Agreed. What I meant is that if he is owed $100M currently, then offering him his job back should exceed that offer, or why would he even consider it? It’s not as though he would be voluntarily quitting, since Musk very publicly declared that he was terminated.
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Seems likely that Musk might not have 100 M$ just laying around liquid, given his debts. I wonder how many of these gotcha bombs Dorsey left scattered through the org.
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Another article on this
I vote Halli Thorleifsson should stay fired and cash in. Fuck Elon Musk. If this is what tips him into bankruptcy, then HT is a true hero.
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Zomg, it’s public radio, it’s even in the name, fercrissakes!
The Elongated Muskrat has obviously never tuned in during pledge week.
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To people like Musk, Public = Government == OMG Socialism!
He definitely does not have the canvas bag.
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What an asshole.
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In a statement, it said: “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.”
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As usual, it’s hard to predict what Musk intends to do next with Twitter. This news follows one of the most unserious months in Musk’s tenure as CEO, where he replaced the Twitter bird logo with Dogecoin’s shiba inu logo and got in trouble with the landlord at Twitter’s headquarters when he erased the “w” on Twitter’s signage so that the building was marked “Titter.” Journalist Dave Troy tweeted that these moves and others—like Twitter’s press team responding only with a poop emoji—were apparently signs that Musk was about to “kill off a beloved (?) global brand.”
Troy’s thread also noted that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had praised Musk as the only appropriate buyer for Twitter. Dorsey tweeted in April 2022 that Musk was the “singular solution” Dorsey trusted to solve “the problem” of Twitter being a company, rather than a public good, saying “I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter.”
Hyper-capitalists talking about the public good is a hoot.
…with Musk envisioning Twitter users becoming avid subscribers eager to access exclusive content from journalists posting entire news articles or other creators posting long videos.
Whether it’s YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon or OnlyFans, being a creator tied to a single platform only gives the platform more power.Twitter/X isn’t going to be better than those. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to hitch their wagon to this.
Other ways he plans to monetize Twitter include creating a digital payments platform and essentially an online bank, where creators like Taibbi could earn higher interest by keeping their money on Twitter.
The next logical step is to eliminate the whole real money aspect and just do all commerce via company scrips MuskBuckstm.
In the past, Musk has said that he thinks he could transform Twitter into X, the “everything app,” within the next five years.
I can understand why Musk (or anyone with a profit motive, really) would want to create the everything app, but I don’t know why anyone would want one. We already have them, they’re called web browsers.
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There are some choice bits in that article, of which these are just a sample:
“The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said in an interview. “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”
“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he says. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”
NPR’s Allyn emailed Musk on Wednesday morning asking for “your reaction” to the news organization quitting Twitter.
Initially, Musk didn’t respond, but a couple of hours later Musk tweeted out Allyn’s email followed with a tweet saying “Defund @NPR.” His followers quickly piled on.
In an email to staff explaining the decision, Lansing wrote, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.”
The BBC exchange showed Musk as alternately conciliatory and erratic. He also said that he’s sleeping on a couch at work, that he followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter only because a judge forced him to, and that he should stop tweeting after 3 a.m.
Also, we as a culture need to stop glorifying overwork and eccentric billionaire geniuses.
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NPR, PBS, and now CBC. Are these isolated incidents limited to media outlets that Musk doesn’t like, or is this the start of a larger exodus of BrandsTM from Twitter that will ultimately make it easier for users to leave?
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Yes, I think.
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The fact that everyone hasn’t left twitter already is kind of baffling to me. But yeah, let him burn more bridges and see what happens. It’s kind of amusing to see how badly and repeatedly he will stab himself.
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Each individual has their own priorities of course, but I’d aim for something that makes use of open standards so that the next time this happens, you’ve at least got an option to more easily move on.
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"This is just one of many moves since Musk’s takeover of Twitter that has made the platform more and more unsafe for LGBTQ people and advertisers,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), told Ars.
Musk has said that some advertisers have either returned to Twitter or are planning to soon. However, the WSJ reported that third-party data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower showed that out of 100 top Twitter advertisers, 30 advertisers have spent nothing on Twitter so far this year, and 24 advertisers had reduced their spending on Twitter by 80 percent or more.
An EFF spokesperson told Ars, “There are plenty of cynical and troubling conclusions one could imagine about why this change was made to Twitter’s policy text. The reality is that the policy against misgendering and deadnaming was selectively enforced and the CEO himself dabbled in casual transphobia. Watering down hate speech rules and selling blue checks to users who post hate speech with impunity is part of a pattern at Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company, encouraging more hate speech, eroding whatever value the platform still has, and increasing risks for marginalized and targeted groups on the platform.”
This month, Twitter also published a blog post further explaining its plan to label potentially harmful speech and promising that “we will not place ads adjacent to content that we label.”
Implied in that statement is that they will absolutely place ads adjacent to content they do not label, of which some subset is almost certainly going to be hate speech. I don’t think I would gamble my brand on that.
[Musk] also said that people concerned about his tweets “should take them with a grain of salt” because “it is difficult to convey tone, such as sarcasm, in a tweet.”
Last year, Musk opened up about his relationship with his estranged trans daughter Vivian, telling Financial Times that he “can’t win [them] all.”
Is my tone clear?
The change comes a few days before Twitter plans to deprecate the old API tiers that allowed third-party apps and services to post to Twitter and access its data. The new Enterprise tier, which Microsoft would need to use to continue providing the same level of service to advertisers as before, can cost between $42,000 and $210,000 a month, depending on how many tweets per month you need to be able to access.
A few weeks ago, Musk signed a letter calling for a “pause” in AI development. Two weeks later, he said he was purchasing 10,000 GPUs to provide the compute power needed to develop a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe” because he believes “politically correct” and “woke” chatbots with content filters and other safeguards “lie” to their users. On April 18, Musk tweeted, “wait for it…” in response to a tweet suggesting Musk “sue OpenAI for defrauding him.”
It should be noted that Musk regularly tweets about plans that don’t happen, whether he’s talking about proposed Twitter features, self-imposed deadlines like the one for removing legacy verification checkmarks, or potential business deals.
There are no heroes in this conflict. Musk is a hypercapitalist shitlord, obviously. Microsoft is not taking the high ground here, as it seems they were more than happy to engage with Twitter until the price tag got too high. Also the reckless and thoughtless way that large language models (AI) are being used is its own set of problems. I’m not aiming for false equivalence here, it’s just that the whole thing is exhausting…
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Musks's Blues Blocked, Elon Retaliates With Mandatory Free Blue For Critics
After #BlockTheBlue became a widespread campaign among twitter users, Elon started forcibly assigning permanent unpaid Blue subscriptions to his critics, without their consent, in what could be charitably called “a middle-aged Lowtax moment”.
#BlockTheBlue participants protest Musk’s ownership of the much-reviled hellsite by running browser extensions that block Twitter Blue subscribers on encountering one. One such blocker has seen a 1970% increase in installs, day over day, on the Chrome store alone. Another, Blue Blocker, is available on both Firefox and Chrome, meaning it works on mobile – if one uses Firefox Mobile.
It’s been widely reported, based on a tweet by a data researcher, that, in the wake of Elon deleting the “legacy” Verified status, only 28 “legacy” Verified users signed up for a Twitter Blue subscription. But those numbers are looking inflated: who is to say if those users actually subscribed, or if Elon personally marked their accounts as permanent unpaid Blue status?
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https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1649884329240141828
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lol of course elon broke twitter embeds, what a pathetic manbaby lol
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