After confirming that he’s comping verification for LeBron, Stephen King, and William Shatner, Musk is now offering to pay for Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham’s blue check as well. Graham isn’t taking him up on the offer.
Turns out you can’t actually buy status, even if you can technically afford it.
From my latest Command Line newsletter that just went out to subscribers: the majority of the roughly 50-person engineering team working on combating misinformation across Facebook and Instagram was axed this week.
Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells me the remaining team is being merged with other trust and safety teams, though I’ve seen internal correspondence from employees questioning how the work will continue without the engineering support they had before. “We remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community,” Arnold said in an emailed statement.
Update April 21st, 10:55AM ET: Clarified that the majority of the misinformation engineering team was let go and added that some employees have questioned internally how the work will continue.
[The Verge]
David Marcus left Facebook in 2021 after the company failed to launch the cryptocurrency project he oversaw. Now he’s back with a startup called Lightspark that wants to make it easy for developers to facilitate payments through the Lighting Network, a layer-two protocol for enabling fast transactions with fractions of Bitcoins.
It’s interesting to see someone of Marcus’s stature (he was the president of PayPal before joining Facebook) launching a crypto company right now, especially one that is focused exclusively on Bitcoin. I’ll have more from my interview with him in Thursday’s edition of Command Line —you can subscribe at the link below to get it in your inbox — and a future episode of Decoder.
[The Verge]
