December 21, 2023
Musk’s Master Plan
We promise that we are trying really hard not to mention E*on M*u*k every single week, but turns out he will do any insane shit just to get a shout out.
This week on ‘How On Earth Did This Man Ever Run A Company’, Musk has cut another 4,400 of Twitter’s contractors, in addition to about 4000 permanent staff who were sacked via email the week before (and then some who were asked to come back because nobody knows how to drive this thing).
At least M***k has got a clear vision for verified accounts. Let’s revisit that one for a minute, and make sure you’re bang up to date.
Twitter Blue was launched to make free speech free for all, for eight dollars. Then everyone realised what a truly bad idea that was, as people flocked to create parody or impersonation accounts with blue ticks, basically making the idea of free speech pretty scary. Turns out it was just a simple colour issue though, as the blue tick got put on pause, making way for the grey tick that would mark accounts as ‘official’.
Twitter announced this on Tuesday, then Elon ‘killed it’ just hours after launch, then the grey markers started appearing again, then Twitter announced that they were not rolling them out, then, a day later, Twitter said that they actually would be rolling them out again. Phew.
This is all while Musk got in a bit of a huff about all the impersonation accounts people had made in his name, and so stopped anyone with a blue tick from changing their profile, leaving lots of jokers, fakers, scammers and free speakers a bit stuck, and the rest of us with no hope of knowing what the hell is going on.
But it’s all part of Musk’s master plan to get Twitter out of its $4million a day hole.
As per Musk:
“We just definitely need to bring in more cash than we spend. If we don’t do that and there’s a massive negative cash flow then bankruptcy is not out of the question.”
Seems like he still has a long way to go. And with over half the workforce gone, including the misinformation team, a human rights team, and the team responsible for machine language ethics, transparency and accountability, who really knows what’s next for Twitter?
Not Elon, by the look of things.
No doubt we’ll see you next week.
Strava, meet Snapchat
We all know that if the run’s not on Strava, it basically didn’t happen.
And now, if you don’t Snap it, are you really getting the most out of that post-workout validation?
Snapchat has launched a brand-new AR integration with fitness tracking app Strava. It will provide an augmented reality experience that enables Strava users to share the story of their workouts on Snapchat.
It means that more millennials and older users could join Snapchat in large numbers. These generations take their fitness very seriously, almost as much as Gen Z users, and over time, this may cause the average user age to trend a bit higher.
It’s an important move for Snapchat, which saw a sharp fall in its stock price due to the global economic downturn, and massive layoffs that left the company reeling.
But with diversification comes new beginnings, so we don’t see why this can’t be a successful partnership where everyone benefits.
Kudos to them both.
An absolute FTX-up
The once-third-largest crypto exchange FTX has fallen from prestige in the past week and announced it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S.
In the space of days, FTX went from a $32 billion valuation to bankruptcy as liquidity dried up, customers demanded withdrawals and rival exchange Binance ripped up its nonbinding agreement to buy the company. FTX founder Bankman-Fried admitted on Thursday that he “f---ed up.”
With at least $1 billion of customer funds vanishing from the platforms, he is not overreacting.
Unsurprisingly, after such a prominent and monumental collapse, Bankman-Fried read the room, and stepped down as CEO. He blamed mistaken accounting of the exchange’s liquidity and leverage for the collapse.
“I’m really sorry, again, that we ended up here,” he said following Friday’s filing. “I’m piecing together all of the details, but I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier this week.”
And everyone is rushing to move as far as they can from any links to FTX, with Mercedes suspending their partnership agreement, removing the logo from their race car.
I guess, if you’re having a bad start to the week, at least you’re not on the bad side of all the crypto bros.
