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

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

Post by Straha »

Jub wrote: 2023-04-27 10:58pm
Straha wrote: 2023-04-27 09:21pmSure... But if you're Microsoft is that worth the hassle? And imagine selling this to your board and shareholders. "We engaged in manuevers to take over a broken platform that the second richest person in the world couldn't save for the intangible benefits that it brings (all of which are heavily legally scrutinized and come with immense PR blowback)!"
A large install base with low expectations could probably be converted into dollars by a large corporation with a modicum of savvy. Microsoft is presumably trustworthy to advertisers so they can say, "Starting at [insert date] we're bringing online a new and robust moderation system to protect your interests." That should get advertisers on board then they can rework a paid subscription model into a useful feature people actually want to have, maybe the ability to embed longer videos, curate easily searched collections, and apply meta tags to tweets to boost discoverability to make that angle work.

I don't think the idea of a healthy self-sustaining Twitter is an impossibility, the old team just didn't want to try it and Musk is an idiot.
The old team wanted to get there but couldn't figure out a path. Musk is doing all the tricks that you do with a startup to make it profitable, not realizing that without a physical product or concretized service to sell he's burning the entire thing down.

Re: Your path for Microsoft's takeover, again, imagine the sheer cost involved with introducing a moderation team, hiring people to staff up to sell ads again, and engaging in the full court press to get advertizers back. Now imagine the added costs of trying to woo back lost users and the hassle of cleaning up the userbase. Then imagine the costs in having to deal with legacy regulation issues (like the EU), dealing with political fallout, and the perceptual hit of taking over a place ridden with Nazis. Then imagine doing all of this with a Twitter six months from now after Musk has finished running it into the bottom of the Grand Canyon, because that's the only way you're getting a hold of twitter like this.

Then, by contrast, imagine taking the Billions of Dollars I just described and parking it in, I don't know, some municipal bonds? The return on investment will be immediate and far greater with far far far less hassle.


And this isn't just Microsoft, Twitter is so deeply idiosyncratic and so simultaneously over- and underbuilt that there aren't readily available synergies for companies that could buy it to be able to make it make sense for them to buy it, and the time it would take to profitability just makes it a fucking ludicrous ask.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

Post by bilateralrope »

Ralin wrote: 2023-04-28 12:40amRelated to what Jub said, I tend to think that most of the regulatory agencies Twitter has issues with would be willing to extend some leeway to new owners in negotiating how to fix said issues in a timely way. Since they presumably read the news same as we do and know full well that much of Twitter's current lack of cooperation is due to the Boy King being in charge.
Maybe they will be willing to give that leeway. Maybe not. I doubt anyone will be willing to risk it without some assurances that the leeway will be given. Also there is the risk that one of Musk's code changes and/or firing sprees knocks Twitter offline.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Musk threatens to reassign NPR Twitter account if it won’t start tweeting again
Musk threat to NPR contradicts Twitter's own inactive account policy.
JON BRODKIN - 5/4/2023, 3:26 AM


Elon Musk yesterday threatened to reassign NPR's Twitter account to "another company" if the media organization doesn't start tweeting again. In "an unprompted Tuesday email" to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn, Musk wrote, "So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?" according to an NPR news article by Allyn.

Allyn pointed out that reassigning NPR's account solely for not tweeting would contradict Twitter's inactive account policy, which says that inactivity "is based on logging in," not on posting tweets. While accounts "may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity," Twitter's policy says that users can keep their accounts active simply by logging in at least once every 30 days.

"Musk did not answer when asked whether he planned to change the platform's definition of inactivity and he declined to say what prompted his new questions about NPR's lack of participation on Twitter," Allyn wrote.

NPR stopped tweeting about three weeks ago after objecting to labels applied to its Twitter account. Musk, Twitter's owner and CEO since October 2022, had labeled the news organization's account as "state-affiliated media," a designation typically applied to propaganda outlets controlled by governments in countries without substantial free press protections. The move contradicted Twitter's own policy that said, "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

Musk admitted the first label "might not be accurate" and changed it to "government-funded media," but NPR gets less than 1 percent of its annual funding directly from the US government. NPR announced its decision to stop tweeting a few days after that change, saying that Twitter "is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent."

Musk: “What’s the beef?”

Musk also labeled the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Twitter profile as "69% Government-funded Media," which isn't accurate. The CBC announced it would pause activity on Twitter because the label "undermines the accuracy and professionalism of the work" performed by CBC journalists.

Musk subsequently dropped the labels from all media outlets, even removing the longstanding "state-affiliated" labels from state-controlled news organizations in China and Russia. With about two weeks having passed since the labels were removed, Musk expressed annoyance that NPR hasn't posted any new tweets.

"Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant," Musk wrote to Allyn yesterday. "Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR." Allyn reported that Musk "responded sarcastically" when asked who would take over NPR's Twitter account:
"National Pumpkin Radio," Musk wrote, adding a fire emoji and a laughing emoji to describe the content of the fictional gourd-themed broadcaster. "NPR isn't tagged as government-funded anymore, so what's the beef?"
We contacted NPR today and will update this article if we get a response. Allyn's article said that an NPR spokesperson declined to comment.

Staying on Twitter may not be “worth the risk”

Before the government-funded designation was removed, NPR CEO John Lansing said he wasn't sure whether NPR would return to Twitter even if Musk deleted the label. "At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he said. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."

Allyn's article noted that giving "established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company's reputation."

"If this is a sign of things to come on Twitter, we might soon see even more of a rapid retreat by media organizations and other brands that don't think it's worth the risk," Columbia Journalism School Professor Emily Bell told NPR. "It's really an extraordinary threat to make."

Allyn also wrote that "one former Twitter executive was taken aback by the remark, telling NPR that such a threat should be alarming to any business operating on the site, since it indicates that acquiescing to Musk's every whim may be necessary in order to avoid being impersonated."
Just in case anyone thought that checking the username after the @ was a reliable way to know who was tweeting, here's Musk threatening to break it. All because he's upset that NPR doesn't want to come back.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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NPR not posting on his platform is their prerogative, but deliberately giving their account to an impersonator? He better watch it, because I'm sure that opens him up to potential lawsuits of some kind. Not that threat of lawsuits has stopped him from doing anything before, but the more of them that are targeting his platform the more likely it is one of them will take him down.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Formless wrote: 2023-05-03 06:26pm NPR not posting on his platform is their prerogative, but deliberately giving their account to an impersonator?
I think the reasoning is that if he gives the handle to someone else that will make them the new NPR because Elon wills it.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Formless wrote: 2023-05-03 06:26pm NPR not posting on his platform is their prerogative, but deliberately giving their account to an impersonator? He better watch it, because I'm sure that opens him up to potential lawsuits of some kind. Not that threat of lawsuits has stopped him from doing anything before, but the more of them that are targeting his platform the more likely it is one of them will take him down.
I've commented elsewhere that Musk and DeSantis seem to be competing for the most self-destructive tantrum.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Musk behaves like a vindictive man-child.

I'm not even sure how his supporters continue to make excuses for this type of behaviour.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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bobalot wrote: 2023-05-05 09:02am Musk behaves like a vindictive man-child.

I'm not even sure how his supporters continue to make excuses for this type of behaviour.
I suspect it's because it's how they'd want to behave and get away with it.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Pretty much. It's the same sort of appeal that Trump rode into POTUS.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Formless wrote: 2023-05-03 06:26pm NPR not posting on his platform is their prerogative, but deliberately giving their account to an impersonator? He better watch it, because I'm sure that opens him up to potential lawsuits of some kind. Not that threat of lawsuits has stopped him from doing anything before, but the more of them that are targeting his platform the more likely it is one of them will take him down.
It sounds like blackmail.

Oh, and fuck NPR. They're the ones who banned the use of the word torture to describe Joffrey W. Bush's kidnapping and torture regime.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Elfdart wrote: 2023-05-12 12:18am
Formless wrote: 2023-05-03 06:26pm NPR not posting on his platform is their prerogative, but deliberately giving their account to an impersonator? He better watch it, because I'm sure that opens him up to potential lawsuits of some kind. Not that threat of lawsuits has stopped him from doing anything before, but the more of them that are targeting his platform the more likely it is one of them will take him down.
It sounds like blackmail.

Oh, and fuck NPR. [url=https://fair.org/home/refusing-to-take- ... e-deniers/]They're the ones who banned the use of the word torture to describe Joffrey W. Bush's kidnapping and torture regime. [url]

And now if you say "STAB" on Facebook, you get banned until someone HUMAN is prodded to review the Banning.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Musk has stepped down from being CEO.

Destroys company and leaves the mess for someone else to sort out.

What a fuckwit.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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The new woman doesn't start for 7 months, and musk will still be chairman of the board.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Yeah. It looks like this will be another example of the glass cliff. But only if she can overrule Musk.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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bilateralrope wrote: 2023-05-14 02:03am Yeah. It looks like this will be another example of the glass cliff. But only if she can overrule Musk.
As long as he remains owner I don't see how she could unless she has a contract saying she can.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Oh look, it's Elon posting QAnon / Nazi bullshit.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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bobalot wrote: 2023-05-16 01:03am Oh look, it's Elon posting QAnon / Nazi bullshit.
It's going to get interesting when the EU starts enforcing their laws about what content must be moderated. I think the deadline for the Digital Services Act is in July or August.

Especially since Musk is very willing to silence whoever authoritarian governments tell him to.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Important Things At Twitter Keep Breaking, And Making The Site More Dangerous
from the there's-no-autocompleting-safety dept
Wed, May 17th 2023 10:48am - Mike Masnick


It turns out that if you fire basically all of the competent trust & safety people at your website, you end up with a site that is neither trustworthy, nor safe. We’ve spent months covering ways in which you cannot trust anything from Twitter or Elon Musk, and there have been some indications of real safety problems on the site, but it’s been getting worse lately, with two somewhat terrifying stories that show just how unsafe the site has become, and how risky it is to rely on Twitter for anything.

First, former head of trust & safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, a few weeks after he quit, said that “if protected tweets stop working, run.” Basically, when core security features break down, it’s time to get the hell out of there.

Protected tweets do still seem to kinda be working, but a related feature, Twitter’s “circles,” which lets you tweet to just a smaller audience, broke. Back in February, some people noticed that it was “glitching,” in ways that were concerning, including a few reports that some things that were supposedly posted to a circle were viewable publicly, but there weren’t many details. However, in early April, such reports became widespread, with further reports of nude imagery that people thought was being shared privately among a smaller group being available publicly.

Twitter said nothing for a while, before finally admitting earlier this month that there was a “security incident” that may have exposed some of those supposed-to-be-private tweets, though it appears to have only sent that admission to some users via email, rather than publicly commenting on it.

The second incident is perhaps a lot more concerning. Last week, some users discovered that Twitter’s search autocomplete was recommending… um… absolutely horrific stuff, including potential child sexual abuse material and animal torture videos. As an NBC report by Ben Collins notes, Twitter used to have tools that stopped search from recommending such awful things, but it looks like someone at Twitter 2.0 just turned off that feature, enabling anyone to get recommended animal torture.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told NBC News that he believes the company likely dismantled a series of safeguards meant to stop these kinds of autocomplete problems.

Roth explained that autocompleted search results on Twitter were internally known as “type-ahead search” and that the company had built a system to prevent illegal, illicit and dangerous content from appearing as autocompleting suggestions.

“There is an extensive, well-built and maintained list of things that filtered type-ahead search, and a lot of it was constructed with wildcards and regular expressions,” Roth said.

Roth said there was a several-step process to prevent gore and death videos from appearing in autocompleted search suggestions. The process was a combination of automatic and human moderation, which flagged animal cruelty and violent videos before they began to appear automatically in search results.

“Type-ahead search was really not easy to break. These are longstanding systems with multiple layers of redundancy,” said Roth. “If it just stops working, it almost defies probability.”
In other words, this isn’t something that just “breaks.” It’s something that someone had to go in and actively go through multiple steps to turn off.

After news of this started to get attention, Twitter responded by… turning off autocomplete entirely. Which, I guess, is better than leaving up the other version.

But, still, this is why you have a trust & safety team who works through this stuff to keep your site safe. It’s not just content moderation, as there’s a lot more to it than that. But Twitter 2.0 seems to have burned to the ground a ton of institutional knowledge and is just winging it. If that means recommending CSAM and animal torture videos, well, I guess that’s just the kind of site Twitter wants to be.
A system that has worked so well at preventing horrific suggested search terms that I never even thought about it existing. And Twitter broke it. Or just turned it off because they want people seeing the worst stuff on there.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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and I just got an email telling me if I want to keep my Twitter Account I need to log on ASAP.

Yeah... about that....
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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LadyTevar wrote: 2023-05-17 06:13pm and I just got an email telling me if I want to keep my Twitter Account I need to log on ASAP.

Yeah... about that....
I deleted my account when the Tech Bro Nazi took over.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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bobalot wrote: 2023-05-19 02:35am
LadyTevar wrote: 2023-05-17 06:13pm and I just got an email telling me if I want to keep my Twitter Account I need to log on ASAP.

Yeah... about that....
I deleted my account when the Tech Bro Nazi took over.
I thought I'd deleted mine back when Nitram died. I guess I just let it lie there doing nothing.
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

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Apparently Elon Doesn’t Think He Needs To Pay Rent Because SF Is A ‘Shithole’; So Why Should We Pay For Twitter?
from the burning-down-the-house dept
Mon, May 22nd 2023 09:34am - Mike Masnick


It’s no secret that Twitter isn’t paying many of its bills, including the rent for its headquarters. That was rumored last fall, but became much more clear when the landlords sued the company in January.

Now a new lawsuit, filed last week by six former employees, provides a lot more details on Elon’s view of, you know, paying for things he is contractually obligated to pay for. The employees, many of whom were high level, note that Musk and his circle of advisors (known by existing Twitter employees as “the goons”) made it clear to Twitter employees that they were to break all sorts of contracts:
Led by Musk and the cadres of sycophants who were internally referred to as the “transition team,” Twitter’s new leadership deliberately, specifically, and repeatedly announced their intentions to breach contracts, violate laws, and otherwise ignore their legal obligations.
The employees filing the lawsuit note that they were constantly ordered to violate their own legal obligations, often in the most obnoxious ways.
“Elon doesn’t pay rent,” one member of the transition team told Hawkins. Another member of the transition team put it more bluntly to Killian: “Elon told me he would only pay rent over his dead body.”
The crux of the lawsuit itself is that Musk hasn’t paid them the required severance he owes them per their contracts. But they used the opportunity to reveal a lot of what happened within Twitter. Enough that apparently the city of San Francisco has opened an investigation based on the claims in the complaint.

And while the complaint details various city building codes that Musk ordered employees to violate, the decision not to pay the rent is especially interesting. One of the plaintiffs, Tracy Hawkins, was Twitter’s VP of Real Estate and Workplace, and (as the complaint notes) if she had followed Elon’s orders, it would have destroyed her reputation in the real estate world.

The complaint paints quite a story:
On or about October 30, 2022, Hawkins attended a meeting with Steve Davis, Jared Burchall, and many of Twitter’s global leaders.

In that meeting, Davis announced several changes that boded ill for Hawkins’ team and her role at Twitter.

First, he announced that Twitter’s Sourcing and Procurement team should handle all lease negotiations from that point forward, despite lacking both personnel and experience sufficient to handle this task.

Next, he announced that the company would no longer be working with brokers to procure and negotiate leases.

This choice ran in conflict with every established standard and practice of commercial real estate management, and stood to further increase the burden on the in-house staff substantially.

The meeting gave no opportunities for feedback or discussion – it was merely a series of nonsensical pronouncements.

The only justification given for the changes was “Elon wants this.”

Very soon thereafter, Davis informed Hawkins that Twitter needed to find five hundred million dollars in annual savings.

To accomplish this, each Global Lead was given a massive spreadsheet that had to be filled out every single day, identifying possible savings opportunities.

Hawkins’ spreadsheet covered thirty locations and upwards of fifty leases.

The pressure to fill in the spreadsheet on time was immense. Expectations from above made it clear that compliance was prioritized above accuracy

Nonetheless, Hawkins and her team strove to deliver reliable, well-contextualized information.

For example, Twitter instructed Hawkins to identify leases for cancellation.

When she identified potential sites and leases that could be terminated for cost savings, Hawkins and her team took the time to document the risk factors involved in downsizing or terminating these leases, such as large termination fees.

However, when the time came to present their conclusions, this added context was not well received.

When informed of the risks of termination fees during a meeting on November 3, 2022, Steve Davis said “well, we just won’t pay those. We just won’t pay landlords.”

Davis also told Hawkins “We just won’t pay rent.”

Those are direct quotes of Davis per Hawkins’s best recollection; to the extent that they are not word-for-word accurate they are an extremely tight paraphrase.

Hawkins was shocked.

Twitter specifically directed Hawkins to breach its leases, whether by terminating without any good faith justification under the terms of the applicable lease, or by simply stealing from the landlords by intentionally remaining on the premises without any intention of paying amounts Twitter knew and believed were its legal obligation to pay.

Unwilling to be involved in (let alone responsible for) such thefts, Hawkins resigned the next day.
Later in the complaint it notes:
In effect, if she had done what Twitter was asking her to do, Hawkins would have become permanently unemployable in her field.
Perhaps even crazier is the story of Joseph Killian, Twitter’s Global Head of Construction and Design, who was given the role of taking over Hawkins’ responsibilities after she had quit. You have to read the following because it is absolutely incredible:
After Hawkins left Twitter, Killian, who was Twitter’s Global Head of Construction and Design, was immediately assigned Hawkins’s duties and given responsibility for managing Twitter’s portfolio of nearly fifty leases.

Killian worked directly with the Transition Team to effect the transition from Twitter 1.0 (pre-Musk) to Twitter 2.0 (post-Musk) and bring Twitter in line with Musk’s standard business practices.

Killian was directed in these activities by Steve Davis and Liz Jenkins, who worked for the Boring Company, and Pablo Mendoza, a venture capitalist who invested with Musk.

Killian was also directed in these activities by Nicole Hollander.

On information and belief, Hollander was not employed by any of Musk’s companies.

On information and belief, Hollander is Steve Davis’s girlfriend and the mother of his child.

On information and belief, Hollander was living at Twitter headquarters with Davis and their infant child, who was a month old.

Despite not being employed by any of Musk’s companies, Hollander nonetheless had full instructional authority over Killian and the rest of his team with regards to the transition.

Almost immediately, Musk’s “zero-cost basis” policy reared its head

Killian was informed by the Transition Team that he would have to justify his spend to Musk personally, and that if Musk was not convinced that the expenses were necessary, he would simply default on his contractual obligations and let the expenses go unpaid.

In early December, Davis sent a 3:00 a.m. email to 15 or 20 managers complaining about Twitter’s rent obligations, which totaled $130M annually.

In this email, Davis specifically compared Twitter’s rent obligations to SpaceX’s, noting that Twitter had 1/10th as many employees as SpaceX but paid five times as much rent annually.

Of course, Twitter had significantly more employees when it first incurred its rent obligations.

Killian quickly became concerned that Musk intended to stop paying rent on Twitter’s outstanding leases, breaching the contracts and placing the company at risk of being evicted.

Indeed, Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, loudly opined that it was unreasonable for Twitter’s landlords to expect Twitter to pay rent, since San Francisco was a “shithole.”
So, Alex Spiro is a big time lawyer. One of the biggest. But, I’m pretty sure that not paying your contractually obligated rent because the city is a “shithole” is not how anything fucking works.

Either way, I guess this means that Spiro and Musk approve of squatting in “shithole” cities? Power to the people! But also, I think this also means that Spiro doesn’t think anyone should pay Twitter anything because it, too, has become quite the shithole.

Either way, the complaint then details how Davis ordered Killian to stop paying rent. And, also to… install bathrooms all over Twitter HQ, telling him not to get permits (in violation of their lease) and to hire unlicensed plumbers to do the work. And when Killian emailed his concerns over this, Davis’ apparent girlfriend (who again, was not employed there, but living in Twitter HQ) told Killian to never put such concerns in writing:
Musk announced via the Transition Team that he was going to be installing “hotel rooms” at Twitter HQ.

Killian was initially told that the “hotel rooms,” soon renamed to “sleeping rooms” to avoid triggering the suspicions of the city inspectors, were just being installed to give exhausted and overworked employees a place to nap.

Though the changes had initially been simple, if unorthodox – removing a conference table and installing a bed – Davis instructed Killian to begin planning for and implementing the addition of features like en-suite bathrooms and other changes to the physical plant.

Concerned about how city inspectors would react to Twitter’s plans, Killian emailed the Transition Team to note that the changes they had made thus far were limited to ‘just furniture’ and therefore were code compliant, but that Twitter’s future planned changes would require permits and more complicated code compliance.

In response, Hollander visited him in person and emphatically instructed him to never put anything about the project in writing again.

Hollander appeared surprised and distressed that Killian did not inherently understand that this was not a project for which Musk and the Transition Team wanted a written record.

Hollander specifically conveyed that Davis in particular was upset that Killian had sent the email.
On Friday, Elon mocked the reports that came out of the lawsuit regarding the “wrong locks” on doors:
<snip screenshot of tweet>

But… the details in the lawsuit are not just about “wrong locks on doors” but about the real risk that people would fucking die. Which puts Elon’s comment in a different light:
Killian was instructed to install space heaters in the “hotel rooms” in further violation of Twitter’s lease

Killian was also instructed to place locks on the “hotel room” doors – a request that betrayed the lie that these were intended to be temporary rest spaces for exhausted Tweeps.

California code requires locks that automatically disengage when the building’s fire suppression systems are triggered.

Killian was repeatedly told that compliant locks were too expensive and instructed to immediately install cheaper locks that were not compliant with life safety and egress codes.

Again, Killian protested that no licensed tradesperson would perform work that violated the building code.

Killian protested that installing these locks would put lives at risk – that in case of an earthquake or fire (the latter of which was made dramatically more likely by the noncompliant electrical work and the presence of the space heaters he had been instructed to install), these locks would remain locked, blocking first responders from being able to access the rooms and the Tweeps within.

Nobody cared.

On information and belief, the non-compliant locks were in fact eventually installed – but not by Killian.

Killian quit that day.
Yikes.

I mean, it’s pretty clear that Elon does not care one bit for the lives and wellbeing of those who work for him. But, this really takes it to another level.

And all this because Elon got suckered into massively overpaying for the company because he didn’t understand literally anything about social media, and then saddled the company with a huge, unnecessary debt, and his way to deal with that was to put people at risk?
So the cost of working for Musk can include becoming unemployable in your chosen field. Or worse, burning to death because emergency services can't get into all the rooms.
bilateralrope
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

Post by bilateralrope »

Ron DeSantis Announced He's Running For President On Twitter And It Was A Disaster
The Florida governor, who is currently in a losing war against Disney, ran into a lot of technical issues
By
Zack Zwiezen
Published Yesterday


On Wednesday evening, as previously reported, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his presidential campaign alongside Elon Musk via Twitter Spaces. But because Twitter is a giant trainwreck these days—held together with glue and a few overworked employees who haven’t yet been fired —the entire thing was a mess, filled with glitches and crashes.

DeSantis has been in the news recently because, among other things, he’s picked a fight with Florida’s largest employer, The Walt Disney Company. The war isn’t going well for him, as Disney’s lawyers continue to outsmart the man and his weird faces. But whatever, DeSantis has bigger plans. To announce his bid to become the next president of the United States, DeSantis took to Twitter Spaces. And things just got worse from there.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, 20+ minutes after the online stream was set to start, DeSantis was unable to even speak at all as the Twitter Spaces room continued to crash. Listeners reported lots of echoing as DeSantis and others struggled to stay logged in and speak. Also in attendance was Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk, who tried to blame all of the technical problems on Twitter’s servers being overloaded by all the people trying to join the stream. Surely it didn’t have anything to do with all the people he fired who were actually responsible for running Twitter’s tech infrastructure.
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elon just said "i'd like to introduce ron" and then THERE WAS AN ECHO LIKE IT WAS MOCKING HIM "i'd like to introduce ron" and then he said "i've never seen anything like this before" and the echo said "i've never seen anything like this before" and then my app crashed again ahaha
10:21 AM · May 25, 2023
Others reported hearing microphone feedback and long stretches of silence and throat clearing. After about another 21 minutes or so the stream ended, and a pre-recorded message was uploaded instead.

During the conversation—when people could actually hear what was being said— Republican donor and stream moderator David Sacks apparently claimed that this failed Twitter Space was the largest group that has “ever met online.” When he said this there were about 100,000 listeners.

U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly pointed out that she had more viewers join when she famously played Among Us on Twitch with Pokimane and Hasan Piker. That stream racked up over 400,000 viewers at one point. For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot more than the 100,000 trying (and failing) to listen to DeSantis regurgitate his same old speech about the dangers of the “woke mind virus.”.

So yeah, a pretty rough start to a presidential campaign. But hey at least people will remember it. That’s for sure.
DeSantis and Musk. A partnership of failure.
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Solauren
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

Post by Solauren »

So the cost of working for Musk can include becoming unemployable in your chosen field. Or worse, burning to death because emergency services can't get into all the rooms.
[/quote]

Actually, Musks actions make sense in a warped sort of way.

Hear me out -

He didn't want to pay rent in those places. He was probably of mind he can find places to rent cheaper.
So, he orders all that shit done, hoping to get evicted. Meaning no termination fees on contracts and the like (and possibly him suing the landlords).

Would it work? Absolutely not. Musk isn't the first rich would be CEO to try something like that, and the laws reflect that.
I've been asked why I still follow a few of the people I know on Facebook with 'interesting political habits and view points'.

It's so when they comment on or approve of something, I know what pages to block/what not to vote for.
Ralin
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Re: Twitter board agrees to $44 billion sale to billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk

Post by Ralin »

Noooo, it's because he's gambling that they won't evict him so long as they have hope that he might eventually settle up or pay at least part of what they owe him. It's a pretty standard sleazy rich person tactic. Trump is famous for it.
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