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Elon Musk has taken over twitter; I wrote a short piece on LinkedIn on the deal, its funding, and the technology. and a pointer article to it last week. Since then some, including the FT (£) have commented on its funding, not the least the bank loans and thus collateral required and the personal financial jeopardy for both parties. The linkedin article has some interesting links commenting on the deal, including those by Fr. Robert Ballecer and Dave Troy. I recently found out that Linette Lopez of Business Insider has been following Musk and Twitter for months and is particularly concerned about how he got the money to make the deal.
The first thing Musk did was fire senior managers but the second is to fire half the work force. Advertisers are having second thoughts, based on wild comments made by Musk including comments made at a meeting called to reassure them. It is not helped by the fact that many of the job cuts are aimed at content moderation teams and that programmers being let go are those who released the least lines of code; as many have commented, this is unlikely to end well. Another threat to a platform like twitter is that of regulatory intervention; in the UK, the Online Safety Bill is going through Parliament and the EU is highly likely to legislate on fake information and cyberbullying. Since politicians are so often the targets of such bad behaviour, there’s little support for Musk’s and…
