Elon Musk offers to “buy 100% of Twitter” for $43 billion

Correct me if I’m wrong, but a Discord server is completely hosted by them, so you are still subject to the whims of a for-profit organization. Nothing stops Elon Musk or someone else from eventually acquiring them. No one can own Mastodon in that way.

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this is why i’m jumping to Mastodon. that and my info isn’t their business, and they are fine with that.

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I can’t imagine this was a surprise to many.

The executives fired by Musk are getting big severance payments, with Agrawal “set to receive the largest payout of $38.7 million, due largely to the entirety of his shares vesting upon his firing,” Business Insider reported.

I suspect the others that will be fired by Musk in the coming days will not fare as well financially.

Some useful information for those planning on abandoning the platform.

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also, i’ve been using this:

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The background takes a bit, but this is Musk related too…

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Jesus F’ing Thisdoesn’timproveanything Christ…

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personal update from the Mastodon-verse: i have finally set up an account there, and so far, i like it. still trying to figure out some things, but the people and the vibe is very welcoming so far.

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I love that, one day later, he’s already tried cutting the projected price by more than 50%. And floated a constantly-changing set of justifications that don’t make sense separately, let alone combined…

  • It’s necessary for Twitter to make money!
  • It’s the only way to stop trolls and bots!
  • It will make it so everyone can be verified, “Power to the people!”

Boy, did he ever pick one of the dumbest options to make the center of a subscription model. The only people who need verification are typically the ones who are bringing the most value to the service.

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Is it bad when big companies that do marketing on Twitter, and currently make use of verification, are roasting the plan?

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“Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks,” Musk wrote. “Twitter’s content moderation council will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.”

While many of those words above sound reasonable, I don’t see any reason for Musk to be given the benefit of the doubt. Even if we ignore his entire history prior to acquiring a social media company, he’s made so many contradictory statements since that would make anyone doubt his sincerity.

On a more positive note, perhaps Musk’s focus on Twitter has made working for Tesla or SpaceX marginally less awful.

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Before layoffs have even been confirmed, though, some staff members are already fighting back. In his rush to cut staff, Musk and his legal team seemingly overlooked or disregarded a federal and California law—the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act—which requires 60 days’ notice to staff in advance of mass layoffs.

The class-action lawsuit is asking Twitter to either comply with the WARN Act or provide severance payments, including lost wages, which the employees suing said have not been provided thus far.

With Twitter losing $3 million per day, Elon Musk has ordered whatever Twitter staff he has left to start making up the difference by cutting Twitter infrastructure costs by $1.5 to $3 million per day. Musk is hoping to save $1 billion in annual costs in what Reuters reported has been dubbed Twitter’s “Deep Cuts Plan,” part of Musk’s ongoing scramble to turn Twitter profits around, seemingly even if it risks platform outages during high-traffic times.

Meanwhile, NBC News reporter Ben Collins has tweeted that those spared this fate through Musk’s sudden layoffs seem to be happier about the position they’re in.

“Talking to a couple of Twitter employees just now who learned they don’t work there anymore when their email stopped working,” Collins tweeted. “I have never talked to people more excited to get laid off in my entire life.”

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

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if Mastodon is any judge, people really are leaving twitter in droves. i’m still learning my way around and looking for friends and replacements for all the things i am familiar with on twitter – some of which might be impossible at this point, which is a bummer – but overall i’m really liking Mastodon. people are friendly, and i haven’t seen any trolling going on.

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Instead of creating the town square where important public discourse is freely debated (which Musk claimed was his Twitter vision), he’s now making moves to potentially skew discussions by ranking unauthenticated accounts with freshly granted blue checks above others in feeds, not because they’re users who have more informed or more popular points of view, but because they are just about anyone who paid $8 that month. His other big ideas to drive profits reportedly include charges to direct-message celebrity users and charges to see OnlyFans-like videos posted by paid, verified users. In weighing these ideas, Musk is seemingly ready to charge fees wherever he can and unafraid to throw up paywalls between users and the content that arguably initially drew them to Twitter.

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As I understand it, Elon is evading the WARN Act by not actually firing the people for another 60 days. They just don’t have jobs there anymore, but will continue to get salary and benefits for another 90 or so days. I doubt this will get him around a lot of his problems, but it’ll keep every laid-off employee from finding a lawyer and suing the pants off him. He’s idiot, but he’s not that big an idiot.

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I don’t know what he has to apologize for, but…

In a statement posted on the microblogging site, Mr Dorsey - who quit as CEO in November and left the board of directors in May - said Twitter staff “are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize [sic] many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize [sic] for that.”

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Has anyone here tried Vero?

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