The Big Tech Stories of 2022: Twitter Descends into Chaos

there were a lot of those. I have done three full length episodes about important text stories that unfolded in two and I hadn't even really touched on the one that I probably talked about the most in our tech news episodes, at least in the second half of this year, which is all about Twitter. So we're gonna do that one today. But before I get into that, I also want to mention a different story, and this one won't take too long. So our first story is an update

on Pharaonis. So this was the medical tech company founded way back in two thousand three by Elizabeth Holmes, and it aimed to create a blood analysis device that could run more than a hundred medical tests on a micro

drop of blood. And the pitch was that you would be able to run such tests in a device that was about the size of a desktop printer and that in fact, in the future, maybe you know, your average person would have one of these and they could run a blood test at a moment's notice and get reliable results and be able to practice better preventable care and that kind of thing. There was only one real problem.

The tech didn't work, at least not to the extent that it needed to work, and the company, the anis Obvius, skated that by using various shady tactics to keep investors hoodwinked and you know, invested. And that all started to fall apart back in two thousand, two thousand sixteen. Now, at its height, the company was valued at more than nine billion dollars, and when it all came crashing down, the Justice Department wanted to hold some folks accountable for

multiple reasons. Now, there were the obvious reasons that I can really get behind, like the fact that there were people who depended upon getting accurate blood test results and their health was potentially in danger because of the actions of this company. There was also the reason that you know, rich people lost money by pouring investments into this. I know, I'm a broken record that I complained so much that the US Justice seems to uh to favor matters that

involve rich people losing money more than anything else. And I know that that's not necessarily the case all way across the board, but Holy cal twenty twenty two really brought that into sharp relief in many instances. So I'll take my cynical hat off, will just cover the story. So, Elizabeth Holmes and her ex boyfriend and ex Soronis president Ramesh Sunny bal Wannie both stood trial for multiple accounts of fraud and similar charges and both were found guilty.

And this year, six years after Tharonis started to crumble, Holmes and bal Wannie finally received their sentences. Holmes has been sentenced to eleven years in federal prison and bal Wanni is looking at thirteen years. Now. There's a lot more to this story, obviously, but perhaps I'll do a follow up to my previous Saronis episode at some point. Now.

The reason that I wanted to start off this episode with that story is that I have this kind of armchair psychology pet hypothesis when it comes to Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk, and we'll be talking a lot about Elon Musk in a moment, and that hypothesis is that these folks seem to be inclined to think that just because they want something to be possible, it must therefore

be possible. So with Holmes, it seems like this idea that technology should be able to overcome these challenges is, you know, possible, because it sounds like it should be.

That technology is so incredible with what it can do. Obviously, we should be able to run a hundred or more medical tests on a micro droplet of blood, and it ignores the actual physical obstacles that are in the way of allowing that to happen, even though there were mentors and experts who were warning Homes that this idea probably

wasn't going to work. With Musk well, from the hyperloop to the apparent belief that Twitter could implement massive sweeping changes without negative consequences, seems to indicate that he doesn't have a real understanding of things. And again, this is sort of my personal hypothesis. I am aware I could easily be proven wrong. Maybe Holmes never worried about whether or not her tech would work. Maybe it was a scam from the beginning. I don't get that sense, But

I don't know. Maybe Musk is playing some three D or four D or five D chess the way some people claim, But honestly, the feeling I get is that Checkers is really more his speed. All right, So let's talk Twitter. The social network company has been around since two thousand six, three years after Therainus had been founded, if you can believe it. Seven years later, in two thousand thirteen, Twitter held its initial public offering or i p O. That's when it transitioned from being a privately

held company to a publicly traded company. It would take another five years in eighteen for Twitter to post its first annual profits. But that same year ten Twitter had this nagging problem. See in Twitter had around three hundred thirty million users. By the end of twenty eighteen, it's first profitable year, it was down to three hundred twenty one million users. That had lost nine million users in the year, so it was starting to make a profit,

but it was losing millions of users. Twitter has been having issues for ages. It clearly was serving a useful purpose, particularly in the world of journalism. You had reporters and editors who were using Twitter to network with each other, also to make contact with important people. They landed interview opportunities through Twitter, so it was definitely serving an important purpose, but it was also a very useful network force, say

malicious misinformation campaigns. And then of course there were the trolls. So Twitter has a bit of a dodgy reputation when it comes to handling abuse on its platform. In some cases, the company has acted swiftly, but in others the slow response or lack of response has meant that some people have suffered a lot more abuse while waiting for Twitter to do anything about it. The gamer Gate affair is

a good example. People in the video games industry, primarily women, became the targets of persistent and extreme abuse, and many of them found it impossible to get any response from Twitter to to fix this or to act on it. In November, Jack Dorsey, one of the co founders of Twitter and two times CEO for the company, stepped down now. One reason for his departure was that Dorsey is also the CEO of a company called Block Incorporated. That's the

company behind the popular Square payment processing app. There were also concerns among stakeholders that Dorsey's attention was too divided because he was having to provide leadership to two big companies at the same time. We should kind of remember that because that will very much be relevant later in this episode. So Dorsey would step down in November, and a man named Parague Agrival becomes CEO of Twitter. Now Agrival had joined Twitter way back in two thousand eleven,

so before the company had even gone public. He initially worked as a software engineer, but by two thousand seventeen he had worked his way up to chief Technology officer of the whole company. So Agreval would end up serving as CEO beginning in November one, and he stayed in that position for not quite a full year. Okay, now we're moving up to the beginning of two thousand twenty two. At the star of the year, Twitter's stock was trading

at just under forty dollars a share. This was down from the company's high of seventy seven dollars a share. It had hit that in early one and since then had not really enjoyed those same heights. In early April, news broke that Elon Musk, who at the time was the world's richest man and was known as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, had purchased nine point two percent

of Twitter through stock purchases. That he had been doing this since January of this year, so earlier in the year, Musk had been complaining that Twitter was quote failing to adhere to free speech principles end quote, and that Twitter, as a sort of online public town square, was undermining

democracy by suppressing freedom of speech. Never Mind that Twitter as a company, not a government, so the whole First Amendment argument does not apply because First Amendment protects citizens in the United States against the government from suppressing free speech. It does not protect them against a company enacting its policies.

But never mind that must also entertain the notion of making his own social network platform, but that was something that was already being done in other platforms like parlor Gab and truth Social, all of which have had different challenges since their founding, and all of which position themselves as being more faithful to the concept of free speech. They also cater more towards the far right of the

political spectrum. Now, y'all, the stuff Twitter cracked down on and would act on when it comes to speech usually falls into categories like abuse, misinformation, and things like calls for violence. And the high profile accounts that had been banned were very much connected to these kinds of violations.

But Musk was repeating some of the talking points spread on the far right that Twitter was authoritatively deciding who would be allowed to speak and who wouldn't, And as he would learn the hard way later on, things aren't always so cut and dry. But you know, I don't want to get ahead of myself anyway. Musk's purchase of this massive amount of Twitter stock made him the largest single shareholder in Twitter, and the general belief was that he was going to use these shares to push for

changes within the company. Musk even got an invitation to join Twitter's board of directors, which Bloomberg reported that he had accepted, and it looks like initially he did accept. But by doing so, Musk would forfeit any chance of taking over Twitter entirely, because if you were to become a member of Twitter's board of directors, that came with

a kind of limit built in to it. No board member would be allowed to own more than fourteen point nine percent of the company while serving on the board of directors. So a few days later the New York Times clarified things Musk had chosen not to join the board of directors. He changed his mind, perhaps with the aim of making a move to take over Twitter entirely. So Musk was also slagging off on Twitter about Twitter.

So he was saying things like maybe the company's HQ should be converted into a homeless shelter since it was so empty all the time. He said that, you know, his followers should let him know if Twitter itself was dying. He he loves to post Twitter polls. He has done this so many times, so he posted a poll asking is Twitter dying? I'd love to see him ask the

same question now. But hey, you might ask why would you go and then by billions of dollars worth of stock in a company and then immediately start bad mouthing the company you invested in? Why would you invest in the company? And then you know, say the company is terrible? Like how does that make sense? Isn't that a pretty

dumb way to invest your money? And the answer to that is yes, unless maybe you're planning on trying to buy the dang thing outright and in the process you're hoping to maybe drive the price down a little bit. That could potentially be a thing. On April twenty two, Elon Musk did in fact offer to buy Twitter. The price he was looking at was at a fifty four dollars and twenty cents per share of stock, and at the time the stock was trading it around forty five

dollars per share. So saying that we'll pay fifty four twenty when you would otherwise get forty five, that's a premium, right, that's a good boost over the going price of the stock. And thus shareholders would be incentivized to agree to this deal. So the deal in total would cost around forty four billion dollars. And Musk said that Twitter needed to be transformed and it could only go through this transformation if it were a private company, so it didn't have to

answer to, you know, a board of directors and shareholders. Now, initially the board of directors resisted Musk's move. The method they used is called a poison pill. Now, if you're like me and you're not super big in the investment world, a poison pill might be a new term to you. And a poison pill is when a company does its best to make it more difficult for an outside entity to execute a hostile takeover. And there's a couple of

different ways companies can do this. In Twitter's case, the approach was to give Twitter's stockholders, with the exception of Elon Musk, a chance to purchase additional shares of Twitter and a discounted price. Now, adding more shares means that Musk's nine percent ownership would end up getting diluted. So, in other words, like if you had a hundred apples and one person bought nine apples from you, and an apple represents voting power, and you're like, oh, I don't

want this person to have nine of the vote. Maybe you add another hundred apples and you don't let this person buy any and thus you dilute their ownership of your stock of apples. That's kind of the idea that was going on here, But as it would turn out, things would go in a different direction. I'll explain more after we come back from this break. Okay, we're now up to April two. This is a week after Elon

Musk first announced his intention to buy Twitter. Then he said that he had secured more than forty six billion dollars financing that would be needed for him to purchase the company. A few days later, in April twenty, Twitter's board of directors reversed its position. Remember they had previously resisted this acquisition and had administered the poison pill. So they change course and they agree to the original terms of a forty four billion dollar acquisition deal. And Elon

Musk agrees to this. Then Elon Musk goes and sells some of his Testlas stock to apparently helped fund this acquisition. Uh, this was enough to amount to around eight and a half billion dollars worth of stock. That is a jaw dropping amount of money. And you might wonder how that all works out. I mean, you wouldn't be the only one. Some analysts have long said that, you know, Testlas stock

is is drastically overvalued and has been for ages. Like there are a lot of analysts who say that Tesla is valued much, much, much higher than established automotive companies that produce way more vehicles per year than Tesla manages to do, and that, uh, it's just a matter of time before Tesla stock ends up being go undergoing what

would be considered a market correction. And you could argue that that's what's happening right now, because back in April, Teslas stock was trading it more than three hundred dollars per share. Today, as I record this, Tesla stock is trading at around a hundred thirty one dollars a share. That is a huge drop. It's been a bad week because earlier this week it was up to a hundred fifty and now it's down to around a hundred thirty.

So things are not going well for Tesla stock. But that's another story which I was hoping I might be able to touch on a little bit at the end of this episode, but as you will hear, I just don't have the time because Twitter takes up too much of it anyway. So Musk owns a lot of shares of teslent put it lightly, and at the time they were worth a ton of money. So while he sold off a decent chunk to make eight and a half billion, that just represents a part of his ownership of Tesla

and a a part of his fortune. In early May, Musk secured another seven billion dollars from various investors, which included Larry Ellison, the co founder of Oracle, and also a chunk of change dedicated from Finance, the cryptocurrency exchange that I talked about a bit in the Crypto Winter episode I did. This week, The New York Times reported that Musk had met with investors and promised them that by twenty twenty eight, he would quintuple the company's revenue.

He would increase it by five times, is what he said. That would be quite the achievement all by itself, let alone an achievement after you consider the company's revenue right now. So again, spoil or alert. Things are not going well for Twitter on the revenue front, but I am getting ahead of myself again. He also stirred the pot by announcing that he planned to reverse Twitter's ban on Donald Trump, who had received a lifetime ban for violations of Twitter's policies.

So he was, you know, Elon Musk really likes to be ah. I can't say the word on this show, a beep stir. I'll say, we'll just use the word beep. But you probably could figure out what I mean anyway. A couple of leaders at Twitter then left, and the company also announced that it was holding a hiring freeze in anticipation of Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Then we get to mayt So at this point, where about a month out from when Musk initially announced his plan to acquire Twitter.

That's when Musk tweets out that the deal is on whole. Why well, Musk claims it's because he's worried about the number of bots that are on Twitter, or specifically that there were way more bots on Twitter than the company had previously indicated. And now, for some Jonathan commentary, now, I think that at best, Musk's excuse about bots was disingenuous.

One of the things that Musk was complaining about leading up to his announcement of his plan to acquire the company in the first place was his perception that there were too many bots on Twitter, which, you know, seems to indicate that he was aware there was this bot issue that one of his priorities when taking ownership of the company was going to be to reduce the number

or even potentially eliminate bots on the platform. So, in other words, the picture he was presenting was that he viewed bots as already being an issue on the platform before the whole acquisition thing got started, and that one of the reasons he wanted to buy Twitter was that he saw Twitter as being a valuable tool, but it needed to be cleared, it had to be a clean house. But now he's saying, Hey, whoa, there's boats on this platform.

You didn't say anything about bots, which again seems disingenuous at best. Complicating matters is that Musk had waived due diligence when agreeing to buy Twitter. Now, if any of you all out there have ever been in the market to buy a house, you know due diligence is really important. So during this process you might find out that the

house you're looking at has some serious issues. Now, maybe those issues are serious enough to make you rethink purchasing the house and you can back out of the deal and then continue your search elsewhere. But Musk waived that right with Twitter, so that would mean that even if something did pop up, that was a massive problem. He had already agreed to purchase the company, and it's a binding agreement, but Musk seemed to want out, and there were a lot of theories as to why he was

having second thoughts. So one was that the overall economy was starting to have problems and that could potentially threaten the financing for the deal and cost Musk a lot more of his own wealth um and also his wealth was potentially going to take a hit anyway. Because as the stock market declines, well, chances are that the the stocks that Musk owns will be part of that, including stock and things like Tesla. That you know, it's usual that when you have an overall decline in the market,

the various companies will also be in decline. Uh. It's rare that you have like outliers that are doing really well despite the rest of the stock market. So maybe that was part of it. Also, potentially part of it is that Twitter's revenue depends upon add money. Uh primarily, that's like the chief source of revenue for Twitter, and as we know, during economic hardship, companies cut way back on things like advertising budgets, so Twitter would be directly

affected by that. Uh. There were also theories that perhaps some of Tesla's investors were getting worried that Musk was too distracted to handle things that needed to be handled at Tesla. That's a concern that would grow over the last half of this year anyway. Whatever the reason, Musk at the time claimed he was still committed to the deal, but he wanted to hold off on closing the deal until he got more definitive answers about the number of

bots on the platform. On May, some Twitter shareholders would file a class action lawsuit against Musk, arguing that he had engaged in stock manipulation and that his behavior was hurting Twitter investors. And in early June, Musk escalated things by saying he would pull out of the Twitter deal if Twitter could not provide sufficient information about those gosh darned bots, and almost immediately after he announced his intention to pull out of the deal, he tried to pull

out of the deal. At this point, both sides were accusing each other of breaching the agreement in different ways. Musk was saying that Twitter's failure to sufficiently prove that bots were not absolutely infesting the platform amounted to misrepresenting the company's value and that this would be one of the few nullifying terms in the agreement that would let Musk back out of it, and Twitter was saying, no, nothing we have done has invalidated anything, So you're beholden

to seeing this acquisition through. Sorry, you don't want us anymore, but you have to take us because them's the rules. Then we sat on this for about a month. In July, Twitter sued Musk in Delaware in an effort to force him to go through with this acquisition. This was wild, right because you here you had this board of directors who initially resisted Elon Musk's move to acquire the company, then they came around to agreeing to it. All of this was done for the shareholders ever had a chance

to actually vote on the matter. By the way, now you get to a point where the board of directors is suing Elon Musk to force him to go through with a deal that originally the board of directors didn't want in the first place. It was crazy. So even if Musk were to successfully argue that he should be released from the deal, he would be on the hook to pay a billion dollars just to walk away. Yea, Zoe, the steal is getting worse all the time, as Lando

Calrosian would say. Now, both Twitter and Musk made arguments for when the trial to decide this matter should happen. Twitter obviously wanted it as early as possible. Musk's lawyers wanted to delay the trial until the court would arrange a date in October, which was a little later than what Twitter wanted, but way earlier than what Musk's team wanted, and despite Musk's lawyers asking pretty please with sugar on top.

That date was etched in stone. Then we get some more drama when a guy named Peter Zako, Twitter's former head of security, came forward with accusations that Twitter had massive lapses and information security. Meanwhile, Twitter was like, dude, that was your job, That's why we fired you, or words to that effect. You should know. I'm massively paraphrasing

for comedic purposes here. And while it seemed like this was gonna be a big deal, it never turned into the giant bombshell that folks initially thought it would be, and it really didn't have much of an effect on the acquisition drama in general. Then we get up to October.

Despite multiple efforts to push off the court date, things stuck and then Musk suddenly announces on October four that you know what, I Am going to go through with this deal after all, and that it would be at the previously agreed upon price of fifty four dollars and twenty cents per share. Then there were a few more attempts to try and get that price knocked down a bit.

This is the crazy thing about this as well, is that there would be agreed upon terms and then like a day or two later, it was like Elon Musk woked up and said, why did I agree to No, let's see if we can get that knocked down a bit. It did not work. Musk had to go through with the whole process of resecuring financing, and ultimately the deal went through before the matter would actually go to chancery

court in Delaware. That was probably a good thing for Musk because the general feeling in the text space was that he didn't have a legal leg to stand on and he would have been forced to go through the deal anyway, so perhaps moving to acquire it ahead of a mandate would help him save face a little bit. So the deal closed in late October. Musk arrived at

Twitter's headquarters holding a sink. He was carrying a sink into Twitter HQ, and I guess he thought this was a brilliant piece of commentary, but most folks I know just kind of rolled their eyes at it. And immediately we started to see some massive changes. For one thing, Musk fired the top leadership at the company, so Paragua agrival. The CEO was sent packing, as were the chief financial officer, the chief legal officer, and the general counsel for Twitter.

The board of directors was also dissolved. Not unusual. Actually, when a public company then goes private, this sort of thing does happen. Uh, the companies have different corporate structures

if they're public versus private. So while some people, including myself immediately had a reaction of oh my gosh, it really wasn't that unusual, but this would just be the beginning of Twitter getting rid of leadership within the company, and over the next two months we would see massive departures that I imagine have really had a negative impact on the knowledge held at Twitter at this point. Now early on, even this early on, some brands began to

pause advertising spending on Twitter. A major concern was Musk's plans to unbanned very accounts that had been associated with different kinds of abuse and violations of Twitter's former policies, and a lot of companies aren't super keen on being associated with that kind of stuff, so, for example, General Motors chose to suspend ads on Twitter as early as octobery In early November, Twitter began to hold massive layoffs,

essentially cutting the head count in half. So Twitter went from seven thousand, five hundred employees to somewhere around three thousand, seven hundred range. Among the cuts appeared to be the entire public relations team within Twitter. It was not the only department to be seriously depleted in the wake of layoffs,

and we were just getting started. Must claim that the layoffs were necessary as Twitter was losing quote over four million dollars a day end quote and all that financingment that Twitter was also on the hook for paying off massive loan interest, like a billion dollars a year type stuff,

and there were other problems as well. The economic downturn obviously meant that companies were starting to scale back on advertising budgets already anyway, and since Twitter gets most of its revenue from advertising and only a small amount from stuff like subscription services, that was bad news and that would only get worse. Okay, before we dive into the

even worse part, let's take another quick break. Okay, November eight, Man, it's hard to believe that that's like a month and a half ago, but November eight, Elon Must sold off more Tesla stock, nearly four billion dollars worth of it, and that would mean that at that point, over the course of two Must would have sold off around thirty six billion dollars worth of Tesla stock. That is impossible for me to imagine. It's way too much money for

me to even get my mind wrapped around it. Moreover, it gave Tesla shareholders more reasons to be worried, because whenever a leader sells off some of their own stock, it sometimes sends a message to investors that maybe things are not going as well as they could be. So then we get to November nine, Twitter pushed out a

new version of its subscription service, Twitter Blue. Now, this was one of those things that Elon Musk was really hoping would help counter balance the issues with advertising revenue, that maybe Twitter could make more money with subscription services, and the service gives users access to features that your average Twitter user doesn't have access to, like an edit tweet option, which is something that Twitter users had been

asking about for years. But this new version of Twitter Blue gave users something even more coveted, the legendary verification tick, the little check mark that serves as a sort of status symbol on Twitter. Now, to be clear, the original intent for that check mark was to designate accounts as being legitimate, and it was meant for accounts that are

claiming to represent notable figures or organizations. So the idea was, if you jump on Twitter and you see an account that's claiming to represent say Neil Gaiman, the author, and you see that there's a check mark next to that handle name, well then you know that Twitter had verified that account and that, in fact, is Neil Gaiman behind

that account, It's not just someone posing as the author. Likewise, if you jumped on Twitter you saw an account that claimed to belong to a celebrity, but there was no check mark, you would know to be skeptical about that account really belonging to that particular celebrity. Uh. And you know it was all sorts of notoriety that could get you a check mark. I had a check mark. I still do have a check mark on Twitter. Um. But

it's not like I'm super notable. It's just that I remember applying for that when I was hosting the Forward Thinking Video series, and that was a big series that was sponsored by Toyota. And as such, Twitter said, you know what, this, this amounts to enough for us to verify that you are in fact Jonathan Strickland, and they did,

and I got the little check mark. But now Twitter had check marks for sale at eight dollars a month a pop. And so, in a move that I think anyone besides Elon Musk could have predicted, people started creating spoof accounts claiming to represent celebrities, politicians, brands, and then they were paying to get that verification check. Then they started posting all sorts of nonsense and mischief. There were

floods of impersonation accounts. Twitter then rolled out a quick fix, throwing out an official tag to designate the difference between a verified account and one that just had the little check mark on it. But he here's an interesting fact that again I think everyone besides Elon Musk already knew.

If you give people the chance to impersonate others, complete with a check mark that makes them look like the real thing, and that Twitter has authorized this, well, then brands are suddenly going to be way less interested in

advertising on your platform. I mean, if someone could pose as I don't know, Nintendo America and then post stuff like a picture of Mario flipping off everybody, and they have a little check mark next to their account name, that's likely to discourage the real Nintendo from spending money on that platform, So Musk's pushed to transform Twitter was really pushing it further away from being able to make money.

At this point, the FTC announced that it was going to look into Twitter, with quote deep concern in the quote, suggesting that the US government was worried that maybe things weren't going so well all over there. I don't know what gave him that impression. Also, as this was going on, Musk was communicating to Twitter employees in his first actual meetings with them, and in these meetings he cheerfully informed employees that they would need to start putting in eighty

hour work weeks. I mean, it's almost like if you cut half your staff, you double the work for everybody else. He also wanted everyone back in the office full time, which would reverse Twitter's remote work policy. Twitter had made this remote work policy and even indicated that this was going to be a permanent thing moving forward, back before Musk took over the company. So this was a huge blow to employees. It was one of the removal of one of the big benefits that they had been enjoying,

So that was ugly. Then word got out that several more leaders at Twitter, including folks in charge of ensuring user privacy and safety had resigned uh. In fact, the head of trust and safety, a guy named Yoel Roth, had one day earlier been part of an official Q and A session within Twitter spaces, then the next day handed in his resignation and left the company. On November six,

Musk appeared at a trial in Delaware Chancery Court. This one had to do not with Twitter, but with his compensation package at Tesla, valued at fifty five billion dollars. During that trial, Musk claimed he didn't want to be CEO of either Tesla or Twitter, and then his plan was to get Twitter to a stable place and then

find a successor to serve as CEO. However, he has said similar things about Tesla for quite some time now, and has remained CEO of Tesla without there being much evidence that he seriously considered any kind of succession plan. Also on November six, Musk sent out a message to the remaining employees at Twitter telling them they needed to

kind of sign almost like a loyalty oath. They had to sign a form that would say they were willing to work even harder at the very best of their ability and go into what he was calling hardcore mode or otherwise. They needed to hand in their resignation and then receive a severance package, and he tells them that their response will be due by the end of the next day, and a whole bunch of folks a Twitter chose to go the severance route. The reports were kind

of kind of conflicting at first. There were something that were saying it was, you know, dozens, some hundreds, some as many as a thousand, and it's hard to get an accurate headcount of Twitter staff at this point, perhaps because maybe the folks who would have had the best idea of how many people were working for the company have already left the company. Generally, the thought is that Twitter is down to somewhere around two thousand, three hundred staff.

Remember they started out at seven thousand, five hundred. They might have fewer than that, or there might be more. We just don't know. Apparently some of the people who left were people who were in charge of really important

stuff like payroll, which is worrying. Musk had also fired more employees who had shown any sort of disagreement with him, including an engineer who contradicted Musk's explanation for how Twitter worked on a technical level, and the engineer said that he was just explained that Musk's own explanation was incorrect, and he got fired for his trouble. He wasn't the

only one. Several other Twitter employees who expressed concern about Musk's leadership or otherwise criticized him found themselves out of a job, and Twitter employees began frantically scrubbing slack messages and emails of evidence that they had perhaps shown some concern about Elon Musk's leadership. On November, Twitter's office in

Brussels closed. This is notable because that office was instrumental in making sure Twitter was in compliance with EU regulations, and so it's absence presents a danger that Twitter could go astray with regard to e use rules and regulations, and if that happens, then the company can start racking up some serious fines as a result, which I don't know if you know this, the company can't really afford

right now. In fact, speaking of afford, other news stories broke that Twitter stopped paying its rent on its office space, you know, the same office space that Elon Musk was requiring people to go back to, to the point where some folks had even had beds put in and their office area so that they could catch some sleep there while putting in those hardcore office hours. So yeah, there's been a lot of bad stories coming out about, you know, Twitter just kind of not paying vendors because that seems

like that's legit. There's also rumors that Twitter executives were in conversations about not paying severance packages and that they would just take on the legal fees that would come as a result of lawsuits brought against the company rather than paying out the severance packages if in fact they determined that the legal fees would be lower. So yeah, kind of shady stuff. Also around this time, Musk had

a public tiff with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Musk even took to Twitter to reveal that Apple had this super secret iOS tax that app developers have to pay, and it's this one where Apple takes a percentage of every transaction made within an app on iOS, something that no one except you know, everybody knew about already. I mean, if you've been listening to tech stuff, you know about

this because I talk about it a lot. Apple's actually been in trouble for this policy around the world, including here in the United States, but apparently it was news to Elon Musk and he was very unhappy about it. Musk and Cook were eventually able to patch things up,

and the tempest mostly remained within the teapot. Then we got the so called Twitter files, which Musk treated as though they would be true bombshells, and I guess in some ways they were, because Busk shared some screenshots that ended up revealing private email addresses for certain people, and those certain people started getting things like death threats, so it was a bombshell for those people in particular. The revelations themselves ended up not being nearly as dramatic as

Musk had indicated. They were mostly just internal discussions within Twitter on how to handle content moderation. He also seemed at one point to be blaming the Biden administration for decisions that were made in saying that, you know, the government was trying to censor companies messaging in case you're not aware, the Biden administration wasn't in power in twenty that was during Trump's time in office, but yeah, whatever.

Then Twitter suspended its Content Moderation Council, which came after several members of that council had resigned. They were complaining that Musk and his team were not listening to the council at all. They were putting Twitter the company in danger, they were putting users in danger, they were endangering the careers of all the employees. And the response from Twitter was just to dissolve the council entirely, kind of like how Emperor Palpatine ends up dissolving the Senate and the

prequels of the Star Wars movies. Anyway, then Musk sold off some more shares of Tesla as Tesla's stock price was in decline, so that brought up the total amount of shares that he had sold this year too close to forty billion dollars worth of Tesla stock. He also lost the title of richest man in the world around this time. I have a feeling he's still going to be able to make ends meet, so don't worry too

much about him. On December six teenh just a few days ago now, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists. Musk was accusing these journalists of sharing his real time location, which he called quote basically assassination coordinates end quote. Some of them were involved in a Twitter spaces conversation. Not all of them had actually reported on Musk's location at any given time, but they got lumped in and were bumped. And we're talking like big name journalists, folks who worked

for really important, uh news outlets. I was not bumped off Twitter because I'm not important. But I know that already, and I know you know that already. It's okay, I'm cool with it. But pushing out the press rarely has a positive outcome, and Musk became the center of both criticism and ridicule for doing this. Uh. Some of those decisions would be reversed fairly quickly. Some of them would

kind of stand. He also, upon tweeting that he was at the World Cup, was called out for broadcasting his own quote unquote assassination coordinates, but he didn't get banned from Twitter for doing it. Now we're almost at the end.

Musk then starts looking for some new investors, reportedly, and he's looking to keep Twitter going and essentially was asking for the same amount of money that he paid for the company before, you know, before he made all these changes that have drastically affected the value of the company negatively. At this stage, some news outlets report that add revenue at Twitter is down as much as ninety per cent.

Then Twitter launches a new policy that if you promote other social media platforms, including ones like Mastodon, which folks were starting to to navigate to to migrate to, those tweets can be removed. They can be prevented, like if you were to put in a link, you might get a message saying the tweet you're trying to send violate Twitter policies, so we're not going allow it. Some accounts

got banned for doing this kind of stuff. Twitter's official account tweeted, quote, we recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter. End quote. Which, um, okay, I guess that

freedom of speech thing has real tight limitations. Again, I said early on, Elon Musk was talking at the beginning of this year like freedom of speech is a very simple concept and it's very easy to do, and that if he were in charge, it would be a different story.

And then he is in charge, and freedom of speech has an even narrower definition now because anything that Elon doesn't like is not free to be posted on Twitter, so people immediately pull up an old tweet from Elon Musk, where essentially he was saying that if a place has to put up a wall to try and prevent people from escaping, it a sign that it's the bad place, because there's always a tweet, right, There's always a tweet that will show that someone's actions are hypocritical compared to

what they had previously claimed to believe in. Then Musk posts a poll on Twitter, again something he loves to do, and he asks should I step down as head of Twitter? More than fifty of the respondents voted yes, and must kind of went quiet for a little bit, like he didn't immediately address the results of that poll, which left people wondering what was going on now. On the one hand, Musk had already said in court that his intent was

to step down as Twitter CEO at some point. But on the other hand, this had to be a big blow to his ego. I'm sure he was expecting well, not sure, but maybe he was expecting a huge number to say yes, not no. Then one of his followers argued, then maybe only the people who paid for Twitter Blue subscriptions should be allowed to vote in such polls because they have quote unquote skin in the game, and Ellen apparently or seems to agree with that. He actually said, like,

that's that sounds good. Maybe we're going to change the way polls work in the future, suggesting that maybe there would be a big do over and he wouldn't pay attention to it. But then more recently, Musk has said he will step down as Twitter CEO as soon as he finds someone quote unquote foolish enough to take over Twitter. Now, again, that kind of wording does not raise much confidence. It doesn't sound like Elon Musk is really trying that hard.

If he's essentially saying whomever takes over this company after me is an idiot, that that's not a real big selling feature. Right. Also, despite having earlier said that there were no plans to hold further layoffs at the company, last night Wednesday, so that would be December twenty one, he held more layoffs at the company. Reportedly, the public

policy team is now gone. And again this is bad because this is the team that helps make sure that Twitter is in compliance with say regulations in the United States. So now it sounds like various teams that are are meant to keep Twitter in line so that it doesn't face massive regulation and finds and things of that nature. Those are all gone, so Twitters in a particularly vulnerable spot right now. There are a lot of questions about

what will come next for Twitter. I am not going to make any predictions because at this point, I just don't know. It has been a chaotic year for Twitter. Uh. I'm sure I will cover some more stuff in a in a future episode about some of the other chaos that's been going on, specifically like a tesla. But for now, we're going to sign off because we're coming up on fifty minutes and I don't want to go over that amount.

So I hope you are all well. We'll be back next week after Monday, because Monday our office will be taking a holiday, so I'll be running a rerun on Monday. But after Monday, we'll have a few more episodes about how twenty two unfolded, and then we'll look forward to I hope you're all well. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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