| Hi all, it's Kurt in San Francisco. Elon Musk is wrapping up his first 100 days at Twitter. But first… Today's must-reads: • Microsoft will use Open AI tech to write emails
• Apple won't name a new design chief
• An ex-FTX executive is ready to make a comeback Elon Musk, the self-appointed chief twit of his social media company, recently spent some time with the right-wing political YouTuber Dave Rubin at Twitter Inc.'s headquarters. In that meeting, according to Rubin, Musk offered a state of the union. "He thinks maybe the entire code has to be torn down and start from scratch," Rubin wrote in a post after the visit. Musk later called Twitter "a flaming dumpster rolling down the street," Rubin wrote. Musk's first 100 days in charge of Twitter will come to a close at the end of this week, and the billionaire is right about at least one thing: Twitter is a dumpster fire right now. The old code base does indeed have problems, as any engineer who has worked on it will readily admit, but former and current employees say a second, more urgent problem is Musk himself. Twitter's wounds are apparent, and many are self-inflicted. Musk laid off or fired more than half the employees, many of them in charge of critical projects or infrastructure; he's scared away advertisers with his unpredictable tweets and a botched plan to sell blue verification badges, eliminating a major chunk of Twitter's revenue in the process; as a result, he has talked often about bankruptcy; and the company's controversial yet earnest effort to moderate user content and establish transparent rules has taken a step back under Musk's direction. Meanwhile, the product updates under Musk have been modest. Twitter started showing how many people view each tweet, an idea former employees had previously considered and scrapped because the numbers tended to remind users how few people actually engage with their posts. A new algorithmic timeline called For You shows a lot more tweets from accounts a user doesn't follow, which could be an important step toward generating more growth but has so far gotten mixed reviews. The big ideas — remember the Vine reboot? — have yet to materialize. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment is that Twitter still exists. Analysts were skeptical that Musk could cut the workforce in half and keep Twitter running stably. So far, it has. This is, of course, short of the standard to which we hold any serious tech company, especially one run by Musk. The first 100 days can tell us a lot about a leader's policy agenda. It says less about whether they'll be successful in the end. There's reason to be optimistic. Despite his early stumbles, Musk is still heavily invested in Twitter, and his recognition of the company's struggles may mean that fixes are on the way. "This is definitely a work in progress," Musk said on the All-In podcast in late December. "One of the first things I said after the acquisition closed was like, 'We're going to make a bunch of mistakes. But then we'll try to recover from them quickly.' And that's what we've done." —Kurt Wagner Earnings were bad. Apple reported a steep decline in revenue over the holidays. Weak advertising demand took a toll on Google. Cloud growth is slowing for Amazon. And the chipmaker Qualcomm gave a lackluster sales forecast. Not a great Thursday. Job cuts at Google affected some of the people responsible for building the company's cash cow, the display advertising business. A high-profile cyberattack on the software company ION Trading UK is under an FBI review. The hackers behind it have also hit the UK's postal service as well as local government agencies in the US. The FTC rejected Meta's request to bar the agency's chair, Lina Khan, from an antitrust case over the company's proposed acquisition of a virtual-reality startup. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment