Elon Musk has said that Twitter is reaching all time highs in “device user seconds usage,” and that almost all the advertisers who left have “either come back or they said they will come back.”
This week he started paying out big bucks to a “select” group of posters, promoting the idea that subscribing to Twitter Blue can help them make money on Twitter by splitting ad revenue.
Also Elon Musk:
Enjoyed this Bloomberg story about the possibility that we are all old and tired, sick of seeing each other’s bad posts, and hoping to touch grass:
In 2022, according to GWI’s latest report, daily time spent [online] fell by 13 minutes. It’s now six hours and 43 minutes a day, slightly lower than it was in 2017. The drop was the biggest since the company started tracking the topic and suggested, as GWI’s report put it, “that we’ve reached a kind of internet saturation point.”
I guess I’m not the only one who’s been seasoning their cast iron!
Perhaps reacting to Threads’ 100 million user milestone, Elon Musk tweeted today that “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime... may hit an all-time record this week.” He noted that stat, “as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game.”
Anyway, here’s a probably-unrelated video.
That’s not something I thought I’d be typing today, but what else is new? Anas Haqqani, a Taliban leader, tweeted his support of Twitter, saying other competitors can’t replace it (via Vice Motherboard).
He lauds its “freedom of speech,” calling Meta “intolerant.”
Vice quotes Aram Shabanian, an OSINT manager for nonpartisan think tank New Lines Institute, who is surprised the Taliban endorses Twitter:
“Zuckerberg is clearly the Mullah Omar of this situation,” Shabanian said, referring to the founder of the Taliban and previous ruler of Afghanistan. “You may not like him, but at least you know what you’re getting...”
“Unlike going with Musk, who represents a lawless, profit-driven society. Musk is all balls, no shaft, as the ancient Armenian proverb goes.”
Here’s WIlliam Cohan on Musk’s various new legal stuff, including the nastygram Alex Spiro sent to Mark Zuckerberg:
I think there is only one person in the world who could make Zuckerberg appear sympathetic and we have found him in Elon Musk. Suing the company that may or may not have hired the employees he fired, many of whom he stiffed of their severance from Twitter? That takes an extraordinary level of hubris and a belief that the rules just do not apply to him.
As I have noted before, one service Musk provides is demonstrating exactly how much the rules truly don’t apply to him. Anyway I personally would not sue a pack of lawyers that already handed me my ass once, but I am not Musk.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a graph to both Threads and Twitter today (Cloudflare’s communications VP Daniella Vallurupalli confirmed it was him) showing what he says is Twitter’s DNS ranking from January to now.
It’s, uh, not a great story!
Twitter alternative Threads, meanwhile, has been growing explosively — it’s less than three million from the 100 million user mark. It debuted on Wednesday.
This time, by suing Levine’s old law firm while Levine is on vacation without a laptop. I will update the story when Levine’s emergency newsletter drops.
Elon is suing the law firm Twitter hired to force him into buying the company for “unjust enrichment,” and the complaint contains this email from former board member Martha Fox to former Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett upon receiving the $90m legal services bill for approval just before the Elon deal closed. $84m of the money was wired moments before Elon fired the former executive team. Which, given Elon’s history paying bills… smart!
