 07:52am Top Twitter Engineer Quits After DeSantis Launch
The article doesn't go a lot into the why, but here's the sacrificial goat we knew was coming.
Although I'm still wondering if someone screwed it up on purpose.
With all the shit Musk's pulled, I don't believe in Coincidence when it comes to Twitter.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2023-05-26 08:03amIf he was fired, that means Musk is still getting rid of the people with the institutional knowledge needed to keep Twitter running. Also Musk not talking about it is unusual.LadyTevar wrote: ↑2023-05-26 07:52am Top Twitter Engineer Quits After DeSantis Launch
The article doesn't go a lot into the why, but here's the sacrificial goat we knew was coming.
Although I'm still wondering if someone screwed it up on purpose.
So I think this might be coincidental timing when this engineer found a job elsewhere.
Except for the 'increased profits' and 'nothing immediately going wrong' parts.bobalot wrote: ↑2023-05-28 02:59am This is like watching the MBA brigade waltz into and organisation and start cutting maintenance, R&D, etc.
They point to increased profits and nothing going immediately going wrong.
Eventually, things start to fall down.
A irreversible decline punctured by routine disasters that accelerate the decline.
I can't see the rest of the article without giving that site my email address. Still, it looks like Musk stopped paying for a piece of software, so the company behind it cut off access.On Wednesday night, Twitter experienced multiple outages during a high-profile live audio forum on the app in which Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign. While the specific reason for the flub couldn’t be learned, the company several weeks ago stopped paying for special software that handles high-traffic internet services, including for the app’s live-audio feature, according to a person with direct knowledge of the decision.
The move, which hasn’t been previously reported, followed dozens of other cost-cutting measures at Elon Musk’s Twitter. Among layoffs that shrank about 80% of its workforce, the company also eliminated the positions of all but a few of the people working on Twitter’s live-audio feature, Spaces.
Yes, Elon is unique in that he has managed to decrease profits, destabilise the product, attract multiple lawsuits and destroy the value of the company.bilateralrope wrote: ↑2023-05-28 03:46am Talking about stuff immediately going wrong:
Twitter Cut Key Software Before DeSantis Audio Glitch
I can't see the rest of the article without giving that site my email address. Still, it looks like Musk stopped paying for a piece of software, so the company behind it cut off access.On Wednesday night, Twitter experienced multiple outages during a high-profile live audio forum on the app in which Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign. While the specific reason for the flub couldn’t be learned, the company several weeks ago stopped paying for special software that handles high-traffic internet services, including for the app’s live-audio feature, according to a person with direct knowledge of the decision.
The move, which hasn’t been previously reported, followed dozens of other cost-cutting measures at Elon Musk’s Twitter. Among layoffs that shrank about 80% of its workforce, the company also eliminated the positions of all but a few of the people working on Twitter’s live-audio feature, Spaces.
That's not unique. That happens with most places that are taken over by people that have no idea what they should be doing.
I'd say HP has some contenders with Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman of course Leo Apotheker. Each of them terrible in their own ways with Leo and Carly fighting it out for number one worst CEO and Meg in a solid 3rd place. The thing with them is that none of them were attention seeking narcissistic sociopaths
Remembering of course, that decisions in any business could go that route too, just usually not so quickly (I think it's more like 9 - 15 months, but I have no idea where I'm getting that from)
Also he's back to being the worlds richest man. Just in case anyone here needs a reminder about how little competence matters when it comes to acquiring that much wealth.
Just looked up Apotheker on Wikipedia:Mr Bean wrote: ↑2023-06-03 07:00pmI'd say HP has some contenders with Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman of course Leo Apotheker. Each of them terrible in their own ways with Leo and Carly fighting it out for number one worst CEO and Meg in a solid 3rd place. The thing with them is that none of them were attention seeking narcissistic sociopaths
They were just sociopaths, perfectly ordinary America CEO sociopaths each convinced they were the greatest business people of their generations who surrounded themselves with yes men/women, filled their mouths with buzzwords and made horrendous business deals that tanked the company. Carly with purchasing Compaq, The Autonomy buy with Leo, and last and Whitman with HP and HP Classic (She split the company in half). Unlike those three terrible CEO who fundamentally misread the market and bad business decisions, there could exist worlds in which each of them could do well. The only thing Elon has that's unique is how obvious his decisions are terrible even to basic lay people.
*Edit that and each of our example bad HP decisions proved to be bad 3-9 months down the line not.... fifteen minutes after he makes the decision.
That is amazing.On 22 September 2011, the HP Board of Directors replaced Apotheker as chief executive, effective immediately, with fellow board member and former eBay chief Meg Whitman.[17] Though Apotheker served barely ten months, he received over $13 million in compensation: a severance payment of $7.2 million, shares worth $3.56 million, and a performance bonus of $2.4 million,[18] although the company lost more than $30 billion in market capitalization during his tenure.
This is the mess Musk has left for the new CEO. Lets see how long it takes her to realize it.from the pretend-captain-on-a-sinking-ship dept
Tue, Jun 6th 2023 09:28am - Mike Masnick
On Monday of this week, new CEO Linda Yaccarino officially became CEO of Twitter. Of course, basically no one believes that she’s actually the CEO. Everyone knows that Elon Musk, who in the past has mocked the “CEO” title anyway, is still in charge. He still owns the company and is executive chairman, meaning that he can still fire Yaccarino whenever he wants. And he’s still managing the company and its products. Any honest look at what’s happening here would recognize that Yaccarino’s role is somewhere between “VP of Marketing & Advertising” and “the person we sent to meetings when Elon has pissed off someone important.” At best, she’s poised atop that glass cliff, awaiting the inevitable shove from Elon.
Still, Yaccarino, who had just interviewed Elon on stage in front of advertisers a few weeks before she was hired, spent years leading NBC’s ad sales. She has tons of relationships in the ad business, and it seems obvious that her entire role is to try to sell ads. Because it’s obvious by now that Elon’s best skill at Twitter is scaring away advertisers by being completely clueless and ignorant of how to be a good human being. We’ve written about how Elon himself has admitted to driving away 40% of the company’s advertisers. But more recently he claimed the advertisers were mostly back.
Except… that’s bullshit. First of all, the company was “roughly breaking even” before he took over. But at a much higher revenue run rate (approximately $5 billion a year). Elon came in and added approximately $1.3 billion per year in debt interest payments, and then drove away a huge number of advertisers. He did cut costs by firing basically anyone who knew how to do anything, but that’s hardly a recipe for successDiscussing Twitter’s finances, Mr Musk said the company is now “roughly breaking even”, as most of its advertisers have returned.
As for the advertisers returning? Nope. On Monday the NY Times got its hands on an internal document saying that Twitter’s ad revenue had dropped 59% year over year. And even its internal sales projections are falling short, meaning that it can’t even meet the lowered expectations the company is setting for itself:
And, a few hours after that story came out, Elon effectively admitted that he had just lied to the BBC in claiming the advertisers came back. In trying to make himself sound noble during his ridiculous discussion with conspiracy theory nonsense peddler RFK Jr., Elon admitted that advertisers haven’t actually been coming back.But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its U.S. weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent, the document said.
Musk tried to frame this as the “cost” of supporting free speech, but as we’ve shown over and over again, Musk doesn’t care one bit about “free speech.” He cares about spreading the speech he supports. Also, the advertisers aren’t leaving because of Elon’s “commitment to free speech.” They’re leaving because he’s a liability to their brand.In a Twitter Spaces conversation with long-shot presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Twitter CEO said it was “frankly a struggle for Twitter to break even” because of the loss of ad dollars since he took the helm. More than half of Twitter’s top advertisers suspended ads this winter, but this is the first time Musk has publicly acknowledged the extent of the damage….
The NY Times report notes that even the big advertisers who are still on Twitter are spending a lot less:
And of course it doesn’t help that the person at Twitter who had been in charge of “brand safety and ad quality” quit last week.Some of Twitter’s biggest advertisers — including Apple, Amazon and Disney — have been spending less on the platform than last year, three former and current Twitter employees said. Large specialized “banner” ads on Twitter’s trends page, which can cost $500,000 for 24 hours and are almost always bought by large brands to promote events, shows or movies, are often going unfilled, they said.
Twitter has also run into public relations snafus with big advertisers like Disney. In April, Twitter mistakenly gave a gold check mark — a badge meant to signify a paying advertiser — to the @DisneyJuniorUK account, which Disney doesn’t own. The account posted racial slurs, leading Disney officials to demand from Twitter an explanation and assurances that it wouldn’t happen again, two people with knowledge of the situation said.
The report also notes that, in Elon’s desperate need for revenue, the company is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel of advertisers:
Again, literally none of this had to go this way. Every single bit of this is due to terrible decisions by Elon, starting with overpaying for the site in the first place, then trying to back out of the deal, then saddling his new company with $13 billion in debt (which, by the way, now almost equals the amount that Fidelity claims the entire company is worth). Elon didn’t need to fire everyone. He didn’t need to make irrational, spontaneous decisions that pushed the worst content to the forefront of his site and drove advertisers away. He didn’t need to undermine the safety of the site’s highest profile users and advertisers.In one week last month, four of Twitter’s top 10 U.S. advertisers were online gambling and fantasy sports betting companies, according to one presentation. Twitter has also started allowing ads for cannabis accessories, including “bongs, vapes, rolling paper,” as well as erectile dysfunction products and services, according to internal emails.
Adult content, which is permitted on Twitter, has become a concern among the company’s sales staff. When some employees tried to drum up interest from advertisers for Mother’s Day, they found that potential sponsored search terms, like “MomLife,” surfaced pornographic videos, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
But he did all of those things.
And now he thinks Linda Yaccarino will clean up the mess he’s still making, and which it’s still clear he doesn’t realize is entirely due to his own terrible decisions.
The other unique thing about Elon is that he intentionally courted the spotlight. Most CEOs want to get paid, stay below the radar, and maybe influence the world. Musk wanted to be Tony Stark in real life and I think it sort of broke his brain in the process.Mr Bean wrote: ↑2023-06-03 07:00pm They were just sociopaths, perfectly ordinary America CEO sociopaths each convinced they were the greatest business people of their generations who surrounded themselves with yes men/women, filled their mouths with buzzwords and made horrendous business deals that tanked the company. Carly with purchasing Compaq, The Autonomy buy with Leo, and last and Whitman with HP and HP Classic (She split the company in half). Unlike those three terrible CEO who fundamentally misread the market and bad business decisions, there could exist worlds in which each of them could do well. The only thing Elon has that's unique is how obvious his decisions are terrible even to basic lay people.
That's how you know the difference between aristocracy and peasantry.
People who want to be Tony Start in real life often seem either to either forgotten or been unaware that Tony Stark was a womanizing asshole, with sufficient arrogance to generate Avenger-level hazards (Ultron, anyone?). In addition to, you know, saving New York City from a nuke and snapping half the universe back into existence at the cost of his own life. Sure, he's a hero but that doesn't mean he's someone you want to know personally or as your boss.Adam Reynolds wrote: ↑2023-06-06 03:20pm Musk wanted to be Tony Stark in real life and I think it sort of broke his brain in the process.
Also there's the matter at as big of an arrogant asshole Tony Stark can be, he's still Iron Man willing to risk his life for people he has personally never met. Musk on the other hand seems laser focused on the arrogant asshole who likes to show off part of Tony Stark not realizing that a big part why that's tolerated in the Marvel multiverse is because Tony Stark is willing to put his life on the line for others, by contrast Musk seems like the person who wouldn't risk his life to save even people who he claims to love let alone complete strangers.Broomstick wrote: ↑2023-06-07 07:09amPeople who want to be Tony Start in real life often seem either to either forgotten or been unaware that Tony Stark was a womanizing asshole, with sufficient arrogance to generate Avenger-level hazards (Ultron, anyone?). In addition to, you know, saving New York City from a nuke and snapping half the universe back into existence at the cost of his own life. Sure, he's a hero but that doesn't mean he's someone you want to know personally or as your boss.Adam Reynolds wrote: ↑2023-06-06 03:20pm Musk wanted to be Tony Stark in real life and I think it sort of broke his brain in the process.
Though technically, it was Banner who carried that part out, Stark just helped him do itRalin wrote: ↑2023-06-08 01:18am As Mike put it on Facebook awhile ago, personally bringing billions of people back from the Netherworld tends to earn you a lot of good will and forgiveness that Musk doesn't benefit from.
Personally I'd still like to see people try to convince him to give his entire fortune away to prove he can become a billionaire from nothing like Ozymandias.
#elonkingofkings
