Elon Musk bought Twitter, and here’s everything that happened next
Laura Normand / The VergeElon Musk is now the owner, CEO, and sole director of Twitter. His “Twitter 2.0” era has so far included mass layoffs and rapidly changing policy decisions. Continue reading…
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There was a lot of back and forth about bots and text messages, but in the end, Musk settled on buying the company rather than facing a deposition or Chancery Court trial and eventually strode into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.
Elon Musk began Twitter’s new era of private ownership by firing several executives — including previous CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and policy chief Vijaya Gadde — and, a week later, initiated mass layoffs, drastically cutting its workforce.
The first few weeks of Elon Musk’s Twitter have so far included mass layoffs, the firing of employees who criticized Musk publicly or privately, and hundreds of employees voluntarily accepting Musk’s offer of three months severance instead of the option of joining a new “extremely hardcore” version of Twitter.
On November 19th, Elon Musk announced that based on the results of a poll posted to his personal account, he’s reinstating the Twitter account of former president Donald Trump. The @realDonaldTrump account was suspended by Twitter on January 8th, 2021, following the January 6th mob attack on the US capitol.
Read on for the latest updates about what’s going on inside Twitter right now.
Twitter loses another executive as Donald Trump’s account gets restored.
Sarah Rosen, Twitter’s head of US content partnerships, announced her departure from the company shortly after Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account on Saturday night.
Other execs, including Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, and Robin Wheeler, the company’s ad sales chief, both left last week.
Twitter’s copyright strike system appears to be broken.
Naturally, one user took this as an opportunity to post the entire The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie in a series of two-minute clips spanning nearly 50 tweets.
The thread has been up for almost a whole day now, and the fact that it hasn't been taken down yet is a likely side effect of the hundreds of employees who resigned from Twitter earlier this week.
Reddit’s software community is laughing at Elon.
Musk posted an image from his late-night Twitter “code review” and… well, at least we got this very funny Reddit thread out of it.
Twitter’s now-former head of Trust and Safety predicts what’s next for its “custodians of the internet.”
In this op-ed, Yoel Roth examines why he left Twitter last week (because all decisions now lie with one person, Elon Musk) and the hellish rules about content moderation Musk will have to navigate, whether made by regulators or the planned moderation council.
But, as Roth explains, the most notable check on Elon’s “unilateral edict” and free speech platitudes may be Apple and Google:
Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun
If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now.
How many people took their new boss’s offer and quit their jobs at Twitter last night?
We don’t have a number to put on that, but Alex Heath has this email that was just sent from Elon Musk to Twitter’s software engineers.
Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today.
Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
Thanks,
Elon
The strangest part of all this is that just 18 hours ago, Twitter told employees that all office buildings will be closed until the 21st. But maybe they could really use the help.
Twitter’s getting sued over its remote work rules.
A disabled employee who was allegedly fired for not coming into Twitter offices to work has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that its new rules about remote work are discriminatory (via Reuters).
CEO Elon Musk has previously said that workers who “can show up in an office” and don’t are basically resigning, and while he’s said exceptions will be made, managers may be risking their own jobs by nominating employees for remote work.
Twitter might add even more badges.
The new Elon Musk company is working on a “Blue for business” project where businesses can buy special badges for their employees, according to Platformer. In one mockup, Verizon CEO has three badges by his name. Here’s hoping Twitter’s badges go full Tumblr.
Twitter may resurrect end-to-end message encryption.
At least according to this code dug up by reputable app researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong. Twitter had previously worked on direct message encryption, though the project was shelved without explanation. Elon Musk has said that he wants Twitter DMs to “superset Signal,” and seemingly confirms Wong’s discovery via his usual emoji-only response.
“They’re all a bunch of cowards.”
Fired Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer talks to Forbes, revealing that he discovered he was fired via Elon tweet and his laptop getting locked down; no one from the company actually called him.
“No one trusts anyone within the company anymore,” he said. “How can you function? Employees don’t trust the new management. Management doesn’t trust the employees. How do you think you’re supposed to get anything done? That’s why there’s production freezes – you can’t merge code, you can’t turn things on without permission from VPs.”
