It is just me or has Elon Musk forced Twitter’s blue bird to fly into a window and break its neck? Let us count the ways. (Sunday edition)
Elon Musk has owned Twitter for all of one week and the carnage and weirdness has been rather insane. Let’s review.
He’s in the process of firing half the company’s employees
Half of 7,500 people. If you got an email on your Twitter work account, that meant you were staying. If that same email arrived in the inbox of your personal email, you were toast.
It took just hours for fired employees to file a class action lawsuit about the firings
Mass layoffs with no notice contravenes some labour laws in some parts of the world. The first is at least one lawsuit filed in California.
Severace packages seem to be a little messed up
So Indian employees are worth less?
Ex-employees have thoughts
Here’s just one example. And Twitter founder Jack Dorsey found it necessary to apologize to ex-employees.
Advertisers are bailing so…
…Musk wants to charge people $8/month for a blue “verified ” checkmark next to their name. Will people pay? The blowback has been…intense. And gee, you think this will lead to a rise in imposters and fake accounts? After all, you’ll only have to pay $8/month to impersonate someone who won’t pay. Or am I missing something? Trevor Noah has another solution to keep revenues going.
…and he wants to charge people to DM VIPs and celebrities.
…while taking a slice of that fee, of course.
Advertisers are having none of this
Take the case of United Airlines. They’re out when it comes to Twitter.
And Elon is handling advertiser defections well. Not.
What, exactly, are his plans for a “thermonuclear name and shame?” That’s how you take care of your customers, right?
Users are bailing. too
A million users may have left Twitter since Musk took over.
And even the UN is concerned about what Musk is doing.
The UNITED NATIONS? Yep.
Naturally, there are many, many tweets about the whole mess.
Funny how so many of them seem to be deleted. Not suspicious at all. Nope.
Jeezus. And it’s only been a week.
So the argument is the guy behind PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the boring company, and more, doesn’t know hat he is doing with twitter because maybe you disagree with his actions in WEEK 1
No one was seriously doing EVs before him, SpaceX has reusable rockets, and so much more. I’m sure he has a legit plan for twitter going forward. And the issue with the blue checkmark is ridiculous. Do you have any idea how many fake bot accounts there are on twitter even with the blue checkmark? Of course you don’t, twitter didn’t either. Actually, they probably had an idea of how many there were but it was not in their financial interest to disclose.