Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

[bilateralrope]

Now, the question is this -

At any time during this entire fiasco, did Musk state his intention to lay people off once he took control?

At one point he said he was going to fire 75% of the staff. Then he said he wasn't going to do that. Now he's laying off 50% of them.

I'll let someone else try to say if that counts for this law.

[Gandalf]

Based on this and every other report coming out, this would be a good time for the Twitter workers to unionise.

[Bedlam]

Now, the question is this -

At any time during this entire fiasco, did Musk state his intention to lay people off once he took control?

At one point he said he was going to fire 75% of the staff. Then he said he wasn't going to do that. Now he's laying off 50% of them.

I'll let someone else try to say if that counts for this law.

I'm not a legal expert but I'd assume the law would require specific notification of the workers in question from the company rather than a general statement from the potential new owner that he's planning on firing people.

[PainRack]

You know. There's apparently a slow exodus of twitter people, looking for alternatives such as Mastodon, Discord and etc.


Well. USENET still exists. It's time to bring back the flame wars, the killfilter, everything Twitter was with it Nazis and alt right and tweet threads and bring back the good old days.

[bilateralrope]

Remember how Musk said he didn't like people getting permanent bans from Twitter

He's decided to make an exception. Turns out he doesn't like people who impersonate him.

Twitter will ban impersonators, Elon Musk says, as users flock to take his name

After the announcement by Elon Musk, several accounts that had changed their name to his appeared to be suspended

Guardian staff and agencies
Mon 7 Nov 2022 01.13 GMT

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has said that any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be “permanently suspended”.

“Previously, we issued a warning before suspension, but now that we are rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning,” he tweeted on Sunday night.

He said any name change would result in the temporary loss of a verified checkmark.

On Sunday evening several accounts that had changed their name to Elon Musk or approximations of Elon Musk appeared to be suspended or placed behind a warning sign, including those of US comedian Kathy Griffin and Australian satirical website the Chaser.

Musk had previously said he opposed permanent bans on Twitter.

Appearing to defend his sweeping bans, Musk tweeted that he was still committed to free speech, and would continue to allow the account that flags his movements to remain online.

The latest storm comes amid reported uncertainty around Twitter’s planned rollout of verification checks for a monthly fee of $7.99, which is a feature of its paid-for Twitter Blue service.

The New York Times reported the new feature would be delayed until after the US midterm elections, amid concerns users could buy verification, pretend to be a political figure and then sow electoral confusion.

Engineering teams at Twitter are rolling new features at breakneck speed, amid the chaos and distress caused by reports of the summary dismissal of half of Twitter’s 7,500-strong workforce.

There were reports on Sunday night that dozens who had been laid off had been asked to return as they were either laid off by mistake or the company had since realised their work was vital to build the new features Musk is seeking.

He acquired Twitter at the end of last month for $44bn, in a deal backed by billions of his own money. The entrepreneur has now set up a war room in the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, where he and a small team of advisers are scrambling to save costs and push out new products.

The first of these was Twitter Blue, rolled out in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

On the topic of previously banned accounts, Musk last week said they will not be allowed back onto Twitter until the social media platform has “a clear process for doing so”.

Creating such a process would take at least a few more weeks, Musk had tweeted, giving more clarity about the potential return of Twitter’s most famous banned user, former US president Donald Trump. The new timeline implies Trump will not return in time for the midterm elections on 8 November.

With Reuters

Oh and they are trying to get some of the laid off people to come back. Which means he's in for another shock when he finds out that anyone who does return never stopped job hunting.

[bilateralrope]

A Verge article with details about which teams Musk hit hardest:

he areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams, according to tweets by laid-off employees and people familiar with the matter. More company leaders, including Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering, and Tony Haile, a senior director of product overseeing Twitter’s work with news publishers, have also been laid off following Musk’s firings of Twitter’s senior leadership last week.

iven the sweeping nature of Musk’s layoffs and his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting, employees who remain at Twitter told The Verge that they expect the company to have a hard time maintaining critical infrastructure in the short term. “Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, while another called management’s layoff process “an absolute shit show.”

That's an impressive list of teams that got hit hard despite sounding important.

At this stage, it seems to be a question of what Twitter will hit first. Major backend failures or the trust thermocline.

[Broomstick]

Honestly, when I see a large/important/influential company crash and burn I wind up feeling more sorry for the worker-bees/peons who don't have the golden parachutes. One that sticks in my mind because of my location in the corporate world when it unfold was the fall of Arthur Andersen. Most of the execs and partners eventually got other jobs in the field or starts their own business, but fuck all helped the 25,000+ who lost their jobs in the shitstorm.

I anticipate a similar, if not greater, disaster for Twitter. Anyone working for Twitter who is NOT named "Musk" should be looking for alternative employment if they have any smarts at all.

[Solauren]

Anyone working at Twitter should have started looking for alternative employment chances when the board announced they were going to force Musk to honor the sale. Or at least talked with a tech headhunter. Tech take overs like that are never good, and Musk doesn't inspire confidence.

[bilateralrope]

Anyone working at Twitter should have started looking for alternative employment chances when the board announced they were going to force Musk to honor the sale. Or at least talked with a tech headhunter. Tech take overs like that are never good, and Musk doesn't inspire confidence.

From memory, one of the things Twitter cited in their lawsuit to force Musk to honor what he had agreed to was that some staff had left but they couldn't hire new staff while waiting for it to be resolved. So at least some were looking for a while.

[Solauren]

Could people already looking for work elsewhere hurt the class-action lawsuit?

[Broomstick]

I don't think so.

The lawsuit would be about the unlawful actions of the accused, not the legal actions of the people who were wronged.

[Solauren]

I don't think so.

The lawsuit would be about the unlawful actions of the accused, not the legal actions of the people who were wronged.

I was thinking more "10 of the people in the lawsuit were already looking to leave, they shouldn't be allowed in it" attempts.

[bilateralrope]

I don't think so.

The lawsuit would be about the unlawful actions of the accused, not the legal actions of the people who were wronged.

I was thinking more "10 of the people in the lawsuit were already looking to leave, they shouldn't be allowed in it" attempts.

How do you think Twitter could prove that each of those people was seriously looking to leave ?

[Broomstick]

At certain levels of the US workforce it is routine for people to be looking into their options. Out of any given 100 employees at a company probably 10 are looking at other jobs even if the place isn't being sold to Elon Musk. At least 10%, more than that in some industries.

[Zaune]

Besides, even if some of the laid off workers had got as far as submitting resumes to other firms I'm pretty sure they're still entitled to more than a week's notice.

[bilateralrope]

Besides, even if some of the laid off workers had got as far as submitting resumes to other firms I'm pretty sure they're still entitled to more than a week's notice.

Exactly. There is no guarantee they will get the job they applied for until they get told they have it.

[bilateralrope]

Two more articles about how incompetently the worlds richest man is running Twitter. Just in case we have anyone here who assumes that someone with massive wealth is automatically competent at running an organisation.

Elon Musk has discussed putting all of Twitter behind a paywall

So far Twitter Blue is a mess and might even lose money.
By CASEY NEWTON / @caseynewton

Nov 8, 2022, 2:52 PM GMT+13

If Friday brought massive layoffs to Twitter, Monday brought fresh evidence that the company will never be the same. Elon Musk has discussed putting the entire site behind a paywall, Platformer has learned. Meanwhile, the company is scrambling to lure back employees who it laid off mere hours ago, and some workers say the economics behind its soon-to-relaunch Twitter Blue subscription could actually lose the company money.

All of this took place against the backdrop of a company that still has yet to hear anything official from Musk, via email or a companywide meeting. As Monday began, after losing thousands of their colleagues days earlier, many employees didn’t know who their managers are.

Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.

Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.

I. The botch

Friday’s layoffs had been brutal for all involved, including those involved in planning them — many of whom themselves lost their jobs. While the process varied by team, some managers were asked to submit to Musk’s team two sentences about all of their direct reports: one sentence explaining what the employee did, and one sentence justifying their continued employment at Twitter.

“You were like, this better be a fucking good sentence,” one person asked to write such a list told me.

Managers agonized over the decisions and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.

Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. But within a day it was being posted in public Slack channels.

“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. The company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers over the past day in an effort to get them back, Platformer is told.

Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

Now workers fear that if they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. One person I spoke with was told that any technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors, while also spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given much higher numbers of direct reports.

II. The two Twitters

As today began at Twitter, there were essentially two groups at the company, one employee told me: those working on projects that Musk has been deeply involved in, such as the revamped Twitter Blue subscription, and everyone else.

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

To learn what they are supposed to do, employees looked to some unusual sources. After a number of celebrities and high-profile accounts began to impersonate him, Musk announced a new policy, via a tweet, that anyone found impersonating someone else would be permanently banned without warning. That was news to what remains of Twitter’s policy team, I’m told, and afterward some employees began discussing how to implement Musk’s edict.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. “I think it is worth listening to in order to understand the macro environment we are operating in.”

Most employees were more interested in their health benefits, which had suddenly become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

III. The Blue disaster

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had begun to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

But several employees I spoke with were still wrestling with one overarching question: do Musk and his team have any idea what they’re doing?

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

But the rollout of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that will allow anyone to get a verification badge, has been a disaster.

The company rolled out a new version of the app on Saturday with release notes that said the new Blue was now available. (The copy, written by Calacanis, was widely derided for sounding like a phishing email.) The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.

Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.

But the new Blue likely faces larger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. It’s unclear how the company will persuade enough people to subscribe to justify the effort.

Twitter employees tried to sell Musk and Sacks on the idea of asking business accounts to pay for extra features since many of them use Twitter to reach large audiences. But they were dismissed in favor of offering wide-scale verification first, I’m told.

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user in the United States by making that change, sources said. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.

“The business fundamentals are just not there,” said one former employee who worked on the plans.

Musk has been heavily involved in the chaotic launch of Blue, participating in standup meetings and exchanging regular emails with Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company. “There is one decision-maker and that is me,” Musk told workers, according to meeting notes shared with employees in Slack.

“Any detail of Twitter Blue must be clear w/ him down to the last detail,” the message added.

But all of that could be a prelude to the biggest change of all: charging most or all users a subscription fee to use Twitter.

Both Musk and Sacks have discussed the idea in recent meetings, according to a person familiar with the matter. One such plan might allow everyone to use Twitter for a limited amount of time each month but require a subscription to continue browsing, the person said.

It could not be learned how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall; Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.

Still, given Twitter’s huge debt burden, the backward economics of Blue, and the recent pause in spending by major advertisers, it’s clear that Musk and his brain trust will have to do something to significantly increase revenue. And whatever they choose, it seems increasingly clear that Twitter will never be the same

Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks

One insider says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform.

By Chris Stokel-Walkerarchive page
November 8, 2022

On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.

Twitter introduced retweets in 2009, turning an organic thing people were already doing—pasting someone else’s username and tweet, preceded by the letters RT—into a software function. In the years since, the retweet and its distant cousin the quote tweet (which launched in April 2015) have become two of the most common mechanics on Twitter.

But on Friday, a few users who pressed the retweet button saw the years roll back to 2009. Manual retweets, as they were called, were back.

The return of the manual retweet wasn’t Elon Musk’s latest attempt to appease users. Instead, it was the first public crack in the edifice of Twitter’s code base—a blip on the seismometer that warns of a bigger earthquake to come.

A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger, a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry. “These are very big, very complicated systems.” Krueger says one 2017 presentation from Twitter staff includes a statistic suggesting that more than half the back-end infrastructure was dedicated to storing data.

While many of Musk’s detractors may hope the platform goes through the equivalent of thermonuclear destruction, the collapse of something like Twitter happens gradually. For those who know, gradual breakdowns are a sign of concern that a larger crash could be imminent. And that’s what’s happening now.

It’s the small things
Whether it’s manual RTs appearing for a moment before retweets slowly morph into their standard form, ghostly follower counts that race ahead of the number of people actually following you, or replies that simply refuse to load, small bugs are appearing at Twitter’s periphery. Even Twitter’s rules, which Musk linked to on November 7, went offline temporarily under the load of millions of eyeballs. In short, it’s becoming unreliable.

“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says.

Twitter’s remaining engineers have largely been tasked with keeping the site stable over the last few days, since the new CEO decided to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff maintaining its code base. As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running.

This is particularly problematic, says Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs—a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.”

That engineer doesn’t see a route out of the issue—other than reversing the layoffs (which the company has reportedly already attempted to roll back somewhat). “If we’re going to be pushing at a breakneck pace, then things will break,” he says. “There’s no way around that. We’re accumulating technical debt much faster than before—almost as fast as we’re accumulating financial debt.”

The list grows longer
He presents a dystopian future where issues pile up as the backlog of maintenance tasks and fixes grows longer and longer. “Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”

Twitter’s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. It starts with the small things: “Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they’re using; whatever service in the back end they’re trying to use. They’ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.”

Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.”

The juddering manual retweets and faltering follower counts are indications that this is already happening. Twitter engineers have designed fail-safes that the platform can fall back on so that the functionality doesn’t go totally offline but cut-down versions are provided instead. That’s what we’re seeing, says Krueger.

Alongside the minor malfunctions, the Twitter engineer believes that there’ll be significant outages on the horizon, thanks in part to Musk’s drive to reduce Twitter’s cloud computing server load in an attempt to claw back up to $3 million a day in infrastructure costs. Reuters reports that this project, which came from Musk’s war room, is called the “Deep Cuts Plan.” One of Reuters’s sources called the idea “delusional,” while Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says that “unless they’ve massively overengineered the current system, the risk of poorer capacity and availability seems a logical conclusion.”

Brain drain
Meanwhile, when things do go kaput, there’s no longer the institutional knowledge to quickly fix issues as they arise. “A lot of the people I saw who were leaving after Friday have been there nine, 10, 11 years, which is just ridiculous for a tech company,” says the Twitter engineer. As those individuals walked out of Twitter offices, decades of knowledge about how its systems worked disappeared with them. (Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.)

Unfortunately, teams stripped back to their bare bones (according to those remaining at Twitter) include the tech writers’ team. “We had good documentation because of [that team],” says the engineer. No longer. When things go wrong, it’ll be harder to find out what has happened.

Getting answers will be harder externally as well. The communications team has been cut down from between 80 and 100 to just two people, according to one former team member who MIT Technology Review spoke to. “There’s too much for them to do, and they don’t speak enough languages to deal with the press as they need to,” says the engineer.

When MIT Technology Review reached out to Twitter for this story, the email went unanswered.

Musk’s recent criticism of Mastodon, the open-source alternative to Twitter that has piled on users in the days since the entrepreneur took control of the platform, invites the suggestion that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. The Twitter CEO tweeted, then quickly deleted, a post telling users, “If you don’t like Twitter anymore, there is awesome site [sic] called Masterbatedone [sic].” Accompanying the words was a physical picture of his laptop screen open on Paul Krugman’s Mastodon profile, showing the economics columnist trying multiple times to post. Despite Musk’s attempt to highlight Mastodon’s unreliability, its success has been remarkable: nearly half a million people have signed up since Musk took over Twitter.

It’s happening at the same time that the first cracks in Twitter’s edifice are starting to show. It’s just the beginning, expects Krueger. “I would expect to start seeing significant public-facing problems with the technology within six months,” he says. “And I feel like that’s a generous estimate.”

[Solauren]

To be fare, someone that builds up massive wealth running a given type of company should be able to run any similar company.
However, that doesn't translate into a being able to run a different type of company.

[bilateralrope]

To be fare, someone that builds up massive wealth running a given type of company should be able to run any similar company.
However, that doesn't translate into a being able to run a different type of company.

There is not knowing how to run a company different to the kind someone is used to running, which would mean relying on the expertise of the people who do know how to run it while you learn how the company operates. Then deciding who to delegate to.

Then there is the stupidity that Musk engages in. Firing the board of directors and half the staff so quickly that he's looking at a lawsuit and asking some of the fired workers to come back. Pissing off the companies customers. The change to the blue checkmark going exactly as many people predicted with lots of impersonators.

Making changes so quickly that some staff may be risking prison sentences if they rush through the wrong thing.

Twitter security execs quit amid worries that Musk will violate FTC settlement

Musk's rapid product launches may run afoul of mandates from FTC privacy decree.
JON BRODKIN - 11/11/2022, 10:20 AM

Some of Twitter's top privacy and security executives resigned this week amid worries that Elon Musk's rapid changes may cause violations of the company's recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

"The privacy staffers said they were most concerned by the rapid rollout of new features without the full security reviews that the FTC consent decree requires," The Washington Post reported in a story about the departures today.

Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner confirmed leaving the company in a tweet. Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty also resigned, according to news reports.

The FTC said it's keeping track of what's going on at Twitter. "We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern," an FTC spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill and other news outlets. "No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them."

Recent FTC order opens Twitter to compliance risk

Twitter reached a new settlement with the FTC in May 2022, agreeing to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. The FTC said the ad-targeting violated the terms of Twitter's 2011 settlement with the FTC, which "explicitly prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices."

The FTC also said it was requiring "substantial new compliance measures" to "help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users' privacy." The settlement requires assessments of risks to privacy, security, and confidentiality before Twitter launches new or modified products and services.

Another requirement is that Twitter must submit a compliance notice within 14 days after a merger. That means the company has to give the FTC a compliance notice triggered by the Musk purchase today if it hasn't already done so.

Musk's quick changes risk violating Twitter's deal with the FTC, a company lawyer reportedly warned in an internal Slack message that was viewable by Twitter's entire staff. The Verge published the Slack message, saying it was posted by an attorney on the company's privacy team.

"Musk's new legal department is now asking engineers to 'self-certify' compliance with FTC rules and other privacy laws, according to the lawyer's note and another employee familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak without the company's permission," The Verge wrote.

Musk last week laid off about 3,700 employees, about half of Twitter's staff.

Attorney warns Twitter engineers of legal risk

Submissions to the FTC required by the May 2022 consent decree are made under penalty of perjury. As Mike Masnick pointed out on TechDirt, "Anyone working in Twitter needs to know that 'self-certifying' something that violates the FTC's consent decree may be tied to a prison sentence and huge fines. This is not how any of this should be working."

The Twitter lawyer's internal message reads in part:

This will put huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will be pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.

All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter's longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.

The Verge also paraphrased another anonymous employee as saying that this week's launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription "disregarded the company's normal privacy and security review" in which a "red team" reviews potential risks before launch. "None of the red team's recommendations were implemented before Twitter Blue's relaunch, the employee said," according to The Verge report.

The Twitter Blue changes make it possible to pay $8 a month for the blue checkmarks that were previously reserved for accounts that Twitter verified as being real and notable.

The Washington Post quoted former FTC official David Vladeck as saying the executive departures and general chaos at Twitter raise questions about whether "compliance requirements are going to fall through the cracks." Vladeck, who was director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection when the 2011 settlement was reached, said another violation would trigger much bigger fines than the $150 million one from earlier this year.

"There would be some very significant multiple of the last fine," the Post quoted Vladeck as saying.

[Jub]

This Twitter thing is wild. As somebody who went from not getting Twitter to using it as my primary social media tool over the past few years, seeing it all looking like it might end because one man is a profound idiot is wild. If it wasn't already clear that billionaires and the 'elite' are and always have been worthless; I hope that illusion has been shattered now.

[bilateralrope]

In Musk is an asshole who doesn't follow the law news:

Twitter lays off staff at its only Africa office in Ghana

By Nkechi Ogbonna
BBC West Africa business reporter

Twitter has fired nearly all its staff in Ghana, which was home to its only office in Africa.

The firm "is re-organising its operations as a result of a need to reduce costs," read Twitter's email, seen by the BBC.

The layoffs were part of a global staff cull introduced by new boss Elon Musk.

The Ghana office was opened to some fanfare last year with the company saying it wanted to be more "immersed" in African conversations.

An anonymous employee told the BBC no redundancy was offered, unlike in some other countries, but their normal salary would be paid until the end of the contract at the beginning of next month, they said.

On 4 November Elon Musk tweeted that employees had been "offered 3 months of severance", after news started to break globally about mass staff layoffs, however, it was not clear what office he was referring to.

"It's very insulting," the anonymous Ghana employee said. Under local law laid-off staff must be paid redundancy and should be given three months notice, as opposed to under a month in the case of the Ghanaian employees who have been told the "last day of employment will be 4 December 2022".

"From the mail to the lack of next steps to the tone of the letter. Just everything. Ridiculously insulting," the staff member continued.

Ghana staff were sent messages about the end of their contracts to their personal accounts, after being denied access to work emails.

There were just under 20 people employed in Ghana's Twitter office who were working in various roles from curation and marketing to editorial, the BBC understands.

The letter from Twitter's management further warned staff not to "contact or deal with any customers, clients, authorities, banks, suppliers or other employees of the Company and are required to inform the Company if contacted".

It also told staff not to commence any other employment or engagement until their last day with the organisation, while wishing them the very best in their future endeavours.

Mr Musk, Twitter's new owner, has been laying off staff worldwide. He said he had "no choice" but to slash the company's workforce as the firm was losing more than $4m (£3.5m) a day.

Last year, Twitter announced it was opening its first Africa office in Ghana in a bid to "be more immersed in the rich and vibrant communities that drive the conversations taking place every day across the African continent", it said in an April 2021 statement.

At the time, Twitter had praised Ghana for "free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet" with the news even being welcomed by Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo who described it as "excellent".

Less than the amount of pay and notice required by local law. Not allowed to do any work for Twitter or talk with other Twitter employees (which would get in the way of them organising legal action), but also not allowed to start jobs elsewhere until after the notice period ends.

[Broomstick]

If it wasn't already clear that billionaires and the 'elite' are and always have been worthless; I hope that illusion has been shattered now.

Billionaires aren't super-powered, they're lucky. Either they inherit wealth and make more, or they have the right idea/widget/whatever at the right time to cash in. They aren't different than anyone else aside from that, they aren't smarter or more capable.

Worthless? Not completely. Those that had the right widget at the right time may have helped the world, including the little guy, in positive ways because of that widget. But that's it. Again, they aren't smarter or more capable or in any way better than the rest of us, they just got the timing right, usually just the one time.

[Dominus Atheos]

I don't understand a word of this, but i assume if it was bullshit somebody would have called it out as bullshit:

Will Slaughter

Just to be clear, Twitter senior secured bank loans- the top of the capital stack- at $0.60 implies that Twitter- for which @elonmusk paid $44 billion- is now worth less than $8 billion.

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OMG, the preceding tweet has brought out the corporate finance nerds!

OK fine (aside from looking at recovery values), let’s do the contingent claims analysis. Senior creditors are short an EV put struck at $13B (the face value of their loan)

The market values this put at $5B right now (actually more including the spread premium). Let’s assume Elon has got 2 years to turn this around, and throw on a 50% annual asset value volatility. Plug it all in to Black Scholes and you get an implied spot price (EV) of ~$8B

Now a bunch of Elon stans want argue with me about Twitter’s value. Don’t argue with me, argue with the hedge funds who were 60 bid on this paper when the banks tried to sell it this week!
Reminds me of the old ‘87 crash story:

“60 bid”

“My machine says it’s worth 100!”

“Well son, sell it to your machine then!”

https://twitter.com/BamaBonds/status/15 ... 5339540480

[Jub]

If it wasn't already clear that billionaires and the 'elite' are and always have been worthless; I hope that illusion has been shattered now.

Billionaires aren't super-powered, they're lucky. Either they inherit wealth and make more, or they have the right idea/widget/whatever at the right time to cash in. They aren't different than anyone else aside from that, they aren't smarter or more capable.

Worthless? Not completely. Those that had the right widget at the right time may have helped the world, including the little guy, in positive ways because of that widget. But that's it. Again, they aren't smarter or more capable or in any way better than the rest of us, they just got the timing right, usually just the one time.

Those who had the right widget at the right time ought to have given it to the world for free. Insulin could have made a billionaire but the only moral choice was to give away that fortune.

Billionaires are the worst of humanity. Even the 'good' ones have gallons of blood on their hands if only because they wouldn't accept less to give humanity more.

[bilateralrope]

I don't understand a word of this, but i assume if it was bullshit somebody would have called it out as bullshit:

If I'm understanding it right, all it's saying is that the people who are trading in some loans Twitter took out don't have much confidence in Twitter's ability to repay them. Which isn't really a surprise.

But I've never heard of senior secured loans before, so I could be wrong.