if you thought that Elon musk's takeover of twitter couldn't get any more
disastrous than boy.
Do we have news for you?
Here are the latest insane developments.
Just yesterday, several of twitter's top executives resigned from the company.
This is like Ted Lasso running the soccer team at the beginning of season one.
The company's chief information security officer out,
Chief privacy officer out Chief compliance officer also resigned yesterday
along with several other members of twitter's privacy and security unit.
One of the most surprising was the company's head of moderation and safety
Yoel Roth, who had become the public face of the company's efforts to reassure
users and advertisers that twitter would not descend into a free for all.
He's gone on Wednesday, he appeared on a twitter spaces public meeting to
defend the company to adverse to advertisers alongside musk.
To make matters worse,
those resignations have drawn the ire of just the Federal Trade Commission.
The agency said that it was tracking the developments at twitter with deep concern
and that it was prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with
a settlement known as a canoe consent order or
consent decree which requires twitter to comply with certain privacy and
security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse.
Three of the resignations, thursday were by members of the data
governance committee established in the deal with the FTC if the FTC
decides that twitter is not following its consent decree,
it could find the company millions, if not over a billion dollars.
And that is not the end of Elon Musk's woes in the past few weeks of course he's
made his primary focus at Twitter to institute the new verification
system in which you can pay $8 a month to receive a blue check as of last night.
Users can no longer sign up for that feature.
Oops, whoa, oops.
He did it again and I did it.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
Some users who already paid for the service said they're paid for
blue check mark has disappeared from their account.
The new blue check marks just rolled out
on Wednesday Meaning the feature did not even last 48 hours.
This is like a Nick Nolte Eddie Murphy movie.
This is unbelievable.
That's because it's really easy to impersonate just about anybody with
this new very poorly thought out system.
Look no further than pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly,
someone impersonated them with a verified check mark and tweeted.
We're now excited to announce insulin is free.
The company had to issue an apology from their actual account which which his
name is lily pad.
Far less official sounding than the fake account.
We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake lily
account.
Our official twitter account is at lily pad.
You'll notice there's a gray official badge in that image under the check mark.
So there's now two badges.
They were trying to figure out both a check you can pay for and
an official badge and of course the message there from Eli lilly is,
don't worry, we're still gonna gouge you on the prices for insulin stand by.
But that was not enough.
That correction to stop Eli lilly's stock from taking a hit, take a look at this
chart right here, down three and some percent in the past five days but
a big a big dip right there and all of this havoc at twitter, not to mention
the massive company wide layoffs then asking some to return the next day and
musk's elimination of remote work, which he just told all the Employees on
Wednesday they would need to start coming in a full 40 hours a week into the office.
Beginning the very next day.
All of it weighing very heavily on Twitter's employees taking from a former
Twitter employee who actually survived the mass layoffs but decided to quit anyway.
People are enraged with very few expecting RTO would happen this soon.
I am ethically not okay with making the richest person in the world
even richer also not okay with this alpha dog mentality.
It's already trickling down.
Elon's erratic behavior is also really bad for
users in an internal slack message shared with the Washington post and
employees said the quick release of products and
changes without effective security reviews was quote extremely dangerous for users.
The message said engineers would have to take on the burden of certifying that
the products complied with FTC agreements,
putting them themselves personally at substantial legal risk.
Meanwhile, Ellen is still pretending everything's fine and
doing his fake populist garbage tweeting as twitter pursues the goal of elevating
citizen journalism.
Yes. Media elite will try everything to stop
that from happening.
Mainstream media will still thrive but increased competition from citizens will
cause them to be more accurate as their oligarch on information is disrupted.
I love that he talks still as though he can predict how the future of media will
unfold when he can't even understand if you verify people who are in
verified you're gonna have problems.
But let's prognosticate about the future jake.
Okay, so there's two issues here.
One is Elon Musk's backpedaling on the eight bucks verification thing.
I was trying to find his tweet from a couple of days ago to give him some
ironic credit right about he tweeted look over the next couple of days or
months etcetera, twitter will do some dumb things but hey,
that's us learning and will change as we go along etcetera.
And I thought that was both a little humble and, and it's called a B testing in
digital media where you try one thing and then Try the next thing and
see which one works better and I thought was a good point but I couldn't
find the tweet, you know why if you type in Elon must you get 2000 fake accounts.
Okay.
So that's the great irony of it and, and but he overall he's wrong.
It's okay to try things and fail that that attitude is correct.
But to try them without even thinking them through and
to dry them on spectacular basis go all the way public instantly.
You're supposed to do a little test, right?
You're supposed to, you know, try it a little bit here and
a little bit there and you're supposed to think things through, right?
And this guy instead is like, okay, I got an idea, let's charge 20 bucks for
the blue checks and who cares if you're verified or not verified and
nobody knows anything.
No, it's eight bucks.
No, we're not doing it at all.
Well we're gonna quit if you do it, I'm still doing it.
I'm still doing it pressing the button and we're quitting.
I'm still doing it.
The FTC's on your shoulder.
Maybe I'll take it back.
Yeah.
And so he took it back partly because of the FTC and partly because when
Eli lilly's stock crashes, they're not gonna be happy about that.
And then he's gonna have potential lawsuits on his hands for that,
let alone people saying terrible things Impersonating other people and that
could be a lawsuit and then he realized, maybe I should have thought it through,
which leads the second point guys, those guys quitting now are not part
of their initial batch initial batch that he fired were people that were
against Elon musk and had sued him to make sure the deal got completed.
I said were the fairest show in America.
So I told you, look, it makes sense that he fired those guys.
He was fighting with those guys and he takes over the company, it's his company.
He has to do whatever he wants.
These new guys that quit.
It's a totally different thing if they stayed, they were gonna get a lot of money
because those are the guys he absolutely needed to run twitter and, and,
and not only employees with FTC and so many others trusted those guys.
He needed those guys really badly and, and
a guy who needs something really badly would have paid a lot of money for them.
Right?
The fact that they quit shows you that there's one of two things that
are possible.
One is they realized, we're doing really illegal
things ain't no money worth going to jail for I'm out of here.
Right.
I got plenty of other good job offers.
I don't need this crap or they came to the conclusion, No, this guy's actually nuts.
This guy, we can't stay this guy.
I don't care how much he pays me.
He's nuts.
And this is all gonna get us in trouble.
So I think it's one of those two options brian, what do you think?
I think that?
I think that Ella, that Ellen is coming, coming to terms with with some,
this irreconcilable issue where he took over because he said that free speech was
at risk.
And what he's realizing now is that from a business perspective,
these things are in direct contrast with each other, which is that if you allow
the platform to just become a free for all and have no content moderation and
you don't verify identities and you just basically, you know, turn it into
this little funnel to make $8 a person so that you can recoup your your investment.
The advertisers are gonna see that this is not that this is not a sustainable way to
spend their money.
And so he, you know,
he came into this with this riding riding on this like free speech horse, right?
But like at the end of the day, there's a reason why all of these social media
platforms do have to do content moderation and can't just have a free for
all because you'll have this kind of impersonation, you'll have you'll have,
you'll you'll drive regular users, the people who actually do create the content
on that platform off the platform, if they realize that it's just that it's just,
you know, a platform full of neo nazis and and it turns into a chant basically.
And so I think what you're gonna see is is him slowly start to back away
from all of these promises he made about about unrestricted free speech and
it's really going to ultimately look pretty similar at the end of the day to
what twitter was before if he doesn't tank it in the meantime, which seems to
be happening quicker and quicker by the Day I think Brian's exactly right.
I just want to read one comment from a member on twitch her Berry said this is
like watching a child run a Fortune 500 company and it's true and and
the bottom line is his original thesis was wrong.
He thought I could just let him run wild and it'll work well it didn't work so
he's now stuck and I don't know what the hell he's going to do with it other than
go bankrupt which is he said twice yesterday and today we could go bankrupt,
we can go bankrupt.
He's like panicking the twitter employees about how
they can go bankrupt because they can, if you missed the show yesterday,
Not only is he botching it with all of this and this is a massive problem for
Twitter but remember he borrowed $13 billion,
the interest payments on that $13 billion $700 million.
The interest rate is higher than not their profits but
the revenue that is an insanely bad business decision.
I can't believe how bad he is at this.
I was I think that that also there's this like there's just this like oozing
contempt for the content creators on the platform to the point where it's like,
look, we're all on a lot of platforms, my my principal platform is on youtube,
but I spend a hell of a lot of time in my day on twitter and
too much time in my day on twitter and the thought though that any other platform
would charge the content creator to create content, which is what we're
doing every time we tweet every time we bring people to the platform.
I mean, you know, you've all read the studies where a relatively small number of
users actually create the vast majority of the tweets on that on that platform,
that is the content that is the product.
And so there's just this, this like dripping disdain for
the people who are actually creating the product on that platform.
And, and there are enough other social media platforms that if,
if we're feeling like, like we're just getting screwed over or or even worse
that we're being like exploited by by, by trying to charge content creators for
the privilege of posting our content on that platform, they're just gonna leave.
Like there's, there are other platforms and you know, you can go to Youtube,
you can go to twitch and and Snapchat and Tiktok and instagram and, and
facebook and and that's to say nothing of the fact that already twitter is
the smallest platform of all of those.
Yeah, and it just, even though it's an, it's an insane amount of interest,
he'll have to pay back on this loan.
The other part is that it's much worse for
everybody else on twitter than him because he'll survive if twitter goes bankrupt
he'll have to pay a lot of money and paying those loans back.
But he will survive to degree.
It almost feels like he's intentionally tanking
the company just to mess with the world just to keep himself
in the headlines like like a next generation trump and it's pretty wild.
And just I think the best example was AOC's clap back at Elon saying $8 for
the check mark $8 to check mark.
And she said the the The irony of a billionaire saying we need free speech and
free speech will cost you $8 is pretty amazing.
He said ha ha it's still gonna be $8 and now maybe it's not just a few days later.
Yeah.
So I guess AOC was right all along