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Elon Musk has been criticized for urging “independent voters” to support Republican candidates in this week’s midterm elections. The Tesla and SpaceX boss, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last month, told his 115 million followers that “shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties” and that voters should therefore curb a Democrat president by voting for a Republican Congress. It comes after comedian Kathy Griffin and several others were fired from Twitter for impersonating Elon Musk. Ms. Griffin, while impersonating Mr. Musk, urged Americans to vote Democratic in the midterm elections. It’s the latest episode in a week of chaos as the San Francisco-based social network reportedly has to rehire some of the staff it laid off last week because it needs their expertise. Musk has decided to lay off nearly 50% of Twitter staff, with employees being notified of their job status by email after barring entry to offices and cutting off access to internal systems overnight. Twitter apparently loses $4 million a day. immediately clear.
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The investor warns that the layoffs may backfire
In his lengthy Twitter thread, early-stage investor Chris Sacca issued a stern warning to Elon Musk about his massive layoffs, which have reportedly cut roughly 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,400 employees. “Every day feels more like an uphill battle,” he said. “So much product and policy talent was pushed out the door at the company, and oh my god, you just can’t lay off that many engineers, businesses [staff]and SREs and we expect the site to remain healthy.” The term “SREs” refers to “site reliability engineers,” a specialized cadre of workers who keep online services up and running even under sustained high traffic or unusual conditions. Last week, cloud computing economist Corey Quinn expressed similar fears, saying Mr. Musk’s reported plans to cut cloud spending by $1 billion could lead to Twitter outages or even permanent data loss. “Most customer requests are in the form of ‘help us forecast and control our spending,’” he said. “Sometimes it’s ‘cut the bill.’ It almost never “reduces the bill by X dollars”. “This happens as a side effect of others. Pursuing it as the set goal is to flirt with destruction… very quickly you’re not cutting fat, but muscle and bone.” Io Dodds8 November 2022 01:50 1667870390
Musk ‘alone and his wings,’ says Twitter’s first investor
One of Twitter’s early investors said Elon Musk needs people around him to “speak some truth to power” and say no to his worst ideas. Chris Sacca, who invested $25,000 in Twitter in 2006 and was Twitter’s 102nd user, said Monday that he feared Musk was “on his own right now making this up” because he’s surrounded by yes-men. “I’ve known Elon for a long time. I admired his thought and ambition. His ability to note and question the assumptions implicit in the rest of our thinking is a rare type of genius that I have seen only in the greatest minds. His success to date is no accident,” said Mr. Sacca. “But recently I have seen those around him become more and more slanderous and opportunistic. Simply put, agreeing with him is easier… “This guy is lonely. He has many “girlfriends” and is the life of parties and dinners. But the hard truth is that he is alone right now and doing this. If you are trying to understand anything, this framework can help you… “However, I really want this thing to work. The only way I see that happening is if someone around Elon can speak some truth to power and complement his bold and ambitious instincts with some desperately needed nuance.” Io Dodds8 November 2022 01:19 1667867736
Ice-T delivers his verdict
Rapper and movie star Ice T is unimpressed by Mr. Musk’s takeover. “Musk spent $44 billion and I can still block him…lol…I’ll probably get banned for this tweet,” he said Monday afternoon. You can’t win them all, I guess. Io Dodds8 November 2022 00:35 1667866140
Tesla shareholder slams Musk as ‘part-time CEO’
Even as he fends off lawsuits to fire Twitter employees, Musk faces a separate legal challenge in his role as Tesla CEO. According to Reuters, a Tesla shareholder, Richard Tornetta, is seeking to void Musk’s record 2018 pay package, which awarded him a total of $56 billion. The lawsuit accuses Musk of being a “part-time CEO,” noting that he worked for the electric car maker only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while working for rocket company SpaceX on Mondays and Thursdays. That was before Mr. Musk also became chief executive of Twitter, a large social network with about 450 monthly users that has made a net loss in all but two of the past 11 years. The trial begins on Monday, November 14. Io Dodds8 November 2022 00:09 1667863540
Fact check: Daniel Radcliffe was not banned from Twitter
Reports that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has been banned from Twitter under Elon Musk’s new rules appear to be false. Many Twitter users appeared to take it literally when “Weird” Al Yankovic, the music parody artist played by Mr. Radcliffe in a new Hollywood biopic, wrote on Monday: “Oh no, they suspended his account @danielradcliffe on Twitter! Wasn’t it obvious he was PARODING???” It is true that there is a Twitter account called @danielradcliffe which has been suspended. But Mr Radcliffe is known to have never used social media, including Twitter. “I thought about getting a Twitter,” he said in 2020, “and I know 100 percent that if I did, you’d all wake up to stories like, ‘Dan Radcliffe fights with random person on Twitter.’ “ Additionally, according to the Internet Archive, the @danielradcliffe account became inactive sometime between September 2009 and August 2011, when the Archive’s automated web checks began redirecting to Twitter’s “suspended account” page. In other words, @danielradcliffe was never the real Mr. Radcliffe and was probably suspended years ago, while Mr. Yankovic appears to have been joking. All of this could have been avoided if Twitter, at any point over the past 16 years, had been transparent enough to add information to suspended users’ profiles showing how and why they were banned. Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine such a feature being a priority now that half the company’s employees have been laid off. Io Dodds7 November 2022 23:25 1667861382
Elon Musk’s Nazi soldier meme, explained
It’s actually not the only time in recent days that Musk has been criticized about Nazis. He also appears to have deleted a tweet in which he responded positively to a user who posted an apparent Voltaire quote. As it turns out, this quote actually came from an American neo-Nazi and convicted child abuser who has written about his frustration that Voltaire is being credited for his views. Io Dodds7 November 2022 22:49 1667859396
Twitter users rise to ‘all-time high’ since Musk buyout
New users are flocking to Twitter in unprecedented numbers after Mr. Musk bought the company, according to a new report in The Verge. Journalist Alex Heath obtained an internal company document that claimed growth in the social network’s daily active users has reached an “all-time high” since Mr Musk’s takeover, accelerating to more than 20 per cent. That means another 15 million people have signed up since the end of October, bringing the site’s total number of defenders “topping the quarter billion mark” since June. A third-party report by bot monitoring firm Bot Sentinel suggested more than a million accounts may have been disabled or suspended since Mr Musk’s takeover, although it could not say how many of those accounts were automated. However, Twitter has never publicly released statistics on the prevalence of hate speech on its service, so we have no way to compare it to the past. Io Dodds7 November 2022 22:16 1667856706
Tesla shares fall to 52-week low
Shares of Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla have fallen to their lowest point in more than a year amid the ongoing chaos on Twitter. Having started the day at $208.79, Tesla’s stock fell about 6 percent to $197.14 by the close of trading on Monday – the lowest price since May 2021. “Fundamentally, Tesla’s share weakness must be blamed on Twitter,” financial magazine Barron’s wrote Monday. “More specifically, the weakness should be blamed on Elon Musk, who now runs both companies.” Io Dodds7 November 2022 21:31 1667853584
Elon is under fire for sharing the Nazi soldier meme
The meme Elon Musk posted this morning may have seemed innocuous to some, featuring a black and white photo of a soldier with a cage full of carrier pigeons and the caption “3 unread messages.” However, hawk-eyed Twitter users were quick to point out that the soldier in question is actually a member of Nazi Germany’s military, known as the Wehrmacht. According to Getty Images, the photo shows a Nazi soldier during the German invasion of France in May 1940, when all soldiers did not yet have portable radios. Io Dodds7 November 2022 20:39 1667850437
