Elon just entered Twitter HQ carrying a literal sink and updated his bio to “Chief Twit” 🤣
Meme - "Big domino: Elon Musk carrying a sink into the Twitter HQ
Small domino: The Babylon Bee calls a man a man"
Meme - The Independent @Independent *blue check mark*: "Having a blue check on Twitter is now like wearing a MAGA hat - you'll know who to avoid"
Facebook - "Reactions to Elon Musk buying Twitter are a pretty good gauge of how shallow a lot of anti-capitalist posturing is - the billionaires who used to own Twitter were your class enemy too."
Musk to unpick Twitter code after closing $44bn takeover and sacking execs - "Elon Musk has brought in Tesla engineers to unpick the central code of Twitter just hours after completing his $44 billion takeover of the social media giant... The billionaire reportedly removed a number of top executives immediately on completion, including Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Though Twitter has yet to confirm completion, Musk tweeted “The bird is freed,” referencing the social platform’s famous bird logo. He made immediate changes, with Bloomberg reporting that Musk brought in engineers from his electric vehicle firm Tesla to to meet with product leaders at Twitter HQ, where they were asked to show the engineers the company’s code system. Twitter’s team were also locked out of the code, the report claims, from Noon yesterday, Bloomberg said citing anonymous sources. Musk fired Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, according to Reuters. He had previously accused them of misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform."
Payments are the reason Elon Musk bought Twitter - "If you want more evidence that Musk’s Twitter purchase is a payments play, look at some the people he has brought in to help him: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao; David Sacks, another PayPal Mafia member who is deeply involved in crypto; as well as Sriram Krishnan, who invests for a16z Crypto and who has an Ethereum address in his Twitter handle. Does this sound like the makings of a political and media operation—or one for payments? One more good reason to think Musk will treat his new purchase as a vehicle for payments is because he has said as much. According to an investor document obtained by the New York Times, Musk has predicted Twitter will bring in $1.2 billion in payment revenue by 2028, which would also achieve his stated goal of making the platform less dependent on advertisers."
Most messed up thing at Twitter: 10 people managing for every one person coding, says Elon Musk
Will Chamberlain on Twitter - "Look - if you are upset at the way Elon Musk is running Twitter, just remember: TWITTER IS A PRIVATE COMPANY AND ELON CAN DO WHAT HE WANTS"
People Say They’re Leaving Twitter. Are They Really? - The Atlantic - "Ever since Elon Musk announced his intention to acquire Twitter, take the company private, and introduce a new era of free-speech absolutism, users have been threatening to leave the platform—a threat that has been likened to those made by liberals during the 2016 presidential election to move to Canada... This moment calls back to 2018, when #DeleteFacebook trended in response to the Cambridge Analytica data-collection scandal. Although people’s frustration was clearly real, it wasn’t obvious whether they would actually follow through on their commitment to abandon a major social-media platform they’d spent years using. As someone who has spent at least several hours on Twitter nearly every day for the past eight years, I find it hard to imagine myself leaving the site unless things devolve into total chaos or worse—unless everyone else leaves, and only brands and Musk fans remain... In 2020, Fiesler and her colleague Brianna Dym, now a lecturer at the University of Maine, published a study looking at why fandom communities migrated from platforms such as LiveJournal and FanFiction.Net to Tumblr in the early 2010s. They highlighted that—as with real-world migration—there are both “push” and “pull” factors... LiveJournal implemented policy changes that were hostile to fan fiction and was then acquired by a Russian company that banned various political topics. People were pushed to leave and pulled to a place more suited to their needs: Tumblr was a bit of a blank slate, lacking the prohibitions and offering useful features such as customization and better social tools. (Tumblr has also been crucial to fandom because it allows users to remain anonymous, make multimedia posts, and archive material with a meticulous tagging system)... “There has to be a compelling reason to leave and a viable alternative option,” Fiesler told me. “An immediate viable alternative option … People are impatient.” She evoked the example of Tumblr’s ban on NSFW content in 2018, which resulted in a catastrophic loss of users for the site. Many of them tried to get their communities to relocate to the newer platform Pillowfort, but it lacked the infrastructure to handle such a huge influx. Other Tumblr users, inspired by the fan-owned fiction-hosting site Archive of Our Own, attempted to start their own social-media platform and collaborated in a massive Google doc with support from the Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski—but that effort petered out. Now the people who once used Tumblr for sexual content have either dispersed to smaller platforms (or Twitter) or trudged back to Tumblr and accepted its limitations."
Meme - Aaron Rupar @atrupar: "ELON MUSK: Hell yeah I overpaid for Twitter, I'm the richest man in the world so whatevs
ELON MUSK 1 WEEK LATER: Give me $8 please my family is dying"
Unconventionally Conventional @UnconConven: "Blue check marks: I'm important. My opinions are important. And my blue check mark is the trophy the proves it. It's valuable.
One week later: How dare you charge me $8 for the valuable marketing device you provide me."
Meme - "Pre-Elon
If you don't like it then go. make your own Twitter
Twitter is a private company it can do whatever it wants
The Government must not regulate private companies
Twitter doesn't even matter in real world. Only a small fraction of the population uses twitter
*no problem with billionaires owning twitter*
Post-Elon
It's impossible to make our own Twitter. Twitter under ownership of Elon must abide by our hate speech rules
twitter cannot do whatever its literally fascist and killing people
Government must regulate and breakup Twitter to stop it becoming a platform for hate
An evil billionaire is taking over the largest mainstream public media, Twitter is the public marketplace of ideas
Elon the billionaire buying twitter instead of solving world hunger is literally so selfish"
Meme - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC: "Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that "free speech" is actually a subscription plan"
Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8"
"SO, DAYLIGHT SAVINGS.. IS NOT A BANK?"
Just when you think she couldn't get any dumber
Jack Dorsey apologizes for growing Twitter ‘too quickly’ | The Star - "Former Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said he regrets growing the company too quickly as the social media platform downsizes following its recent sale to Elon Musk. Musk on Thursday and Friday slashed over half the staff, affecting almost every team at the company"
Twitter ‘before and after Elon Musk’ photos go viral, internet was quick to point this - "the netizens were quick to spot a smaller number of women in the “Twitter after Elon Musk" photo... Another asked if women didn’t want to work hard and it is only men who do."
Meta could begin large-scale layoffs this week, report says
Amazon reportedly plans to lay off about 10,000 employees starting this week
I saw people upset about the Twitter layoffs. Clearly all the tech layoffs are Elon Musk's fault
It's not just Elon Musk. Tech CEOs everywhere are quietly asking their employees to step it up or risk getting fired. - "Although other tech CEOs have not issued edicts as aggressive as Musk's, this year's economic downturn prompted leaders across the tech industry to tell workers they'll need to work harder, albeit couched in more diplomatic language. If their language wasn't as belligerent as Elon's, the message was still similar: people would be expected to step up or find somewhere else to work... "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg reportedly said... In the summer, Sundar Pichai sounded the alarm that employee productivity needed to improve. Weeks later, Pichai told Kara Swisher at the Code Conference in Los Angeles that he wanted the company to be 20% more productive and it was "slower" because of increased headcount... "It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people," Meta investor Altimeter Capital said in an open letter"
Thread by @teardowntitan on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I have been quiet on Elons Twitter purge of an inefficient ineffective system. I have also watched the short sellers have a field day selling other people’s stolen shares. Let me tell you a Ford story. Ford was going bankrupt in the early 80s and something dramatic happened. First the Ford family reached into their pockets to find the company. Second a fabulous hero of mine Max Jurosek came up with a plan called the blue ribbon. He picked the top performers and I was one of them. We were classified as the 20% that dragged the 80% deadwood holding the company ransom. We did our job and HR released thousands. What happened? Ford projects went 50% faster and got rid of 80% of our quality issues in one year."
Meme - Leyland "Lee" DeVito @leedevito Editor in chief, Detroit @Metrotimes (he/ him)
Journalist
Ope, there goes gravity.
Elon's $8/month check mark is a tax on journalism."
Yup. Blue check marks are that deluded
Meme - Ron Perlman @perlmutations: "Just popped back on because I couldn't let this one slide. No Elon, it is you that is manipulating free-speech because as the quintessential narcissist you fetishize that the entire universe must think your way. I'll be back soon. Cuz your minutes are ticking away."
Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They're trying to destroy free speech in America."
Kris Kringle @Kringle_Klaus: ""I don't miss Elon. Not one bit. Anyway, does Elon ever ask about me? I mean, I drove by Elon's work the other day and his car was out front. How is Elon? Not that I still care or anything. Maybe I'll check on Elon...""
Meme - Lou Paskalis: "Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND. You say you're committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!
So for all the replies I received that content moderation = denial of freedom of speech (it doesn't),what do you say about the fact that the "chief twit" just blocked me for exercising mine? Yesterday, @elonmusk solicited ?s from marketers, today he's blocking those who ask them."
It seems if you block spam, you are anti-free speech
Meme - ""Comedians" on Twitter"
"Violating the pre existing TOS en-masse by impersonating Elon Musk"
"But muh freedom of speech!"
Meme - Chairman @WSBChairman: "Twitter employees were selling verification for upwards of $15,000. For certain accounts, mine included, they would refuse to verify you through the standard application and then privately offer to verify you for $$ behind the scenes. Investigation needed. "
Elon Musk: "Yup"
Meme - Jim Osman @EdgeCGroup: "The entitled elite are not mad that they have to pay $8. They are just mad that anyone can pay $8"
Meme - "Spending $8 trillion of taxpayer money *AOC is happy*
Spending $8 of her own money *AOC is crying*"
Meme - "Twitter: TERMS OF SERVICE
1. You will not impersonate other people
I agree"
"I am Elon Musk"
"YOU ARE BANNED
REASON: impersonating other people"
*Upset*
Twitter Permanently Bans Kathy Griffin After She Impersonated Elon Musk: ‘She F’d Around And Found Out’ - "Comedian Kathy Griffin was permanently banned from Twitter Sunday afternoon after she impersonated Elon Musk, who recently bought the company and nows serves as its CEO. Griffin’s account had been temporarily restricted after she impersonated Musk by changing her profile photo to his photo and changing her user name to “Elon Musk,” even though her handle remained as “@kathygriffin.”... Musk also explained that banning accounts for impersonation does not go against his views on free speech. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”"
Clearly this is against free speech even though cracking down on "misinformation" and punishing defamation are not
Meme - Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Actually, she was suspended for impersonating a comedian
But if she really wants her account back, she can have it
For $8"
my name jeff @Waynesworldhat: "FUCK. @elonmusk has been funnier in the past 3 tweets than Kathy Griffin has for her entire career."
Meme - Harrison @HarrisonKrank: "I knew Elon's twitter would be wild but I never expected Kathy Griffin to get banned and then log into her dead mothers account to protest her ban"
Maggie Griffin @TipItMaggieG: "Apologize in advance for all the comments you're gonna have to read about how ugly I am and they're probably gonna throw you in there too. Oh by the way this is KG. I'm tweeting from my dead mother's account. She would not mind. #FreeKathy"
Biggus Dickus @BiggusDickus77: "I feel like I just watched a woman get tossed out of a party for peeing in the punch bowl. And now she's knocking on the windows, asking the guests to ask the host to let her back in."
Meme - "Entitled employee finds out
Hot take
Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Btw, I'd like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!"
Eric Frohnhoefer @EricFrohnhoe...: "I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong."
Money Nerd Techie @pokemoniku: "I have been a developer for 20 years. And I can tell you that as the domain expert here you should inform your boss privately. Trying to one up him in public while he is trying to learn and be helpful makes you look like a spiteful self serving dev."
Eric Frohnhoefer @EricFrohnhoe...: "Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email."
Langdon: "with this kind of attitude, you probably don't want this guy on your team."
Elon Musk: "He's fired"
Of course liberals are claiming that he's violating his commitment to free speech by firing employees who criticise him on Twitter. Apparently the right to be on Twitter is the same as the right to be at Twitter
Kyle Rittenhouse on Twitter - "What have we learned since @elonmusk opened up @twitter? #Conservatives are hilarious and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. 😎 Lefties are boring and fragile. #snowflakes"
Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter - The New York Times - "One engineering manager, upon being told to cut hundreds of workers, vomited into a trash can... Twitter, which is under financial pressure from debt and a slumping economy, is now unrecognizable compared with what it was a month ago... Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, told employees in a meeting on Thursday that Twitter’s situation was grim. “There’s a massive negative cash flow, and bankruptcy is not out of the question”... Mr. Musk insisted on a payroll audit to confirm that Twitter’s employees were “real humans.” He voiced concerns that “ghost employees” who should not receive the money lingered in Twitter’s systems... Twitter executives also suggested assessing the lists for diversity and inclusion issues so the cuts would not hit people of color disproportionately and to avoid legal trouble. Mr. Musk’s team brushed aside the suggestion
Anti-racism means making hiring and firing decisions based on race
Clearly Twitter's financial pressure from debt are Musk's fault though he only just took it over
Elon Musk mocks claim he's starving Twitter employees for ending free lunches: ‘Is this a parody?’ - "A Georgia-based activist was ripped on social media for accusing Elon Musk of starving Twitter employees, after it was revealed that free lunches will no longer be provided at the company... workers telling the paper that their new boss plans to make employees pay for lunch at the company cafeteria. Lunches were free under previous management. That same day, "super followable" Democrat activist Andrew Wortman shared a link to the article, writing, "He fired ¾ of the employees. Now he’s planning to starve the rest of them. He’s failure incarnate."... New York law partner Ron Coleman appeared to mock Wortman by sending an Amazon link to the book "There’s no such thing a free lunch," by Milton Friedman. "Here’s a book you might like," Coleman wrote. "If you promise to read the whole thing I’ll even send it to you. Free." "Starve? Because well-paid employees have to buy (or bring?) their own lunch? What other industry gives employees free lunch? Surely you’re joking?," former gymnast and author Jennifer Sey chimed in... Wortman hit back at his critics, calling Musk a "cheap pile of garbage" in the process. "For the ‘I bring my own lunch’ crowd, that’s a shame but not relevant. Twitter was a company that provided lunch for its employees for free for ten years and has now abruptly stopped because its CEO is a cheap pile of garbage""
If Twitter doesn't pay its employees' housing costs, it means it's making them homeless
Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 on Twitter - "As revenge for @elonmusk suspending violent extremist accounts on Twitter, #Antifa in Portland are organizing arson attacks on @Tesla locations tonight. This is just a drop in the ocean of years of violent organizing on Twitter."
Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 on Twitter - "Update: The violent extremist #Antifa account in Portland who is organizing the arson direct action against @Tesla tonight has been suspended. The account listed addresses of Tesla properties across the US for comrades to attack as vengeance against @elonmusk."
Elon Musk pokes fun at 'Stay Woke' shirts found at Twitter HQ - "Elon Musk is literally cleaning out the closets of Twitter, laughing after finding a stack of unworn “Stay Woke” T-shirts"
Clear proof Twitter was not biased in the past
Thread by @ggreenwald on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Here's the leftist president of Mexico, @lopezobrador_, praising the un-banning of Trump. It's vital to remember: Trump's banning by Twitter and FB was condemned by leaders all over the world. Only US liberals and corporate journalists - the epicenter of censorship - cheered it. Beyond AMLO, numerous leaders who disliked Trump - including Germany's Anglea Merkel and France's Macron, along with EU officials - warned of the grave threats to democracy when Big Tech oligarchs can ban elected leaders like Trump from being heard. Sometimes it's easy to forget how authoritarian US liberals and their journalist allies are because they always herald themselves as the vanguard against fascism. But they are global rogue actors. Here's AMLO eloquently explaining how dangerous they are. Over on Mastodon - the obscure refuge to which liberal journalists are fleeing in fear of free speech even though they can't figure it out - they're already banning each other over the most trivial infractions. It's like a laboratory to study how censorship-happy rats behave. A "journalist" group was started by super-woke Mega Ally @adamdavidson, late of @NewYorker. He just banned the trans activist @ParkerMolloy, late of Media Matters. Her crime? Accusing @pescami of being transphobic. His crime? Posting a NYT article on the harms of puberty blockers. These are the deeply neurotic, obviously unwell, vehemently intolerant left-liberal functionaries who - with scam "disinformation experts" and activist groups - have been controlling our discourse, dictating who can and can't be heard. The meltdown is because they lost this power"
Meme - STUX @stux@mstdn.social: "What's it with people reporting every single person they dont like... Please, stop with that. This is not #Twitter. Please use features like mute or block if you don't like people but stop reporting otherwise I'll start banning people who keep reporting for nothing. I'm trying to keep things running with so many new people and it's such a waste of time to hear whatever you don't like Otherwise go waste Elon's time, not mine"
What happens when you get an influx of pro-censorship people
Opinion: Twitter was an unprofitable mess long before Elon Musk – he might be its only lifeline - The Globe and Mail - "It would be easy to characterize Elon Musk’s approach since taking over Twitter Inc. last month as rash, messy, destructive and unplanned. While such descriptions would be accurate, they would certainly not be complete. What we have been witnessing, in public and in real time, is a live demonstration of the way Mr. Musk runs a business. He has generally managed his other ventures very successfully – especially in terms of growth, if not always in terms of profit. Tesla Inc. continues to build factories and deliver cars and SpaceX rockets continue to supply the International Space Station with materials and astronauts. It’s important to keep two things in mind while following the Twitter drama: The company was already in serious trouble and Mr. Musk’s style, though volatile, is well-matched to the problems at hand. Since 2013, Twitter had fallen from the world’s third-largest social-media platform to the 17th. The company had barely innovated during that time, while its competitors had worked hard to reinvent themselves. Eleven of the social-media platforms with more users are newer than Twitter. Even older incumbents are more innovative. Facebook, for example, has launched Marketplace and shifted its focus to the metaverse. In a fast-paced industry such as social media, it is vital to change and quickly to stay ahead. If a company decides not to be innovative, as Twitter’s developers had openly acknowledged, the alternative is to be highly efficient. But Twitter, based on revenue per employee, was only 50 per cent as efficient as Facebook. In 2016, rumours suggested another large corporation, possibly Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. or Walt Disney Co., was about to acquire Twitter, but that didn’t happen. The most-cited reason was that Twitter was paying its employees twice what the competition was paying and no one wanted to engage in messy layoffs and restructuring. Today, even relatively efficient companies are cutting spending. Amazon.com Inc. is slashing 10,000 jobs, Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook’s parent) will cut more than 11,000 and HP Inc. will slash 4,000 to 6,000 jobs, to name just a few. Twitter had to change to survive. Other owners might have studied efficiencies and signalled layoffs, but taken months to do it. Such efforts can send company morale and productivity into the gutter. When Mr. Musk fired half Twitter’s staff, he was doing what another owner eventually would have done. To create a more innovative Twitter, Mr. Musk has already made, and retracted, product changes, as well as promising many more – including the potential for Twitter banking. All this experimentation, of course, is happening publicly, rather than in a research lab or with limited groups of beta testers... In business schools, we teach management as a very deliberate process in which action follows analysis, planning and deliberation. This is what most analysts would consider typical style. But there is another style of management entrepreneurs use, which is especially risky. Entrepreneurial management creates success through direct action and trial and error. Mr. Musk is an entrepreneurial manager, and this style, which is destructive – and creative – is now on full display. Because we so rarely get to see this approach in action, it’s shocking; but it’s how Mr. Musk operates. He starts working on a problem without knowing what the solution might be. He believes a solution exists and will emerge through trial and error. At SpaceX he started strapping GoPro cameras to rockets and livestreaming every launch – even for experimental rockets that were likely to fail, hoping to gather useful information... Every entrepreneurial venture has a greater chance of failure than of success, and Twitter is particularly risky. Mr. Musk himself said when he launched Tesla that it was probably going to fail. The same with SpaceX. At Twitter, he sent an e-mail to employees saying the company could be bankrupt by next year. Mr. Musk could make horrible mistakes that kill the company, but it would likely have eventually failed regardless, and today he may be the only person who is interested in buying Twitter and has a shot at keeping it going. For the public, witnessing this saga is like watching open-heart surgery on a very sick patient: It can be rough, dramatic, bloody and off-putting, but it may the only way to give the patient a chance to survive."
Mike Pompeo on Twitter - "For the EU to consider banning Twitter while it allows TikTok inside the gates of Europe fundamentally misunderstands the risk to the people it is duty bound to protect. The CCP surveillance state, not a private American company, presents the clear danger."
Meme - "Twitter with 50 employees
I run exactly the same 99% less labor cost
Twitter with 7,500 employees
The spaceman was mean to me and made me actually go to work"
