As Elon nukes legacy checkmarks today, Twitter is saying some celebs, including @KingJames, are paying for verification even though they aren’t theverge.com/2023/4/20/2369… NEW: Have confirmed that LeBron, who has 52 million followers and has said he won’t pay for verification, was emailed by a Twitter employee with the offer to have his sub comped “on behalf of Elon Musk.”

James did not accept but his account is showing that he paid anyway.

Elon Musk has been on a Space with a famous engineer (@realGeorgeHotz) who has been “interning” at the company. Hotz expressed frustration with Twitter having 5 APIs to maintain. It sounds like Musk is learning this now and agrees. twitter.com/i/spaces/1mnxe… Musk says the company is at “a little over 2,000 people” after his cuts

Says Twitter was tracking to spend about $5 billion in 23. Net outflow next year of 6.5b without him making changes. Net rev tracking to 3b, so 3ishb loss with 1b cash savings, so “net dead”

Twitter is now banning the sharing of links or usernames to the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post

Tellingly, paid promotion of these platforms is still allowed. theverge.com/2022/12/18/235… This new, vaguely-worded policy, announced during the World Cup, seems to also apply to sharing third-party link aggregators like Linktree or Lnk.bio. I guess even if you don’t link to a banned social platform there you get suspended too?

Re: the banning of reporters who have tweeted about Elon Musk’s jet, Twitter's head of trust & safety Ella Irwin tells me: “Without commenting on any specific accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk." She points to the policy update made yesterday prohibiting the sharing of “live location information” after Musk said his kid was stalked due to his jet info being available: help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-p…

“We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

Some notes on the latest inside Twitter:

The company lost too many employees too fast. There are still people with “critical” knowledge who haven’t been fully cut off from Twitter’s systems, even though they did not opt into Musk’s “hardcore” cultural reset over 2 weeks ago. Musk’s transition team has been slowly going through the list of employees who didn’t check "yes” to being hardcore in a Google form and, if they are marked "critical,” calling them to see if they are sure about wanting to leave.

On the evening before Thanksgiving, some Twitter engineers received an email saying they were fired because their “code is not satisfactory.” Others received “performance warning” emails asking them to “restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team” On Tuesday, Twitter’s remaining engineers were told they had to send “code samples” via email every week.

Engineers who were fired via email this evening are being offered 4 weeks of pay in exchange for signing a separation agreement and release of claims.

The head of Apple’s App Store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account over the weekend. Not a good sign for Musk’s business relationship with his most critical source of distribution. theverge.com/2022/11/21/234… Much is written about the power regulators like the FTC have over Twitter. But talk to any app-based biz that relies on the App Store and you’ll quickly find that Apple is who they really live in fear of.

Twitter’s ex-head of T&S said as much last week nytimes.com/2022/11/18/opi…

Word inside Twitter is that A LOT of employees are not saying “yes” to staying at Musk’s “extremely hardcore Twitter 2.0.” He has been meeting today with engineers to convince them to stay. His deadline to decide to stay or leave expired 6 min ago. theverge.com/2022/11/17/234… Twitter’s Slack currently has hundreds of employees giving the 🫡 emoji, meaning they decided to not stay for Musk’s “Twitter 2.0” cultural reset. The company had just under 3,000 employees remaining before the deadline to say “yes” or not hit 20 min ago.

Elon Musk surprised Twitter employees today with a surprise all-hands scheduled less than a half hour before it started. It was his first time addressing the company in a meeting.

I obtained a recording and just published the full transcript: theverge.com/2022/11/10/234… Musk wants Twitter to take on YouTube. He is tasking employees with making a program to pay creators to post video on Twitter and somehow earn rev share. (Will likely add to his already deep expenses — Musk said the company could have negative cash flow in the billions next year)

A Twitter lawyer sent an alarming message to colleagues this morning, saying that Elon Musk “is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users” and is at risk of putting the company in violation of its FTC consent decree theverge.com/2022/11/10/234… The lawyer says that Alex Spiro, Musk’s personal attorney and current head of legal, has said internally: “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC”

Twitter’s chief privacy officer, chief information security officer, and chief compliance officer have resigned

Twitter’s user growth hit “all-time highs” last week, according to an internal sales team FAQ I've seen. The company has added more than 15 million daily users since it stopped reporting financials in July. theverge.com/2022/11/7/2344… Since Musk’s takeover, Twitter’s mDAU growth rate has is now more than 20%, while it was almost 17% in Q2. “Twitter’s largest market, the US, is growing even more quickly,” per the FAQ Twitter made for its sales team to use in convos with advertisers.

Elon Musk’s mass Twitter layoff today has left whole areas of the company completely gutted, including teams tasked with defending the platform from manipulation ahead of the midterms next week theverge.com/2022/11/4/2343… We obtained emails to both laid off and remaining employees along with an internal FAQ about the layoffs, which confirms the cuts total roughly half the employee base.

Laid off employees will be offered one-month of pay as severance taxed as bonus income, per the FAQ

NEW: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 a month for verification. It’s Elon Musk’s first big project.

Oh, and the team building it was told they will all be fired if they don’t meet a launch deadline of November 7th. theverge.com/2022/10/30/234… An important detail here: If you already have a blue checkmark, Twitter is currently planning to remove it from your profile after 90 days if you don’t subscribe to the more expensive Blue subscription after it launches.

Elon Musk is moving quickly to change Twitter from the inside out.

On his first day as its new owner, he told employees to change what logged out users see when they visit Twitter’s homepage. Within a few hours, it was changed to the Explore page. theverge.com/2022/10/30/234… Musk’s request Friday required VP involvement to override a code freeze that is in place to thwart employees from making changes. He has quickly started wading into things like copy, also requesting that “Super Follows” be renamed to “Subscriptions” in a rushed app update.

confirmed that Rahul “Ligma,” who identified himself as a laid off Twitter employee carrying a box out of the building this morning, does in fact not work at Twitter (LOL) theverge.com/2022/10/28/234… I gotta say explaining Ligma on the verge dot com was not on my bingo card this week

Elon Musk showed up 10 minutes late to his first meeting addressing Twitter employees, which is still ongoing. He dialed in from his phone handheld like this When asked why he loves Twitter, Elon says: "Some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter"

Notes from Twitter all hands meeting:
- Seems clear who will be CEO after deal closes hasn’t been decided. But board chair @btaylor did confirm the board would cease to exist once the deal closes in roughly six months.
- CEO @paraga: No plans for layoffs… “at this time” - Employee RSUs will continue to vest as normal until the deal closes, and upon close they will be converted to cash grants on the same vesting schedule
- @paraga will stay CEO until the close but didn’t address what happens after. Said the plan is to bring Elon in for Q&A

Mark Zuckerberg is addressing Meta employees at a virtual all hands right now. He’s explaining the company’s updated values, which are:

- “move fast” is becoming “move fast together”
- "be bold" replaced with "build awesome things"
- “focus on long term impact” is a new one - “be open” is becoming “live in the future”
- “be direct and respect your colleagues” is a change to “be open”
- Zuck says employees are not supposed to “nice ourselves to death”

Confirmed that last quarter was the first-ever sequential decline in global Facebook daily users.

It is loosing relevance with teens and spending $$$ on metaverse stuff that won’t pay off for awhile theverge.com/2022/2/2/22914… Meta’s biggest problems in the real world:
- Apple/regulatory ad nuking its tracking and rev growth (going to take years to rebuild)
- Young people using TikTok, iMessage etc instead. Will Reels work and make $? TBD.
- Overall user growth looks tapped out

Breaking: Facebook plans to stop shielding politicians from the content rules it applies to everyone else, a sharp reversal from its position that all speech from elected officials is inherently newsworthy.

Could have big ramifications globally! theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474… Other changes Facebook plans to announce as soon as tomorrow:
- Will disclose its secretive strikes system for policy violations to users for the first time
- Will also begin disclosing when it uses a special newsworthiness exemption in transparency reports

“Mr. Poo-chai”

this house hearing on misinformation with big tech CEOs is really rough, and we’re not through opening remarks Jack calling in from his kitchen