Tag: Twitter CEO

Musk dismisses Twitter employee question on layoffs with Office Space clip

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On Monday evening, one such employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, a prominent designer at the company, took to Twitter to complain that the company had yet to confirm that he’d been laid off, nine days after he was locked out of his work computer.

Twitter’s CEO responded by asking Haraldur what he did at Twitter. Musk even tweeted that he would approve Haraldur breaching confidentiality to share what he did.

But after Haraldur shared some of his responsibilities at Twitter, Musk responded with a clip from the movie “Office Space,” where two consultants challenge an employee with a question: “What would you say you do here?”

On Feb. 26, Haraldur was reported to be one of the 200 employees laid off by the social media company in late February. Haraldur, who joined Twitter in 2021, even posted a goodbye tweet the same day.

Yet, according to his tweets, Haraldur never got official confirmation that he was “no longer employed” at the company until after his Twitter conversation with Musk.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The social media company no longer has a communications department.

Acqui-hire

Haraldur joined Twitter in 2021 after selling his design agency Ueno to the social media company. The sale was presented as an “acqui-hire,” or when a company is bought for its talent, rather than other parts of its business operations.

According to Haraldur’s personal website, he led an “innovation team” at Twitter that helped to spearhead Twitter Communities as well as the service’s “edit button.”

Now, about that edit button @jack

— Halli (@iamharaldur) January 6, 2021

Haraldur offered more details of his work in his conversation with Musk on Monday, which included shifting “the company away from focusing on power users and on to younger users (because our user base is aging).”

Musk responded by casting doubt on Haraldur’s work, tweeting: “Pics or it didn’t happen.”

Twitter layoffs

Other Twitter acquisitions have fared poorly after Musk bought the company. Twitter laid off Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of Revue, a newsletter service that Twitter acquired in 2021, as part of its job cuts on Feb. 26.

“Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over,” de Kujiper tweeted. Twitter shut down Revue last year.

Both Haraldur and de Kujiper were on a “do not fire” list, due to the expenses of laying them off, reported Platformer, a newsletter run by technology journalists Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton. (On Monday, Haraldur asked on Twitter whether the company “will pay me what they owe me per my contract.”)

Continual layoffs may be taking a toll on Twitter, which has experienced frequent glitches in recent weeks.

On Monday, Twitter suffered another outage, as users complained that they were unable to share images or access links. Platformer reported that the outage was due to Twitter shutting down free access to the company’s API.

Platformer reports that just one site reliability engineer was put on the project, who made a “bad configuration change” that broke both Twitter’s platform and many of its internal tools, citing a current employee at the company.

“A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reasons,” Musk tweeted on Monday. “Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

Learn how to navigate and strengthen trust in your business with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter examining what leaders need to succeed. Sign up here.

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Nicholas Gordon

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March 7, 2023
Elon Musk reportedly ordered Twitter engineers to put his tweets at the top of everyone’s feed

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On Tuesday, Twitter users wondered why their timelines were displaying so many tweets from Elon Musk. Now, a new report provides a reason: Elon Musk was upset that his tweet about the Super Bowl got fewer views than one from U.S. President Joe Biden.

The Twitter CEO flew his private jet from the Super Bowl in Phoenix to the Bay Area Sunday night to complain about his tweet’s relatively low engagement, reports Platformer, a newsletter from technology journalists Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton. After Musk ordered his employees to fix the problem, Twitter engineers let Musk’s tweets bypass the platform’s algorithms for determining the best content for users, landing Musk’s posts atop users’ feeds.

Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl—in which the president cheered for the Philadelphia Eagles due to his wife’s ties to the city—currently has 29 million views. Elon Musk deleted his tweet supporting the Eagles after they lost, but the tweet received approximately 9 million views, according to Platformer.

On Tuesday, users on Twitter reported seeing more tweets from Musk on the platform’s “For You” tab, which displays tweets to users according to their interests, including from accounts they don’t follow. (The platform’s “Following” tab only shows tweets, in reverse chronological order, from accounts the user follows).

The flood of Musk tweets was a deliberate consequence of changes to Twitter’s algorithm, Platformer reports. The company ordered 80 engineers to work on boosting Musk’s engagement; that team allowed the CEO’s tweets to skirt safeguards that prevent one user’s tweets from dominating someone’s entire feed.

(Musk first joked about his tweets overwhelming people’s accounts, then said Twitter will make “adjustments” to its systems.)

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company no longer has a communications department to handle media inquiries.

Last Thursday, Platformer reported that Musk is increasingly concerned about his tweets’ low engagement. At a meeting to discuss reasons why, one of the company’s top engineers tried to explain that interest in Musk was declining in general, using a chart from Google Trends tracking searches for “Elon Musk” as evidence.

Musk reportedly fired the engineer on the spot.

Musk’s deputies then told engineers that they’d be fired if they didn’t solve the problem of Musk’s slumping engagement, acoording to Platformer.

Elon Musk has one of the platform’s most followed accounts, with 128 million followers. By comparison, Biden’s official Twitter account has 29.5 million followers.

The U.S. president has long irritated Musk, who believes the White House downplays Tesla’s record in manufacturing electric vehicles in favor of legacy automakers like GM.

Learn how to navigate and strengthen trust in your business with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter examining what leaders need to succeed. Sign up here.

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Nicholas Gordon

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February 14, 2023
‘There must be a method to his madness’: Harsh Goenka defends Elon Musk, says give him some time

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RPG Group Chairman Harsh Goenka is a frequent Twitter user who shares interesting posts with his 1.7 million followers. His Twitter feed has content for users of all ages, from motivational to fascinating to million-dollar life lessons.

Now, Goenka has something to say about the hullabaloo over a flurry of decisions by Musk. He said that people are underestimating the genius of Elon Musk.

Goenka said Musk was ahead of his time with his other businesses, including Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company, and that there must be “a method to his madness.”

“We are underestimating the genius of Elon Musk. There must be a method to his madness. Whether it was Tesla, SpaceX or Boring co, he was ahead of his times. He surely has a game plan with #Twitter which we just can’t comprehend. Let’s give him time before we predict its death,” He said.

Goenka had previously written a post titled “Merits of Working Hard” before sharing an old video of Elon Musk.

Musk revealed in the video that he and his brother had to rent a small office and sleep on a couch when they started their first business. He continued by saying that they took showers at the Young Men’s Christian Association and worked nonstop to establish their business. Musk also recommended that people work nonstop, especially if they were just starting a business.

According to reports, the CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX gave their speech during the undergraduate ceremony at the USC Marshall School of Business in 2014.

Social media users gave mixed reactions to the post. A user wrote. “While I too am optimistic that Twitter will survive and thrive, what I am not sure of is his intent. What color and form will @Twitter take and what will be its stated editorial policy. Agree, I guess one will have to wait and see. @elonmusk.”
Another Twitter user wrote, “Sir, he is a businessman, I am sure you have seen numerous decks. What you are presented is not exactly what you end up buying. It’s a huge buyout, it will settle. He’s already got his eyeball space.”

“Even Alexander failed at last. Hard work brings success, success brings ego, and ego brings failure. Elon at the third stage now,” a user tweeted.

Ever since Musk took control of Twitter, he has been in the spotlight. Musk announced a number of layoffs, including those of the top executives, shortly after assuming control of the company. He then declared that a subscription fee would be charged for the blue tick verification.

The rollout of the feature had to be temporarily paused last week due to a number of problems. After the blue tick was made available for subscription, many phony accounts that assumed the identities of well-known people were successful in obtaining a blue tick. To address these problems, Twitter was forced to pause the feature.

Also Read: Don’t be swayed by Elon Musk: Ashneer Grover’s word of advice on mass layoffs

Also Read: Elon Musk plans to fire more employees at Twitter in second round of layoffs: Report

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November 20, 2022
When Sriram Krishnan, the techie helping Elon Musk revamp Twitter, talked tech with AR Rahman

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After firing CEO Parag Agarwal and his core team, Elon Musk’s choice of yet another Indian-origin engineer to help him revamp the microblogging site, Sriram Krishnan, has an interesting connection with Academy Award winning Indian musician AR Rahman – When Krishnan and his wife talked tech with the Mozart of Madras.

Krishnan, who invests in crypto/web3 ventures as a General Partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), co-hosts a podcast on product and technologies called Aarthi and Sriram’s Good Time Show along with San Francisco-based entrepreneur and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy since January 2021.

The two, considered a Silicon Valley power couple, quizzed Rahman in an hour-long interview on August 4 mainly about his musical journey but also about how he uses technology in his music, Artificial Intelligence and on Indians building technology companies.

To a question on how he applies AI in music, the music maestro said: “If you take mixing, there are certain frequencies we don’t hear. AI helps identify which frequencies are disturbing, what is lacking in a mix, so we can get all that stuff. Some of the organic stuff is really cool. And sorting of samples. It does all those things which took ages to compile. There are many uses of it. Maybe one or two compositions may come out of AI, but any stuff that is cohesive needs to come from a human, so far. That’s a job which can’t be taken away hopefully.”

Rahman spoke about a doing a course in MIT on imaging and AI when he babysitting his kids during a summer course at Berkeley. “I am a synthesiser and work with algorithm and operators and all this stuff for the past 35 years now. So, it’s just a one-step away thing, not a new thing and I have been dealing with microprocessors, synthesizers and computers and samplers,” he told Krishnan and Aarthi.

The show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube has also had co-founder Marc Andrreessen of Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Oculus founder Palmer Lucky, Indian comedian Tanmay Bhat, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck as guests.

In the early part of 2021. Krishnan and his wife launched a Clubhouse talk show that focused on organic conversations on start-ups, venture capitalism and cryptocurrencies. The show featured prominent guests like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Hawk, Diane von Furstenberg, Kanye West, and social media influencer MrBeast. The Good Time Show moved to YouTube from Clubhouse in 2022.

An alumnus of SRM Engineering College in Chennai’s Anna University, Krishnan has held jobs at Snap and Twitter before. On October 31, he tweeted:
“Now that the word is out: I’m helping out @elonmusk with Twitter temporarily with some other great people. I (and a16z) believe this is a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.

PS. Still very much in my day job at @a16zcrypto. If you’re a crypto founder, you know how to find me,” he said in a Twitter thread on Monday.

Krishnan started working with Microsoft in 2007 as a program manager for Visual Studio. He later moved to Facebook where he helped building the Facebook Audience Network, a competitive platform to Google’s ad technologies. He also worked with Snapchat where he built the social media platform’s ad tech platform shortly before the company’s IPO.

After serving at some of the top Silicon Valley companies, Krishnan moved to Twitter where he served as senior director of product and contributed to the core user experience and launching a redesigned home page and events experience.

Also Read: ‘Make Sriram Krishnan Twitter CEO and launch Twitcoin’: Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal to Elon Musk

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November 1, 2022
‘Make Sriram Krishnan Twitter CEO and launch Twitcoin’: Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal to Elon Musk

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While praising the development, Anupam Mittal, a judge on Shark Tank India and founder of Shadi.com, offered some advice to the tech billionaire a day after venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan disclosed that he is assisting Elon Musk with Twitter.

He tweeted, “Good call, Elon Musk, on bringing another Indian in. Now quickly make Sriram Krishnan CEO and launch a Twitcoin.”

With “Twitcoin,” Anupam Mittal was hinting at a new cryptocurrency modelled after Bitcoin and Dogecoin. When a Twitter user asked if he would invest in “Twitcoin”, Mittal replied: “Sure. Would be fun.”

Elon Musk and Sriram Krishnan are both interested in cryptocurrency. While Musk favours Dogecoin and has caused its price to rise on several occasions with a tweet, Krishnan appears to prefer Ethereum.

Sriram Krishnan, who is of Indian origin, is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm that invests in crypto and web3 start-ups. On October 31, he tweeted that he was assisting Musk with Twitter “temporarily” while continuing with his day job at a16z.

His tweet read, “I ( and a16z) believe this is a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.”

Sriram Krishnan had previously worked with Meta (previously Facebook), Snap, and Microsoft.

Also Read: Elon Musk inside Twitter: In just 4 days, Twitter has already changed in a big way

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November 1, 2022
‘Not the CEO you are looking for’: Banker changes his LinkedIn bio after search for Parag Agrawal shoots

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Around 11 months after being appointed as Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal was fired after tech billionaire Elon Musk completed his acquisition of the social media platform on October 27.

Now a LinkedIn user named Parag Agrawal who is a banker, has claimed that after the ouster of the Twitter CEO, his profile views on the professional network have shot up by 36 per cent. To help people find the right Parag, he has changed his LinkedIn bio to read “Not the CEO you are looking for.”

He wrote on LinkedIn, “After the Twitter CEO was fired, my profile views have shot up by 36 per cent. So to help folks with finding the right Parag, I have changed my profile page headline.”

Despite the fanfare surrounding Agrawal’s appointment as Twitter’s CEO and the support of many Indians, his brief tenure was chaotic and difficult as Twitter dealt with issues related to free speech, regulations, content moderation, and tense relations with governments.

Agrawal’s tenure came to an end when the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was formally closed. According to reports, he was followed by several top executives, including Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust, and safety.

As of now, Twitter does not have an official CEO, though Musk may serve as an interim replacement. He announced earlier today that the company will form a new content moderation council. The current moderation policy will remain in place until it is replaced. It means that banned members such as former US President Donald Trump will not be returning anytime soon. Simultaneously, he stated that Twitter expects to reverse all bans and suspensions imposed “for minor and dubious reasons.”

Also Read: Fired by Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde set to get around Rs 1000 crore

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October 30, 2022