Subscribers to Command Line just got highlights from an interview I did yesterday with Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s co-president who oversees all of product and engineering. We talk about the controversial redesign that introduces a TikTok-like feed to Spotify and why it’s happening, plus why Spotify reorg’d earlier this year.
The full conversation is coming out on Decoder next week.
[The Verge]
He gave a high-level update on the state of the company’s financial health during an interview at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley.
Twitter is currently expecting to make $3 billion in revenue this year and is spending $1.5 billion annually in addition to the $1.5 billion in debt payments it owes, according to Musk. For comparison, Twitter was on track to report about $5 billion in revenue for 2022 before Musk bought it. Its costs were $2.8 billion during just the first half of last year, which implies that he has slashed spend by more than 70 percent.
Musk claimed Twitter now has 250 million daily users and 500 million monthly users, though it’s unclear how those metrics are calculated. The last time Twitter reported user numbers as a public company it said there were 237.8 million daily users during the second quarter of 2022.
[The Verge]
From the new edition of my Command Line newsletter that just hit inboxes for paid subscribers:
Exemplifying the madness is what happened to VP Chris Riedy, the company’s most senior face left for the advertiser community. I’m told he was initially on the laid off list — Musk apparently thinks there are still too many managers in sales — and had his access to internal systems shut off, and then somehow convinced Musk not to give him the boot. It’s unclear what exactly he’s doing now, and his reports managing sales for key markets are reporting to Musk directly.
Also, I have more details on Amazon’s brewing work from home battle and Meta’s big all hands from earlier this week.
[The Verge]
During an internal presentation, Meta execs laid out plans for three new Quest headsets, AR glasses, and a ‘neural interface’ smartwatch.
It’s at least the fourth round of cuts since Musk said on November 21st that layoffs were over.
Affected employees started receiving notices by email on Saturday. I’m hearing that this round is hitting a bunch of departments, including ads and infrastructure engineering, and Twitter likely has fewer than 2,000 employees now. It had about 7,500 when Musk took over.
[The Verge]
