San Francisco: Blue product manager Esther Crawford, who shot to fame late last year after a picture of her sleeping in the Twitter office went viral, but was among the around 200 employees laid-off by boss Elon Musk recently, has broken her silence, revealing how it feels to suddenly lose a job despite working so hard.
In a series of tweets, the former Twitter employee sought to reveal how some people, left behind after mass layoffs at the company, felt, claiming that people who remain at a company after mass layoffs get “demonised for not quitting”.
“Seeing people who remain at a company after a round of layoffs get demonised for not quitting in solidarity is truly bizarre. Empathy should be extended to both sides. It’s hard to lose your job and the people who remain often end up having to pick up even more work,” she tweeted.
Seeing people who remain at a company after a round of layoffs get demonized for not quitting in solidarity is truly bizarre. Empathy should be extended to both sides. It’s hard to lose your job and the people who remain often end up having to pick up even more work.
She further added: “For those laid off, it can be jarring to suddenly have a piece of your identity taken away — especially if you were truly passionate about the problem & work. It’s normal to have a lot of feelings as you rebuild a new routine and plan for the future.”
Crawford also said that after a series of layoffs, the remaining employees might feel even “lonelier and scarier”.
“For the people still at the company it can feel lonelier and scarier after a bunch of people you know and trust are gone. A new normal has to emerge and that takes time as projects, people and priorities shift.”
“At the end of the day, businesses are not families — they’re teams”, Crawford emphasised.
Moreover, she believes that the company’s needs can change or new directions can emerge.
Keeping up the fighting spirit, she ended: “Many things are out of our control in life, so the best thing to do is be adaptable and antifragile — that way you don’t just bounce back from challenges but become smarter, wiser and stronger because of them”.
The platform’s new ad verification process and disclosure mechanisms are rudimentary so far, relying on both potential advertisers and members of the public to fill out a form hosted by Google, unusual for a tech company that would typically be expected to build most of its own web features.
Both Republican and Democratic digital operatives said they expect Twitter advertising will eventually pick up as campaigns seek to meet voters wherever they are, including on the Musk-owned platform. But the same concerns about Twitter’s “brand safety” driving the platform’s overall advertising decline remain. Twitter’s rollout of the new ad policy, including the use of Google Forms, is not exactly inspiring confidence.
“It’s been several years since political advertisers have used Twitter, so it’s not just in our muscle memory or our toolbox in the way that some other things would be,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, which studies campaign practices. “And then there is a lot of uncertainty about Twitter and who is using it.”
Twitter stopped accepting political advertising in 2019, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey saying political message reach should be “earned, not bought.” Political ads accounted for only a small share of the company’s revenue prior to the ban, Twitter said at the time.
The slow start to political advertising could partially reflect the timing. Overall political advertising is relatively low across all digital platforms in February of an off election year. Campaigns typically pick up spending on digital advertising ahead of competitive elections beginning in the fall ahead of the election year.
But campaigns also have to consider some of the “brand safety” issues that have caused other advertisers to leave or reconsider their presence on the platform, said Mark Jablonowski, president of DSPolitical, a digital advertising firm that works with Democratic candidates and causes.
The issue is not necessarily about Musk’s professed political beliefs, Jablonowski said, but reflects campaigns needing the ability to get their message across in an environment where content policies do not “amplify misinformation.”
Twitter’s policies define political advertising as ads that advocate for or against a candidate or party, appeal for votes or financial support related to an election or are paid for by registered political groups. For now, the platform is also allowing only certain kinds of political ads — sponsored posts, for example, but not sponsored hashtags. The policies also say ads cannot include false or misleading content, although it’s not clear how that policy will be enforced. Since Musk bought Twitter, he has expanded the use of community notes, which allow users to comment on others tweets intending to correct misinformation, but has also eliminated the platform’s policy of misinformation related to Covid-19 and has faced criticism for allowing back users previously suspended for spreading misinformation.
Advertisers can request verification to run political ads by submitting information via a Google Form. The company follows up with those who have submitted, with the process expected to take between two and four weeks, according to Twitter’s website. It is not clear how many campaigns have attempted to be verified so they can run ads.
There is similarly a Google Form where users can request information on political ads running on Twitter. By contrast, Meta has a verification process within its website and a public ad library on its website, where all political ads are searchable.
After POLITICO requested data on ad disclosures so far, Twitter responded on Feb. 27 saying “there are no existing political ads to disclose at this time.” The company did not respond to follow-up questions about whether campaigns or groups were going through its verification process to run ads.
“It’s apparent that there’s a resource crunch at Twitter if they’re using a Google form for the verification process,” Jablonowski said. “It seems like they want the revenue from political advertising but don’t have the infrastructure to support it.”
Polling from the Pew Research Center in 2021 found that less than 1 in 4 U.S. adults use Twitter, while nearly 70 percent use Facebook.
Still, the minority of adults who use Twitter are highly interested in politics. Campaigns and groups are likely to try out the platform eventually, particularly as digital advertising remains generally cheap and other methods of running ads will become more saturated as elections approach.
“Campaign advertising follows voters’ eyeballs,” Wilson said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Microblogging platform Twitter is down once again. The platform has faced outages several times in the last few months even as Twitter CEO Elon Musk assured users that they are trying to resolve issues. On Wednesday, Twitter hung for users with “Welcome to Twitter” messages popping up on users’ feeds or attempts to refresh fail as old posts show up.
DownDetector, the outage tracking website, showed several complaints from users, including 619 from India, as #TwitterDown trended on the platform.
The microblogging website faced issues on its mobile app and desktop version. While one could post a new tweet, smoothly, tweets from other users were not visible.
“Welcome to Twitter! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now”, were the messages users saw even as they attempted to refresh their feeds.
While the app was down for several users the rest had their share of fun sharing gazillion memes, and trolling Musk, during the Twitter outage.
San Francisco: Elon Musk has chosen Mexico for the next Tesla Gigafactory and will reveal more about it during the company’s investor day.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that Tesla agreed to use recycled water at the plant in Monterrey throughout the manufacturing process.
“He (Musk) was very responsive, understanding our concerns and accepting our proposals,” said the President.
Musk is expected to present the long-awaited and often teased ‘Master Plan 3’ during the investor day on March 1 (US time) at the company’s Gigafactory Texas located near Austin, Texas, reports TechCrunch.
Tesla has several factories in the US, including in Fremont, California.
The electric carmaker also has factories near Berlin and Shanghai.
US automakers Ford and GM, German automaker Volkswagen and Japanese companies Honda, Nissan and Toyota have vehicle assembly plants in Mexico.
GM, Kia and Stellantis have factories in Monterrey.
“I want to thank Elon Musk, who was very respectful and understood the importance of addressing the problem of water scarcity,” the Mexican President was quoted as saying in reports.
Musk was reportedly touring three Mexican states in December 2022. It was reported locally that the automaker plans an initial investment of $800 million to $1 billion.
The South African businessman’s assets are valued at US$ 187 billion; in 2nd place is Bernard Arnault, with US$ 185 billion
Businessman Elon Musk returned to being the richest person in the world on Monday (27.Feb.2023), according to the ranking from the Bloomberg. the owner of Tesla, SpaceX It is twitter has assets valued at US$ 187 billion, around R$ 973 billion at current exchange rates.
The 2nd place on the list is the CEO of holding LVMHo, Bernard Arnault, with a net worth of US$ 185 billion (R$ 962 billion). He owns brands such as Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Sephora and Chandon.
Read the list of the 5 richest, according to Bloomberg:
Elon Musk – $187 billion;
Bernard Arnault – $185 billion;
Jeff Bezos – $117 billion;
Bill Gates – $114 billion;
Warren Buffett – $106 billion.
According to siteMusk returned to the top of the ranking after Tesla’s stock surged nearly 70% in 2022. Signs of economic growth and a slower pace of US interest rate hikes encouraged investors.
Bengaluru: A group of male activists from the Save Indian Family Federation (SIFF) NGO, which fights for men’s rights, organised a special ‘puja’ here for Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and thanked him for purchasing the micro-blogging platform “allowing men to express their views against the oppression of authorities”.
The video of the incident that took place in the city’s Freedom Park has gone viral on social media.
In a Twitter post on Monday, the NGO said that “men’s Activists of SIFF used to be often shadow banned from Twitter by previous woke admins of the company”.
“After Elon Musk fired them, the MRAs have got back their right to free speech.”
The “special worshipping” was done on the sidelines of a protest against PILs on marital rape in the Supreme Court.
The post by the activists stated “SIFF members are worshipping guru Elon Musk in Bengaluru, India for purchasing Twitter and allowing men to express their views against the oppression of authorities”.
The activists were seen in the video with banners that read “mens lives matters” and “men have a right to peaceful existence”
The members lit incense sticks before a portrait of the tech billionaire and chanted “Elan Muskaya Namaha”, “Elon Musk ki Jaia, “Elon Musk se kuch seekho Adani, Ambani”.
SIFF members maintained that laws on rape, domestic violence and dowry are biased against men which are leading to lodging of false cases against them.
“The law is twisted to create fear among men rather than delivering justice to the victims. The members clarified that at the same time they are not against the laws relating to sexual violence in marriage or relationship, they are concerned with the abuse of laws,” they added.
San Francisco: After another round of layoffs over the weekend, Twitter CEO Elon Musk informed the remaining employees that they will receive acevery significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24.
“This past week, we completed a difficult organisational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company,” Musk wrote in an internal memo on Monday obtained by The Verge.
“Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them,” he added.
The memo, titled “Performance Awards”, was Musk’s first message to Twitter staff since he fired hundreds more employees over the weekend, including some senior loyalists and almost the whole product team.
However, he hasn’t yet shared any details about “how he will make up for the stock awards that went away when he took Twitter private”, the report said.
He also previously made internal comments in which he mentioned the structure he established at SpaceX to allow employees to regularly sell the company’s stock to interested investors.
Now, the company likely has less than 2,000 employees, which was about 7,500 when Musk took over.
“I think he’s just tearing this thing down to the studs and trying to run as lean as possible till the market turns around,” a recently laid-off employee said.
Recently, more than 50 employees were laid off, which were spread across several departments.
Twitter product manager Esther Crawford, who led the Blue project and Martijn de Kuijper, the creator of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021, were among them.
With this recent cut, Musk has done at least four rounds of layoffs.
This is happening despite his promise not to sack more employees after his brutal layoff exercise in November last year that affected two-thirds of the micro-blogging platform’s 7,500 employees.
The appearance was meant to promote California’s commitment to electric vehicle initiatives and its robust economy, but it also highlighted Newsom’s long-standing relationship with the polarizing billionaire, which appears to be alive and well despite Tesla relocating some of its operations to Texas, ignoring the state’s pandemic orders, and Musk nearly running another Silicon Valley giant, Twitter, into the ground.
Newsom says his relationship with Musk goes back “decades,” but the two have engaged in some light public sparring in recent years. Musk in 2021 derided California as “the land of sort of overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation.” The governor in September suggested Tesla wouldn’t even exist without California’s incentives.
But none of that was brought up on Wednesday. Musk cheerfully noted that Newsom was “one of the first to buy a Tesla Roadster back in the day” — noting he would have had to put down $100,000 to reserve one in 2007. That also means Newsom would have been one of the first Californians to buy an electric vehicle. According to data from the state’s energy commission, only 112 zero-emission vehicles had been sold by 2010.
“That was a healthy deposit you had to make,” Newsom said, joking he made the purchase “back when I had money.”
“That was a lot of money in 2007,” Musk said.
“It’s still a lot of money,” Newsom replied. “Trust me, brother, you haven’t looked at my salary … We had about the same net worth back then, 20 years ago.”
The governor, who receives a state salary of $224,020, reported at least $1.6 million in income, assets and investments for 2021. Newsom founded a lucrative wine and hospitality business in 1992, but moved the Plumpjack Group assets to a blind trust upon taking office in 2018.
His office didn’t respond to a question about how many Tesla vehicles he owns, but a 2018 profile in The New Yorker makes mention of three Teslas in his driveway.
By the end of 2022, a total of about 1.4 million ZEVs had been sold in the state, including 346,000 sold last year for nearly 19 percent of the new vehicle market. California has a goal of propelling electric vehicle sales to 100 percent of the new car market by 2035.
Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
San Francisco: Tech leaders and internet stars are lamenting that downtown San Francisco’s real estate market has deteriorated and the city is getting “emptier and emptier”, with Elon Musk calling this “tragic”.
File hosting service Dropbox’s chief financial officer Tim Regan said that they were relatively quick to market with subleasing plans.
However, “the market has deteriorated, with many companies reducing their real estate footprint”, said Regan.
San Francisco has been among the slowest US markets to rebound from the pandemic as tech companies did not open their offices and promoted remote work amid mass layoffs.
Regan said during the company’s quarterly call this week that they no longer assume the company “will sublease additional space in San Francisco in the next few years”.
Podcaster Elijah Schaffer tweeted that San Francisco is getting “emptier and emptier”.
“Last time I went, a man was urinating on the Twitter building and the only people on the street were angry press trying to snap photos of @elonmusk,” he posted.
“Sad what’s happened to this town and scary they think they know best for the world,” Schaffer said.
Musk replied: “Tragic. I hope SF (San Francisco) comes back from this emptiness. It is such a beautiful city with so many amazing people”.
In a video attached to his tweet, Schaffer said that so many businesses have closed in downtown San Francisco near his office, which is also shut.
Musk said last month that office rentals in San Francisco will further drop. Twitter has its headquarters in the city.
David Sacks, Co-founder and partner at Craft Ventures, tweeted that he got offered office space in San Francisco for the same price as 2009.
Musk replied: “It will go lower”.
Amid global recession fears, San Francisco stands to lose the most as work-from-home in the last three years of the pandemic at tech companies and expensive real estate has stalled the city’s growth.
San Francisco: Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Saturday said that the micro-blogging platform will provide users the ability to adjust the algorithm to their “closer match”, in the “coming months”.
Musk tweeted: “If many people who you follow or like also follow me, it is highly probable that the algorithm will recommend my tweets. It’s not super sophisticated.”
“In coming months, we will offer the ability to adjust the algorithm to closer match what is most compelling to you.”
Several users expressed their thoughts on Musk’s post.
When one user commented, “It’s ridiculous that the Twitter algorithm recommends me content from the accounts I follow.”
Musk replied, “The algorithm needs and will get major upgrades. We will still publish it later this month, but please expect to see many bugs & silly logic! What matters is showing users compelling content. We’re doing better than before (I think). User-minutes are up >10 per cent from last year.”
Meanwhile, in a tweet on Friday, Musk said, “Several major media sources incorrectly reported that my Tweets were boosted above normal levels earlier this week.”
“A review of my Tweet likes and views over the past 6 months, especially as a ratio of followers, shows this to be false.
We did have a bug that briefly caused replies to have the same prominence as primary Tweets, but that has now been fixed.”
To this, one user said, “Media has been doing this since ages now!” “True, but, on the plus side, their constant reporting about me on Twitter has driven usage to record levels,” Musk replied.
Twitter CEO later posted, “A big part of the problem is that journalists used to choose their career to pursue truth, but in recent years many have entered journalism to be activists.”
