There was a lot of back and forth about bots and text messages, but in the end, Musk settled on buying the company rather than facing a deposition or Chancery Court trial and eventually strode into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.
Elon Musk began Twitter’s new era of private ownership by firing several executives — including previous CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and policy chief Vijaya Gadde — and, a week later, initiated mass layoffs, drastically cutting its workforce.
The first few weeks of Elon Musk’s Twitter have so far included mass layoffs, the firing of employees who criticized Musk publicly or privately, and hundreds of employees voluntarily accepting Musk’s offer of three months severance instead of the option of joining a new “extremely hardcore” version of Twitter.
Musk has also flip-flopped on paid verification, launching it just over a week after he took over, then putting it on pause after some high-profile impersonations. He then announced it was coming back on November 29th, before telling employees that the company might or might not launch it on that date.
On November 19th, Elon Musk announced that based on the results of a poll posted to his personal account, he’s reinstating the Twitter account of former president Donald Trump. The @realDonaldTrump account was suspended by Twitter on January 8th, 2021, following the January 6th mob attack on the US capitol.
Read on for the latest updates about what’s going on inside Twitter right now.
Twitter wanted encrypted DMs so bad, it licensed Signal’s tech.
When Musk says he wants Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike to help add encrypted DMs to Twitter, the funny part is this’d be the third time they’ve asked him.
He left Twitter in 2013 when it didn’t wind up letting him build that — and Platformer is now reporting Twitter wound up getting a license to use Signal’s tech in 2018 for attempt number two. By 2019, Twitter reportedly scrapped that second attempt as well. Third time’s the charm?
Twitter will let you send crypto to accounts alongside “normal” money, Elon Musk says.
“We will also make it easy to do crypto,” Musk told employees during an internal Q&A yesterday, a recording of which I obtained. “You should be able to easily send money to anyone in Twitter with one click,” he said. “The payments side of things will probably be more valuable than all the rest of Twitter combined.”
Elon Musk wants every Twitter employee sending weekly updates about their work via email now.
Per an internal memo to employees that I obtained, every Friday all Twitter employees are required to send an email update on their work with the subject line structure: “Weekly Update, name, dept, and date.”
Inside the email, they must include what project they are working on, “code samples” if relevant or summaries of work for non-technical work, and what they have been trying to accomplish.
“Looking forward to making Twitter the highest performing tech software company in the world,” the internal memo ends. Hardcore!
Twitter loses another executive as Donald Trump’s account gets restored.
Sarah Rosen, Twitter’s head of US content partnerships, announced her departure from the company shortly after Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account on Saturday night.
According to Bloomberg, Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s ad sales chief, and Maggie Suniewick, the company’s partnerships leader, were both terminated on Friday after they refused to fire more employees. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, also resigned last week.
Twitter’s copyright strike system appears to be broken.
Naturally, one user took this as an opportunity to post the entire The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie in a series of two-minute clips spanning nearly 50 tweets.
The thread has been up for almost a whole day now, and the fact that it hasn’t been taken down yet is a likely side effect of the hundreds of employees who resigned from Twitter earlier this week.
Reddit’s software community is laughing at Elon.
Musk posted an image from his late-night Twitter “code review” and… well, at least we got this very funny Reddit thread out of it.
Twitter’s now-former head of Trust and Safety predicts what’s next for its “custodians of the internet.”
In this op-ed, Yoel Roth examines why he left Twitter last week (because all decisions now lie with one person, Elon Musk) and the hellish rules about content moderation Musk will have to navigate, whether made by regulators or the planned moderation council.
But, as Roth explains, the most notable check on Elon’s “unilateral edict” and free speech platitudes may be Apple and Google:
Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now.
How many people took their new boss’s offer and quit their jobs at Twitter last night?
We don’t have a number to put on that, but Alex Heath has this email that was just sent from Elon Musk to Twitter’s software engineers.
Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today.
Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
Thanks,
Elon
The strangest part of all this is that just 18 hours ago, Twitter told employees that all office buildings will be closed until the 21st. But maybe they could really use the help.
