What's the plan? Bankrupting Twitter?

Elon Musk plans to eliminate about 3,700 jobs at Twitter, or half of the company’s workforce, in a bid to drive down costs, sources say trib.al/bCkpx2Y

Twitter ad sales chief leaves company as Musk team woos skittish advertisers reut.rs/3FC2EHU

1/ There is some pretty substantial context about Twitter's 2023 revenue and advertisers that I think partly help explains why Musk is really losing it... And it involves upfront ad sales. Let me explain...

From ad tweep who knows: The drop off is mostly self inflicted. First: The CRO [@Sarah Personette] walked out Friday. She's trusted by the marketing community. So, Elon goes to meet agency heads in NY. The Twitter exec who runs the US walked him in and is a trusted partner at these agencies.

Let's say a few words about "brand safety". Musk and top Republican leaders are now complaining that the problem is "woke" activists breaking Twitter and pushing it toward financial collapse. Nope. That's not it. Not remotely. Are there people pushing for boycotts or ...

The banks sitting on Twitter’s debt must be thrilled about a threatened “thermonuclear war” between the company and its advertisers.

BREAKING: Pfizer is stopping ads on Twitter after the Elon Musk takeover (WSJ)

United Airlines suspends ad spending on Twitter reut.rs/3DDog3U

I spoke with a friend who is one of 10 senior architects at a Fortune 500 tech company. Her reaction: "Twitter is doomed. It has enough inertia to keep going for a year or two, though."

She laughed derisively at firing people based on lines of code produced. "I would have been fired, b/c my code is expected to be compact, solutions elegant, and I get handed the problems no one else can solve. Plus, I have to train & mentor the new folks."

Little preview of the ads coming to twitter pretty soon for anyone curious

Elon Musk is treating Twitter like a startup. The thing about startups is, most of them fail. on.wsj.com/3fy5JOy

A reminder of who Musk fired yesterday. Note the cut to infrastructure engineers. #r4today

The future of Twitter appears to be in doubt today. Advertisers have pulled out. Musk has slashed staff numbers. A nasty, right-wing dominated hate-fest may follow, although I hope not. But what if other critical media institutions went the same way? What then? A quick thread…

Ohhh. This is bad. The new Twitter blue badge won't actually verify your identity at all. You just pay the money and they give you the tick. It's a scammers' charter.

Let's review. Musk went on a bender and offered to buy Twitter at a price based on a weed meme. Then he agreed to a binding agreement to purchase it. Apparently he didn't fully grasp how binding it was. Then he tried to get out of the deal. Twitter sued to force him to ...

It's safe to assume content moderation is now nonexistent on Twitter. That more than anything will likely lead to a wave of advertisers pausing or ending ads on the platform as soon as Monday.

Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running. People inside are stunned.

Mass exodus after Musk’s hardcore work ultimatum. “One former Twitter worker who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC: "I think when the dust clears today, there's probably going to be less than 2,000 people left."” bbc.com/news/business-…

nytimes.com/2022/11/17/tec…

“some employees were summoned to a conference room in the San Francisco office while others called in via videoconference. As the 5 p.m. deadline passed, some who had called in began hanging up, seemingly having decided to leave, even as Mr. Musk continued speaking”

Updates from @Alex Heath on the Twitter staff that's all quit: multiple teams that run core services are all gone theverge.com/2022/11/17/234…

NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow.

Sooo I’m told by two people that the entirety of Twitters payroll department has resigned/not elected to sign up for Elons Twitter 2.0

In addition to the payroll team being gone, Twitter's entire US tax team is gone, I'm told, along with its financial reporting team. Not great.

Some internal estimates showed that at least 1,200 full-time employees resigned from Twitter on Thursday. Some core teams are down to zero people. Elon Musk is also considering shuttering one of the company’s three main U.S. data centers. nyti.ms/3Eftd38

Elon Musk plans to reinstate nearly all previously banned Twitter accounts — to the alarm of activists and online trust and safety experts. The decision will have dangerous consequences, particularly for vulnerable communities washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

Little preview of the ads coming to twitter pretty soon for anyone curious

“You have journalists, activists in authoritarian regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who are now even at the mercy of even more vicious trolls with no ability to fight back,” said Caraballo. “It’s literally life or death for people.” wapo.st/3OBN3uf