The early victory was the result of a lawsuit by former employees
Elon Musk’s Frustration About Twitter, and How to Get It Wrong if he Wants to Stay in the Twitter Jungle
Elon Musk will no longer be deposed by Twitter’s lawyers on Thursday morning, after both sides agreed to a delay as they worked to close the $44 billion purchase of the social media network, the Financial Times and Bloomberg report. The trial is scheduled to start on October 17th, and Musk was going to be deposed two days later in Austin, Texas. His deposition was delayed from September 28th due to exposure concerns.
The offer was based on the fact that many of the accounts on the website were fake, Musk said in a series of messages. “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.” Musk’s frustration appeared to be totally beside the point and the sort of thing he should have raised before signing a binding agreement to buy the company. It was clear that if Musk decided he wanted out, this would be the way to go.
News from Twitter: Twitter CEOs have a lot to say about Musk, the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, Gadde, and Personette
As it stands, the trial is still scheduled to proceed on October 17th. The judge overseeing the case wrote on Wednesday that no party has requested a stay of the action, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. “I, therefore, continue to press on toward our trial set to begin on October 17.” But given the current negotiations, Bloomberg notes that the trial is “almost certain” to be put on hold.
Since Musk took over as the CEO of the company, there has been a lot of drama and decisions. Musk has ruled the account based on what seem to be his own ever changing decisions, without any checks on his decisions. Since Musk took office, almost all of the top executives have left or been fired.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. One person said that he had ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.
“Day zero,” Calacanis texted Musk. They told the boys to sharpen their blades. 20 percent of the staff would leave voluntarily if required to return to offices, Calacanis wrote. Calacanis told Musk he was interested in being the company’s CEO.
The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.
Twitter Takes Control of the Micro-Blogging Site: Musk’s First Tweet in Six Months of his Free Speech Anomaly
Twitter faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content.
Musk has talked about creating the “X, the everything app” using on of his favorite social media sites. This is a reference to China’s WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments and gaming. Musk told people that they live on a messaging service in China. If we can reproduce that, we can be a great success.
After six months, it’s all over, Musk owns the micro-Blogging site. How did that happen? We will lay out everything that happened and explain why the billionaire is now in control of Twitter, with several former execs abruptly escorted from the building and employees waiting for the first update from their new CEO.
The Orbifold Case of Zatko: The Case against Musk and the Twitter Co-AdS/CFT Correspondence
This is a huge story that has a lot of fast- moving parts. It’s also a story that will likely stretch out over the next few months, maybe even longer. When things continue to unfold, we thought we would give you a guide that can be kept up to date. We are like you, like Elon.
Your argument is invalid, and so are you, because TWict hasn’t broken its side of the deal, the way it always does.
Zatko’s disclosure says directly that Twitter lied to Musk about its spam and bot measurements, which could be fodder for Musk’s complaints about spambots, though Zatko’s support for those particular allegations feels fairly thin. The accusations were called a false narrative by the social media company.
Ali is one of thousands of current and former Twitter employees whose lives have been upended since Musk began buying up shares of the social media company early last year. It was a corporate circus with Musk threatening to bail, a high-profile trial of the two companies, and mass layoffs following the deal being completed.
Among those who received subpoenas ahead of the trial are Jack Dorsey, Larry Ellison and other tech moguls. It’s a surprise that he has so much relevant information, given his tenure as the CEO and his push to convince Musk to purchase the company in the first place.
We wouldn’t normally tell you it’s worth reading a 162-page legal filing that gets deep into the weeds of bot measurement procedures. The case has been filled with a lot of legal fighting that was written for a wide audience to read. It’s a nice yarn.
What Are We Doing with Twitter Blue? Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, and the public perception of his tweet-based buyout
In an effort to tame the proliferation of impersonators, Twitter appears to have paused Twitter Blue. The service is no longer available for purchase, and on its website, Twitter notes that “accounts created on or after November 9, 2022 will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time.”
Musk tried to convince the advertisers that he was buying the platform to help humanity, and not to become a free-for-all hellscape.
It was strange for the first all- hands meeting after Musk went public. After serenading employees with Backstreet Boys and Aretha Franklin, the company said it would continue to evaluate the offer.
Former workers who spoke with CNN said the past year has felt like whiplash: they went from working for a company whose culture they loved with a corporate mission they believed in, to hunting for a new job and worrying about the platform’s future under Musk’s leadership as he restored incendiary accounts and alienated advertisers. One former employee told CNN following December layoffs that they felt like they were grieving what had been their “dream job.”
But even a free speech maximalist like Musk needs to convince shareholders that his buyout offer is in their financial self-interest. What are we doing here?
For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.
Casey was right in positing that Twitter’s poison pill provisions may not be enough to stop Musk. But he also assumed that Musk would just continue to troll the company through his tweets.
When Musk and Agrawal met in Los Angeles, a week after the announcement of a $Delta R10,000$Memployment
A deadline set by a Delaware judge for the deal to be finalized on Friday preceded the departures. If an agreement was not reached, she was going to schedule a trial.
The major personnel moves had been widely expected, and they are the first of a lot of changes that the eccentric CEO will make.
There were text messages that show that Musk had clashed with Agrawal immediately before he made a bid for the company.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. The harassment of Gadde was followed by a wave from other accounts. The harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, and calls for Musk to fire her, as well as a long list of other things. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School says that Musk’s change of views about free speech rights on the internet is a result of the note.
There’s a great danger that social media will become a platform for right wing and left wing propaganda that will generate more hate in our society.
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You do not want a place where consumers just simply are bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform takes no responsibility,” Yildirim said.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1132153277/elon-musk-takes-control-of-twitter-and-immediately-ousts-top-executives
Twitter Layoffs: Why Did Musk and Musk Want to Take the Company Public? Insider Intelligence Director Jasmine Enberg Analyses
The New York Stock Exchange informed investors overnight that they would suspend trading in the company’s shares before the opening bell on Friday because of Musk’s plans to take the company private.
Top sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.
Musk’s apparent enthusiasm about visiting Twitter headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to one of his earlier suggestions: The building should be turned into a homeless shelter because so few employees actually worked there.
After buying Twitter, Musk cut more than half of its staff then proceeded to lay off and push out even more employees while repeatedly warning that Twitter could go bankrupt. The number of employees at the micro-service has dwindled to less than two thousand following more cuts late last month.
Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg said Musk has good reason to avoid a massive shakeup of Twitter’s ad business because Twitter’s revenues have taken a beating from the weakening economy, months of uncertainty surrounding Musk’s proposed takeover, changing consumer behaviors and the fact that “there’s no other revenue source waiting in the wings.”
The process has been frightening for some employees according to conversations that took place over the weekend. In the absence of official communication, workers have been gathering in private chats to share their latest rumors.
The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit roughly a quarter of the staff, heavily impacting teams including sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.
On Friday afternoon, Platformer was the first to report on the instructions engineers were given to print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written. It was part of a set of measures Musk and his team have undertaken in an effort to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest performing employees as a precursor to layoffs.
Musk doesn’t like how engineers are performing, so he has instructed employees to track when he recommends a certain number of times.
Do Good Engineers Code and Ship? When Is Twitter Going to Break? A Slack Message from an Engineer at a Video App Store
Since no leader seems willing or interested in filling the void right now, just want to know you are not alone. This is not a good thing.
In other Slack channels, employees are sharing contact information in case they suddenly lose access to their communications, another employee told us.
Engineers have been pressed to complete at least two major projects within days or weeks. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. A plan to revive the short form video app Vine in either a stand-alone product or part of the core service is what was first reported by the website today. If the features are not received by November 7th, the team will be fired, according to AlexHeath.
The project has generated a little enthusiasm so far, we are told. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to work on the project after Musk gave the go-ahead Sunday night.
The employees are being encouraged to build something and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. “At best: you will get some feedback. The director wrote that he may be asked to ship it asap. You will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case it was possible to do something you love.
In a note to his team on Monday, the senior director of software engineering at Twitter said there was going to be big changes. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. Some good and some bad.
Do goodengineering work, that’s what I should do now. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. There is a good culture change that is shipping and delivering. I would like you to use more of your time on coding, shipping, documentation, planning and strategy. Code and ship 5x as usual this week in order to be in a special group. Sexy is not the criteria for building what Elon wants or believes in. Being impactful and changing product and helping our users is the criteria. You don’t need to tell me what to do. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You’re in charge.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk
Are Employees’ Social Media Accounts Violating Musk’s Directives? A Class Action Action Against Musk, Tesla, and Twitter
But Musk’s attention can be unnerving, too. One employee told us that they were not sure if they liked working on a project that Musk is known to be focused on.
CNN obtained an email that says if your employment is not impacted, you will get a notification on the internet. You will receive a notification with next steps via email if your employment is impacted.
Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of three people who were locked out of their work accounts and an employee who was laid off. The law requires notice when there is an intention to lay off employees, and it was claimed that Twitter didn’t give the required notice.
The WARN and California WARN Acts are accused in the lawsuit of not giving the workers enough notice of their firing. Before firing employees, companies should give at least 60 days’ advance notice.
This is not the first time Musk’s management style has led to class-action lawsuits. Two former employees at Tesla sued the company in June for violation of the same WARN Act.
Shannon said that she filed the lawsuit in order to make sure that employees know they have an recourse for their rights.
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets the company said they would find out by 9 a.m. There was no word on how many people would lose their jobs.
He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. Many people on the micro-blogging service took to their accounts to express their support for each other, often using a blue heart symbol to signify the use ofTwitter’s blue bird logo.
White said the agency has not received recent notifications from the micro-blogging site.
Impersonating celebrities on Twitter after Meta’s decision to turn their display names into verification: Kathy Griffin apologizes to Musk and Mastodon
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., had its revenue decline in the second quarter in a row and its shares are at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.
The platform’s new owner warned after some celebrities changed their display names on the social media platform to protest the billionaire’s decision to offer verified accounts for $8 a month, as he simultaneously laid off a large swath of the workforce.
“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended,” Musk wrote. There will be no warnings now that it is rolling out widespread verification.
Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she changed her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.
Some of the content moderators were let go. Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.
Twitter and SCAM Mongers: “It hasn’t been seen in a few months.” Roth says a breakdown of moderation and verification could cause disinformation
The actor replaced Musk’s screen name with hers and then switched back to her real name after a weekend of campaigning for Democrats. Akey-dokey. I thought I made my point and had fun, she said afterwards.
The blue verification checkmark was the original reason for it. It was free for people who had verified their identity with Tweets from the micro- networking site. It was simply that your identity had been verified. “SCAM mongers would have a harder time pretending to be you.”
It said the service would first be available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. However, it was not available Sunday and there was no indication when it would go live. Esther Crawford told The Associated Press that it was coming soon but it hadn’t launched yet.
If the company were to strip current verified users of blue checks — something that hasn’t happened — that could exacerbate disinformation on the platform during Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Like Griffin, some Twitter users have already begun migrating from the platform — Counter Social is another popular alternative — following layoffs that began Friday that reportedly affected about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce. They fear a breakdown of moderation and verification could create a disinformation free-for-all on what has been the internet’s main conduit for reliable communications from public agencies and other institutions.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to assuage such concerns in a tweet Friday. He said the company’s front-line content moderation staff was the group least affected by the job cuts.
Wall-to-Beck Wall Street and Wall Wall Walls: How Musk and his Colleagues Mettoved Wedbush Securities
But if Musk and his backers deem that Twitter is not worth sinking more money into, the eye-popping debt payment could help make the case that bankruptcy is the best way forward for the company, Wu said.
Investment firm Wedbush Securities said the deal represented “one of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in history,” pegging Twitter’s fair value at closer to $25 billion.
Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. Thousands of workers were cut from the staff when Musk was in charge as his associates screened existing staff for technical prowess.
In many ways, Monday’s outage represented the culmination of Musk’s leadership at the company so far. In a single-minded effort to cut costs on his $44 billion purchase, he has been slashing the staff and reducing Twitter’s free offerings.
“In addition to potential financial returns, my sense is that Musk and his co-investors are ideologically driven, that they’re really driven by values,” Wu said.
But that did not change what Musk sees as a core problem at the company, which is that it has just one primary way of making money: online advertising.
It’s an unfortunate reality for the company right now, because it’s a miserable time in the online advertising business. The tech sector has been negatively affected by a decline in ad spending. Facebook owner Meta has laid off 11,000 people. 20% of its staff were let go. Other ad-reliant tech companies are feeling the squeeze.
Demagogy after the event ended: a tale of two idiots and one villain (and one ugly): how Musk made a lot of jokes
The program’s launch has had an opposite effect. A flurry of accounts impersonating star athletes like Lebron James, former President Trump and companies including Eli Lilly and Pepsi, put a spotlight on just how quickly the blue-check-for-sale option could be used to spread deception.
If an emergency service account was opened by someone other than the actual person, the account would be in a bad way, and the bad advice about where to go during a disaster would be stopped.
Tobac fears that the country will become confused and splintered as a result of the election, as she has not yet seen the final results.
“Right now, we have people making jokes and then they make a fool out of themselves, which is funny because he thinks they’re funny now,” she said. Someone who is pretending to be an election official and messing with the election results is going to cause a lot of problems.
As weeks of waiting turn into months, former staffers in the US are filing arbitration suits, while some in the UK are trying to negotiate terms. In other countries, people didn’t hear anything when there were staff layoffs.
“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee.
A ban on links on his website put it at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, but soon he apologized and promised a return to moderation.
All Musk needs from his captive audience is a little more attention, with a promise that there will be votes about “major policy changes” in the future.
If his time as the company’s CEO ended the same way, it would be appropriate, since he started his $44 billion takeover with a poll.
Musk has (mostly) acted in line with the results of polls posted to his own Twitter account in his time owning the company, but the Musk Rules can be fluid. He promised previously that no major content decisions or account reinstates would happen without a council being convened, then retroactively claimed that no longer applies due to activist groups that broke the deal.
Growing criticism of Musk culminated on Sunday in an unscientific referendum on his treatment of the company since he purchased it.
Musk forced remaining employees to take a pledge to become “extremely hardcore” in their work, and stopped enforcing Twitter’s policy against Covid-19 misinformation.
A paid verification feature on the micro-messaging service was not available in its initial hours because of the influence of fake accounts portraying verified major brands, athletes and other public figures.
Twitter announced a new policy on Sunday that took many users aback: It said tweets including links to other social media sites would no longer be allowed, calling such posts “free promotion.”
A number of employees of the company reached out to me to say they relied on the company’s previous promise of a separation, according to a story by CNN. “They were nervous during all that uncertain time last year when it wasn’t clear what was going to happen with the company, and leadership at Twitter didn’t want to lose their workforce in the meantime, so to keep people there, they made these promises.”
A third has yet to receive any details of severance, even though they have been chasing Twitter for information since they were fired in November. They were promised at least twice that they’d be given details of their package, but they never received it.
A former employee from Twitter’s Accra, Ghana, office, which was open for less than a week before its entire staff was laid off, says that they, “like other staff globally, were assured severance but have not heard from them yet.” The former employee says they were not sure what, if any, recourse they may have against the company in Ghana.
Some chose to wait until their official status was expired on January 4, but others took legal action against the company.
Returning Musk’s MacBooks: An Ex-Worker’s View of an Employee’s Wired Email Address for Equipment Returns
Some former employees have said they sent gear back to the company after reaching out to them. Others within the last few days received generic emails that said they needed to fill out a survey. Four out of five who chatted with WIRED weren’t aware of the email so they are still babysitting Musk’s property.
Eric Frohnhoefer, a California software engineer fired in November after confronting Musk via tweet, says he has not heard a peep about returning his company-issued Apple MacBook Pro M1 Pro laptop from 2021 (8/10 WIRED Recommends). He says it is still sitting in a closet. Since early November, when Musk let a lot of employees go, he’s locked the laptops of many of them, rendering them useless.
Businesses typically want their devices back quickly from departing staff to protect proprietary data and save money, by cutting leases for the equipment or through reuse and resale. But there are exceptions. Snap and Airbnb confirmed that they allowed workers laid off during the pandemic to keep their corporate laptops.
A shipping box for returnable items can be sent to the address in the survey, but there’s also options to Drop off equipment at some offices.
When WIRED email address for equipment returns was shared by an ex-worker, an unsigned reply came back after about 3 hours that further instructions and a box would arrive within 30 days of submission. One laid-off worker says they’re not rushing to fill it out. “Elon can wait.”
Social Media Users Aren’t Getting More Like They Used To (And Why?) They Don’t Respond to Emails, Tweets, and Posts
The decline of engagement is an obvious result of the increasingly glitchy product of the service, which has puzzled users with its vanishing mentions, shifting priorities, and seemingly random statements from accounts they do not follow. The company experienced one of its first major problems since Musk took over, with users being told that they were over the daily limit.
Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said that he said, “This is ridiculous.” I have more than 100 million followers and only get a small amount of impressions.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. They told him last April that Musk’s popularity in search rankings was at a peak, with a score of 100. Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers previously looked into whether Musk’s reach had been restricted but found no evidence that the formula was biased against him.
The public view counts for every tweeter was added seven weeks ago. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.
He said that more than ninety percent of people on the social networking site read, but don’t reply or send a message, as those are public actions.
The company said parts of the service might not be working as expected. The change we made had some consequences.
How Slack has gone dormant and how it’s going to turn into a ghost town: An employee’s perspective
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. We mainly spend time on three areas, which include putting out fires, performing impossible tasks and improving efficiency, without clear expectations of what the results will be. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
One employee said that there are times when he is just sleeping late at night and saying crazy things. He goes to us and tells us that one person can’t do it on the platform, and we have to run around looking for other uses for that person. It doesn’t make sense.
Slack — once the epicenter of Twitter’s open culture, where employees discussed anything and everything — has gone dormant. A current employee described it as a ghost town.
“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.
It isn’t true for everyone at the company. The employee says that there are a few believers who are just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who were trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that existed.
What Twitter Blue had to Say After Musk Takes Over a Fortune-Changing Company: Employee Feedback on Musk’s Effort under the CEO
Instead, Twitter employees say they heard very little from their new leader in the days immediately after his takeover. De Caires spent the first week under Musk working on Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk wanted revamped as part of his urgent effort to bolster revenue. de Caires said that they pulled an all nighter to help out. After a week of being in the office, she said she was called back the next night to help set up the audio-video equipment in the conference room.
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. He has to learn areas where he doesn’t know and let those that know take over.
At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”
With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.
The recent vibe in tech is a main reason for most people, an employee said. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”
There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreements with the Federal Trade Commission,Twitter committed to following a number of steps before pushing out changes.
While the company was able to recover from its latest outage within a couple of hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the future.
And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk’s tweets to be made more visible on the timeline than any other user’s, have also roiled the user base.
According to Platformer, the change in question was a part of the project to stop free access to the social networking site. On February 1st, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The company is looking for developers to work with a new paid application programming interface.
“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Some employees are sympathetic to that view that part of the blame for the company’s problems is on technical failures that predated Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old Twitter for a reason.
But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. Former employees have long predicted that the losses have made the site more vulnerable to catastrophic disruptions.
This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on.
Elon Musk: a Silicon Valley CEO and a Pioneer in the Emerging Technology Industry. Ali’s Mother and Baby in San Francisco
Ali said they were on thecoaster for seven months. He was in and he was out, there were many rumors, but we didn’t buy it, we were bought by another rogue faction.
January 4 marked Ali’s official separation date from Twitter, leaving her without health insurance, which her job had provided for her family. A month after her baby was born. She is spending her time with her newborn, rather than looking for a new job.
Some former employees say the company’s severance promises had encouraged them to stay at the company last summer amid the uncertainty around Musk’s acquisition, only to regret that as the tech industry entered its most severe downturn in recent memory later in the year.
“We were on the Twitter-coaster, the Elon Musk chapter, for seven months. And during that time, he was in, he was out, it was happening, it wasn’t happening.”
The former senior audio video engineer, who was laid off after seven months, said that he was not a software engineer or an executive. If I am not hired for another job, I will have to leave my apartment because I was paid enough to live in San Francisco.
On the day news broke that Musk had agreed to buy the company,Armstrong was in her first day of work at a new company, called the “corn company.” It was a very welcoming place to work. “I was respected, and I hadn’t had that anywhere else working in tech.”
He told her she had nothing to worry about, and that she had previously considered looking for another job. And it really changed my mind.
It would have been great to spend that time in the substantially better tech market. “The market is hot garbage right now. I was sitting down earlier this week after a bunch of rejections and I wondered if I should go be a firefighter or something, since the tech jobs are not happening.
Like Ali, some employees said that even if they’d wanted to leave, it simply didn’t feel like an option for personal reasons. Other workers were open to the idea of working for Musk, one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs, despite his reputation as a controversial figure on Twitter and the uncertainty around his plans for the platform.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/tech/elon-musk-twitter-employees-year-of-uncertainty/index.html
What does Twitter have to offer? How did De Caires lose their equity vestment and what they are hoping to get back? “We’ve seen it all, but what have we not seen”
De Caires said that they lost out on a lot of money because they lost half of the equity vestment portion of their compensation. The workers are hoping to get back some of the money they lost through their claims.
“A lot of us put in a lot of effort because we love the company and we love to excel,” Ali told CNN. There are a lot of good people working at Twitter… we were part of the global movement to let everyone know what is going on and how it is affecting them. I believe that we should be compensated fairly for what we have done.