Elon Musk News: Twitter likely to charge users for sending messages to celebrities

Amid the ongoing Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition drama, more parody accounts that strikingly resemble Elon Musk's real account surfaced on the Microblogging platform. Notably, all these parody accounts are verified and have a tick mark by the side of the name 'Elon Musk'. One of the accounts even mocks the $8 that Twitter will charge consumers who desire to have a blue tick mark next to their name to indicate a verified account. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently announced that Twitter users will soon be able to include long-form content in their tweets. Musk who newly acquired the micro-blogging site said on Twitter that "Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots." He continued by saying that creator monetization for all types of content will come next.  

Jack Dorsey, who left his position as CEO of Twitter less than a year ago, has at last spoken about the layoffs which affected almost 50% of the firm that he co-founded in the year 2006. As Elon Musk took control of the microblogging platform Twitter, the workforce decreased which further affected thousands of individuals.  

Indicating it, Dorsey said in a tweet, “I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.” He even added, “Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment.” 

The Microblogging platform Twitter has upgraded its iOS app for Apple iPhone customers and now contains the new $7.99 per month Blue subscription. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has recently taken over the social media site after completing the $44 billion acquisition deal. 

Twitter writes in the Apple App store, “Get Twitter Blue for USD 7.99/month if you sign up now Blue checkmark: Power to the people: Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.” 

Amid massive layoffs at Twitter across the world, including in India, and the subsequent backlash, the microblogging site's new owner Elon Musk on Saturday justified the move, saying there was "no choice" when the company was losing millions of dollars daily.

Alphonzo Terrell, Twitter’s ex Global Head of Social and Editorial, penned a short note on behalf of his team, which was previously responsible for uploading posts on the official account of Twitter. 

“Wont get to Tweet it, but here it is - the last @Twitter Tweet from my team and I. Love y’all and thank you for the honor of a lifetime #OneTeam,” he wrote. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk defended his decision to cut down the workforce by noting that the laid-off employees will be provided salaries of three months despite the company experiencing losses of over $4 million per day. 
“Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required,” Musk wrote on Twitter.

Despite letting go of a large chunk of its workforce, Twitter has assured that its “core moderation capabilities” remain in place. “Here are the facts about where Twitter’s Trust & Safety and moderation capacity stands today: tl;dr: While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place,” tweeted Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity at Twitter.

Sources closely following Elon Musk’s moves as CEO at Twitter speculate that the reason Musk has fired a significant number of the social networking company’s staffers is to avoid incurring losses of about $700 million in the next year, the New York Post reported. 

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has turned the social networking platform disorderly as it undergoes significant changes. According to a report by CNN, multiple users of Twitter have now moved to Mastadon, another social networking service that was created in 2016. 
Mastodon has been able to catch the interest of users with its conversational and news-oriented format which is similar to Twitter.

In a bid to generate revenue on Twitter, CEO Elon Musk is planning to launch a feature that will require users on the platform to pay money if they wish to send direct messages to prominent public figures, according to a report by The New York Times. 

This comes after Musk acknowledged that Twitter has experienced a significant drop in revenue. "Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists," he said in a tweet.

One million users quit Twitter after Elon Musk acquired the platform and became the CEO. According to Christopher Bouzy, who is the founder of bot tracking company Bot Sentinel, “877,000 Twitter accounts were deactivated, and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1." "That’s more than double the usual number," Bouzy wrote on Twitter. 

Experts have voiced concern over the mass layoffs at Twitter, and have warned that significantly reducing the workforce could potentially cause a rise in misinformation and hate speech as the US midterm elections approach. 

Fake news expert Paul Barrett told the Guardian that the sudden drop in staff could turn Twitter into a “Category 5 Hurricane” that will be the breeding ground for election misinformation.

Multiple brands have suspended their paid advertising operations on Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social networking platform. According to Business Insider, the companies include Volkswagen AG, General Mills, General Motors, Pfizer Inc, and United Airlines. 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has avoided signing layoff memos with his name as he continues to reduce the workforce due to the company incurring losses of over $4M per day. 

According to reports, the layoff memos are signed as "Thank you, Twitter” and do not include the CEO’s name. 

Former US President’s son Donald Trump Jr ridiculed Twitter employees that had been fired after Elon Musk’s takeover by sharing a video of a man doing manual labour. 

“Hey Twitter ex employees… Found some jobs for ya,” he wrote as the caption. 

Elon Musk stayed rigid on the blue tick fee as he told detractors that they could criticize him all day on Twitter, but will have to pay $8 for it. 

US President Joe Biden called out Elon Musk and said that the Twitter CEO had bought a social networking platform that propagates “lies” at a global level. 
“Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that spews lies all across the world,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Illinois, CNN reported.

An account posing as Elon Musk on Twitter deceived audiences when it switched to Hindi on Twitter on Saturday to share an excerpt from the Bhojpuri track ‘Kamariya Kare Lapalap’.

After self-identifying as a free-speech absolutist and ‘Chief Twit’, Elon Musk has now titled himself an alien. 
“I’m an alien trying to get back to my home planet,” he quipped on Twitter.

Twitter chief Elon Musk expressed high hopes for Twitter at the Annual Baron Investment Conference in New York. "I think there is a tremendous amount of potential … and I think it [Twitter] could be one of the most valuable companies in the world," he said.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP has demanded a complete boycott of Advertisements on Twitter. The President and CEO of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, who met Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday, released a statement calling all businesses to stop advertisements on the micro-blogging platform.

The statement reader, "It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism, and conspiracy theories." It added that racist slurs have increased since Elon Musk took control of Twitter, and conspiracy theories have multiplied. As per the CEO, although Elon Musk's promises during the meeting inspired cautious optimism in them, businesses cannot in good faith support Twitter unless steps are taken to make it a safe platform. The statement noted, "Twitter must earn its advertisers by creating a platform that safeguards our democracy and rids itself of any content or account that spews hate and disinformation."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has threatened to name-shame any Twitter advertisers who would pull themselves off from the microblogging service after the social media platform announced major layoffs. Musk said while responding to a user on Twitter, "Thank you. A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.”

American actress Amber Heard seems to have stopped using her Twitter account after Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired the microblogging platform after completing the $44 million deal. Her feed stated: "This account doesn't exist," and the actor's handle, @RealAmberHeard, is no longer visible. Further, numerous celebrities have declared their departure from the site in the wake of the billionaire's acquisition, including Shonda Rhimes of Grey's Anatomy.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk defended his move to fire staff from Twitter by claiming that the microblogging service was losing more than $4 million daily. Taking to Twitter, the new owner of the social media platform said, "Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day." He further added that everyone who has left the company has been offered a 3-month severance package, which is 50% over what was legally necessary. 

As Twitter made widespread job cuts with Elon Musk taking over the company, thousands of employees lost their jobs, according to the reports. An internal email sent to staff on Friday explained that the mass job cuts were "unfortunately necessary to ensure the company's success moving forward".

Elon Musk has blamed "activist groups pressuring advertisers" for a "massive drop in revenue" as he led a mass layoff of the staff.  The billionaire owner of Tesla tweeted that "activists" raising concerns about how Twitter is moderated are "trying to destroy free speech in America".

Elon Musk has fired Twitter's entire 'ethical AI' team. The 'ethical AI' team's goal was to make sure that the machine learning algorithms are fair and not prejudicial against any group, however, many belive that they were politcally biased and in the name of fairness promoted their own political ideology. 

Elon Musk has tweeted that Twitter has witnessed a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressurising advertisers. Earlier in the live blog we mentioned the firms which suspended their advertisement on Twitter which inclue - Audi, Pfizer, General Mills and many others. 

Musk added that there has been no change in content moderation, highlighting that he did everything he could to appease the activists. 

This information comes at a time when Musk is going ahead with his decison to sack a huge chunk of Twitter's workforce, to cut costs. 

Twitter has been sued by 5 former employees for allegedly violating federal and state law. Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, commonly known as the WARN act, stipulates a 60 day notice period before mass layoff for companies above a certain size. 

"Twitter is now engaged in conducting mass layoffs without providing the required notice under the federal WARN Act," the lawsuit says, as per a report from NBC news. It is worth noting that the act does allow some exceptions and Twitter quite likely will argue that those exeptions apply in the current situation. 

Layoffs at Twitter India have begun. According to some reports, the entire marketing and communications team has been fired. Before Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the company employed 300 people in India.

There is no clear information yet on how many people have been sacked. 

Shirish Andhare, Twitter's India product head, has removed his designation from his Twitter bio. 

Former Managing Editor of Time, Walter Isaacson, wrote back in 2009 that social networks should enable "micropayments for stories and songs and videos." It was the only way to save journalism, he wrote. Make people pay for it. 

Today, Issacson re-upped his piece and Musk responded by saying that he agreed with him

 

There is a school of history that argues communication platforms lead to social change, famously known as the Gutenberg view of history which posets that the Protestant reformation occured due to the Gutenberg printing press. Printing press meant common people now had access to Bible and could interpret it on their own without a middle man i.e. the clery of Catholicism.

This view of history claims that the question of who controls a communication platform is actually quite important.

Many people on the centre right of American political spectrum feel that the political left has had a monopoly on communication platforms for too long, since the days of radio essentially, which continued into the days of broadcasting, with journalists such as Walter Cronkite being essentially left leaning but pretending to be neutral.

In the era of internet too, this trend continued, according to the assessment of right leaning people. Musk's acquisition of Twitter is the first instance of this norm being broken and Musk himself, seems to share this perception. 

Simon Balmain, who worked as senior community manager for Twitter out of UK, has shared on the platform how he was fired. Many people have claimed that the way Twitter employees are being fired is inhumane.

The email to Twitter employees that is doing the rounds on internet today, should have been a face to face meeting, according to many people.

The sentiment is that - after working for a company, people deserve to be treated as something more than cogs in a wheel. Many have said that the whole process has been quite dehumanising. 

It is easy to forget what led to all of this chaos over Twitter. It was a simple joke by the satirical website called Babylon Bee. Below is the joke that led to all of it. 

 

Seth Dillon, the founder of Babylon Bee tweeted from his personal account that Babylon Bee has been locked out from its Twitter account and won't be allowed to access it until that joke is deleted. The joke was considered "offensive" because a certain clique of Democrat voters found it "offensive". 

Dillon refused to delete the tweet. 

Musk, a regular user of Twitter for quite some time, found out about the incident and well..the rest is history. An often used trite English idiom that everyone has come accross is "the straw that broke the camel's back". This is one of the rare cases where the idiom actually fits rather aptly. 

After finding out about the incident, Musk personally called up the founder of Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon and asked him if what he shared on Twitter was true? If Babylon Bee's account has genuinely been locked down due to a joke?

When Dillon replied in affirmative, Musk reportedly said, "looks like I have to buy Twitter". At that time, Dillon thought Musk was cracking a joke but apparently he was not. 

Some users have relied on memes, the 21st century equivalent of Japanese koans, to remind people what led us to this point.

A former employee of Twitter shared a rather odd post on the platform, seeming rather happy that he has been fired. The individual is 25 years old and worked in Public Policy Team of the social media platform. 
 

Musk has frequently criticised roles such as public policy as wasteful bureaucratic roles that add no value to the company and in most instances undermine the growth of the firm. It is crucial to point out that from Musk's point of view and from an objective point of view, Twitter is not a successfull compnay. Since 2007, it has made profit for only 2-3 years. 

Musk's supporters, like the former professor of Maths, Statistics and Computer Science at Standford, Balaji Srinivasan has claimed that founders like Musk know more about how to run a compnay than people who have never started a company. Below is a tweet that was retweeted by Balaji Srinivasan, which echoes his own views which he has shared in multiple interviews.

Balaji also worked as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and established the venture capital firm's bio and cypto arm. That cypto arm is now managed by Sriram Krishnan, who is helping Musk at Twitter. Balaji is famous in Indian Twitter for being bullish on India and referring to India as part of the 'ascending world' and referring west as the 'descending world'. 
 

Enrique Rueda is a former Twitter employee, who is one of the many who has now been let go. He shared what he thinks about Musk's decision to acquire the platform, only to be mocked by a majority of people in his comments and by a prominent journalist as well.

 

Most of the comments on his Tweet reflect a sentiment that is being depicted in the tweets below.

According to a report from the NYTimes, Twitter employees on Slack are asking, "Has the red wedding started?” referring to the mass layoff. Mass layoffs at Twitter are gaining more attention because of Musk's acquisition. However, during the last few days, many Tech companies other than Twitter have laid off their staff. 

On Thursday, Lyft announced it would lay off 13 percent of its staff. Stripe, a payment processing platform announced that it will be firing 1,100 employees. According to reports, in the year of 2022 only, more than 44,000 tech workers have been fired, as per estimates from Crunchbase. 

Wired reported last month that Tiktok has begun layoffs. Coinbase fired 1,100 workers back in June, during the so called "crypto winter". As Netflix's subscribers started dwindling, it too started firing its employees. In July, Shopify fired 1,000 workers. In August, Snap of Snapchat announced that 1,000 employees would be let off due to a downturn in digital advertising revenues. 

On October 18, Microsoft decided to cut off around 1,000 employees. The biggest mass layoff in tech's history occured back in 2008, during the financial crisis, when HP fired 24,600 employees. It fired thousands more in the next few days. 

Twitter employees are waiting to find out if they are being fired or they are being retained. May have started a 'list' on Twitter to vent their heart out, as they feel victimised, and to share new openings in other companies. Many have lost access to their company email account and they are sharing it on Twitter. 
 

The new Twitter owner, Elon Musk has cancelled “days of rest” for Twitter employees. Musk has also decided to end Twitter's remote work policy and has ordered all employees who are not fired to return to work at the company's office.

Twitter started "days of rest" in addition to regular paid leaves to prevent "burnout" among employees. Twitter has been criticised by venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz for being "bloated". 

In other words, heads of VC firms such as Marc Andreessen ( a friend of Elon Musk) believe that a huge number of Twitter employees don't actually do any work and mostly just relax at the office whilst collecting generous salaries.

This perception was strengthened by videos uploaded by Twitter employees depicting what a day in their life looked like. 

Marc Andreessen's VC firm has loaned out one of its partners named Sriram Krishnan to Musk, to help him with the Twitter rejig. 

Well, not really, but in a way, yes she did. AOC, a politician who claims that she represents working class people and spends most of her time criticising billionaires, owns a Tesla. She has been critcised for owning a Tesla as it isn't really a car working class people own. Some Twitter users yesterday pointed out to her that by buying a Tesla, she helped Musk and today, prominent accounts have started sharing that meme. 

 

Below is a full copy of the email that Twitter employees received. 

Team,

In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company's success moving forward.

Given the nature of our distributed workforce and our desire to inform impacted individuals as quickly as possible, communications for this process will take place via email. By 9AM PST on Friday Nov. 4th, everyone will receive an individual email with the subject line: Your Role at Twitter. Please check your email, including your spam folder.

If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email.
If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.

If you do not receive an email from twitter-hr@ by 5PM PST on Friday Nov. 4th, please email xxxxxxxx.

To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended. If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.

We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through, whether or not you are impacted. Thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.

We are grateful for your contributions to Twitter and for your patience as we move through this process.

Thank you.

Twitter

Reports suggest that Musk intends to fire 50 percent of the staff today. 

After General Motors, the biggest automobile manufacturing company in the US suspended ads on Twitter, now Pfizer, Audi and General Mills have announced that they are pausing advertisements on Twitter as well. More than 90 percent of Twitter's revenue comes from digital ads. Musk intends to reduce Twitter's dependence on digital advertisements. 

“As always, we will continue to monitor this new direction and evaluate our marketing spend,”  said spokesperson of General Mills to AP. 

IPG Mediabrands, one of the world’s largest advertising companies has advised its clients to pause current advertisements on Twitter.

A NYTimes report mentions that the consulting firm Blackglass "surveyed many of its clients, which include Walmart, Pepsi, Cadillac. Most of them said they were planning to pause spending on Twitter until they had more confidence & clarity on platform’s direction".

A report from the Financial Times has stated that L’Oréal has already suspended its advertisements on Twitter. 

It is Friday and Twitter employees are not thanking God. Today is the day layoffs begin. Musk, having paid more for Twitter than its original market value, now faces the challenge of make Twitter a profitable app. Twitter has only been profitable for two years, by some measures, and three by some. 

Musk's go to plan is to cut costs. By 12pm ET Friday, Twitter will inform employees about their employment status. 

“If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email. If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email," read a copy of an internal memo, as per reports from CNN. 

Twitter has temporarily suspended badge access of employees. 

Before Musk acquired Twitter, the social media platform had 7,500 employees. According to reports, Musk has informed people close to him that he intends to bring that number down to just around 2,000.

The decision to conduct mass layoff comes days after Musk fired top executives of Twitter and dissolved the board. 

Democrat Congresswoman Alexendria Ocasio Cortez has put out a video on Instagram claiming that Elon Musk is altering the algorithms to mess with her Twitter handle. 

The Democrat politician was ridiculed on social media and even Musk could not resist and joined in with other Twitter users to have fun at the politician's expense.