>> Elon Musk is messing with the one thing that everyone seems to care about.
Well, not everyone.
Just professionals who think that this is the center of the universe.
He's made some policy changes over at Twitter, so
let's talk about what those policy changes are.
It all started on Friday when Musk announced that Twitter is now requiring
people to essentially log on to view Tweets, which is new.
Previously, you didn't need to do that.
You didn't have to have a Twitter account in order to view Tweets.
But that has changed.
Now. What is Elon's Reasoning here?
He says temporary emergency measure.
We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users.
I'm sure the fact that he fired three fourths of the workforce over at Twitter
had nothing to do with how glitchy the site has now become.
I'm sure it has to do with other companies collecting data through Twitter.
Sure.
I mean, if you say so.
Obviously I don't believe it.
Yeah, I'm just jumping on that.
Yeah. You could stop other companies from
pillaging your data if you had employees, so that would be the other way to go.
So you're going to limit what people can see?
Who does that?
That's basically saying, don't come here.
That's what happens when you fire three quarters of your employees.
When are you going to get it?
When are you going to get it through your thick, thick head?
All right, go ahead.
Keep destroying the company.
We enjoy it.
He says this will be unlocked shortly.
Per my earlier post, drastic and
immediate action was necessary due to extreme levels of data scraping.
Almost every company doing AI, from startups to
some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
By the way.
All of our data gets collected endlessly on every website, every single day.
Every single day.
And the fact that he's pretending like he's concerned about it today
is hilarious to me.
I don't think that he's concerned about it at all.
In fact, a lot of these sites, and I don't know for sure if Elon Musk is doing this,
so let me just give you that warning and caveat.
But most social media sites
intentionally collect data themselves to sell that data to third parties.
That's actually the way most of these social media sites make the bulk of
their money.
Right. Facebook does this.
It's just a widespread practice that I wish there was some oversight on,
some safeguards against.
Yeah, but there's an important distinction here.
He doesn't care that if they're scraping the information to get your stuff,
he's not like, my God, I'm so worried about your privacy.
No, he's worried about things like digital startups.
He said, what does that mean?
I'll decipher for you.
Wait, that's supposed to be proprietary information to us.
We have all of the Twitter users information, but
since I fired everybody, we can't safeguard it properly.
So other companies, including our competitors,
are coming in and also getting your data to compete against us.
And I don't like that.
So that's why I'm going to do this.
It isn't to protect you at all,
it's to protect their competitive advantage against those other companies.
And like Trump, elon Musk has verbal diarrhea.
So he just tells you accidentally that that's exactly what he's doing.
Now, following that announcement, a day later on Saturday, he announced
that the site would also be limiting the amount of tweets that people can read.
And it differs based on whether you have a verified account or not.
To address extreme levels of data scraping and
system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits.
Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts a day, unverified accounts to
600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts to 300 per day.
Note that even verified accounts, people who are willing to pay for
the service, will have the amount of tweets they can read limited.
Although I will say that 6000 tweets sounds like a lot of tweets, and
I would probably lose my mind if I read 6000 tweets a day.
But nonetheless, the announcement came after
thousands of twitter users reported issues when trying to access the app.
On Saturday, users received error messages, for instance,
that said rate limit exceeded or cannot retrieve tweets when trying
to open Twitter or post content via its website and mobile app.
Now, the crackdown began to have ripple effects,
causing more than 7500 people at one point Saturday to report problems
using the social media service based on complaints registered on down detector,
which is a website that tracks online outages.
Now, although that's a relatively small number of twitter's more than 200 million
worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause
hashtag Twitter down to trend in some parts of the world.
And then later Elon decided to revise the post limitations.
So he writes, rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for
unverified and 400 for new unverified.
800 for unverified?
Yeah, 800 sorry, I don't know what I said.
800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.
And then he said now to so
look, I don't really know what he's doing, this is a disaster.
And when he got backlash for it, he essentially encouraged people to go
outside and touch grass, which that's the one area where I agree with him on.
But to me it's like abundantly clear that he's trying to goad people into paying for
the verified version because the difference between the posts, the number
of posts you can see as a verified user versus an unverified user is pretty huge.
I don't think that's all that he's doing.
I think that the main thing he's trying to stop is his competitors
from downloading all the info.
They obviously have some sort of glitch because they have nobody working there
that's allowing the competitors to come in and grab all the data.
That's why he's limiting the amount of posts you can see, because that way they
could write a code saying if an account has seen this many posts, freeze them.
That way they freeze all the robots that are robots, codes,
AI, whatever you want to call it.
That's scrolling the whole website.
That's why he's putting the limit in there in the first place.
But that's limiting the number.
Like people scroll through Twitter,
so you'll hit a couple of hundred before you even know what you did, right?
Because these are all based on impressions, et cetera.
And so if you look at Twitter for even a little while,
you might exceed one of those limits.
He's basically cutting off his nose despite his face.
So the correct answer here is higher engineers who protect your data.
But he's like, I don't want to do that.
I don't want to spend any money on anything.
I just want to run this with gum and duct tape.
Right.
So then he then does something even more counterproductive.
Yeah, I won't let you see my site.
Okay, so you won't let us come and use the thing that you want us to use.
That is terrible business practice, right?
Terrible.
He overpaid for the site to the tune of I mean,
numbers differ depending on where you're reading the reports,
but at minimum, he overpaid by $20 billion, right?
That's right. And
so he's looking to make up those losses by cutting costs.
And I think that's a big reason why he cut the workforce over at Twitter so
significantly.
Again, by three fourths.
The other thing I wanted to just quickly mention is,
just to bolster the point you're making, jank Elon lost
it when Substac put out a new feature called Notes, which
functions similar to Twitter, although it's in the context of the Substac app.
And so that to me, signals that his concern about competition is very real.
Right?
So that's the other part of it.
Right?
He's concerned about other startups using data from Twitter in order to
launch whatever product they want to launch.
And so I do think that's part of this as well.
Remember, the whole Substac debacle is what led to a rift between Elon Musk and
Matt Taibi, because Matt Tayibi has a pretty big platform on Substac, and he
was unable to use Twitter to kind of cross promote some of the work that he does.
So Anna, that's 100% right.
And that's also why he's now threatening to fight Mark Zuckerberg in the coliseum,
because Facebook started basically an internal Twitter competitor.
That's what Facebook does with every successful platform.
They just try to copy it.
Right? And
so that's what got Musk upset in the first place.
That's what led to all the threats and the fighting and all that stuff.
So he's worried to death about competitors.
But you know what competitors have that you don't have?
Elon employees.
And that usually helps.
Okay, and so lastly on this is building off of something.
Anna said, look, tons of things happen in the business world that you don't get to
see, and I don't think media does a great job of sharing with you guys that
are the real reasons why things happen as opposed to what they say is the reason.
So in this case, Elon Musk pretends that he's trying to protect your privacy
when in reality, he's trying to protect against competitors.
Okay?
In the case of other outlets, like Toys R US sounds like a random example, but
it isn't.
It looks like, hey, they went under because retail stores are in trouble and
everybody's buying things off of Amazon, et cetera.
No, they went under because private equity came in and put tons of debt on them, and
they couldn't get out from underneath the debt.
It's similar to the Elon Musk situation because Elon overpaid, so
he's got to do drastic cost cutting.
Same thing that Toys R US and
many other retail stores had to do because of too much debt, and
that undercut their business and eventually caused a bankruptcy.
It's very self defeating.
It's a terrible strategy, but a lot of the top business people in the country do it.
And I'll give you the last example.
That's what's happening at CNN.
So Zaslov comes in discovery.
Warner Bros.
Buys, obviously, a whole bunch of cable stations along with Warner Bros.
Including CNN.
CNN is actually still very profitable, but
they cut like crazy because they have too much debt.
And so they cut employees, they cut anchors, they cut executives.
But now you're cutting into your business that was profitable, and
you're ruining it.
It's short term thinking so executives can get paid, but
it's a long term disaster for the companies, and that includes Twitter here.
And in the case of Zaslov and the others and
the private equity guys, they're doing it for their own personal gain.
Elon is just showing us in front of everybody
that he's just not a very good businessman because it's his money he's losing.
And by the way, one additional feature change that he is
putting behind the Verified features is Tweet Deck,
which is a Twitter feature that allows people to basically read and
interact with multiple Twitter accounts on Twitter accounts on one platform.
So only those who are Twitter Verified will be able to use that feature.
So that, I think, is a way of kind of sweetening the pot for
those who might want to buy the Verified status.
By the way, here I'll shock you guys if you don't know already.
I'm twitter verified.
I pay.
And so people are like, no.
Okay, why do I do it?
See, this is, I think, good business practice left over from the pre Elon days.
If you pay, you can write a little bit longer, and I can't stop talking.
So who am I to blame people for going on and on, right?
And you can edit.
I always misspell something.
And they're like, damn it, I wish I could edit it.
I got to take down all that.
So I pay the $8 a month, no big deal, to be able to do those extra features.
That's a good service when you provide extra features, right?
But when you say, if you don't pay me, that's it.
I'm not going to let you use this site at all.
I don't think it's a good idea.
And by the way, that's also true of newspapers and magazines these days.
When you go online, they're like, you want to read our interesting article?
Not going to let you unless you pay me a whole yearly subscription or
something along those lines.
Not going to let you see any of my good journalism.
Not a great business decision, if you ask me.