He took control of the company last night and booted top execs. But Musk has yet to address Twitter’s wider employee base as its new owner. Employees entering Twitter’s main San Francisco HQ this morning have noticed one change already, though: all new, more serious-looking security guards.
I’m told Twitter CMO Leslie Berland just sent employees an internal memo saying that their soon-to-be new boss, Elon Musk, is in the company’s San Francisco headquarters this week and that they will “hear from him directly on Friday.” Minutes later, Musk himself tweeted a video of him entering the building carrying a literal kitchen sink. He also changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit.”
Friday is the deadline for Musk to close his deal to buy Twitter and take it private. He has told investors he plans to cut 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees once he owns it.
Snap just reported its earnings for the third quarter and the numbers are mostly in line with what Wall Street was expecting. Daily users reached 363 million, a 19 percent increase that is much better than growth rates for Facebook and Twitter. Revenue only grew 6 percent to $1.13 billion and Snap remains unprofitable.
Snap invented the Stories format but now it’s saying that users are engaging less with their friends’ Stories, which is a problem for its business since ads are placed between Stories. The company laid off 20 percent of its employees recently in an attempt to cut costs and get to profitability faster.
Amin Zoufonoun, the executive who led Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, is leaving the company now called Meta after 12 years. In a post on his Facebook page, Zoufonoun says he wants to “take a break for a bit.”
Aside from Facebook itself, Meta has grown mostly through the acquisitions Zoufonoun oversaw. But now Meta seems unable to buy anything. It was recently forced to unwind its acquisition of Giphy by regulators. The FTC is also suing to block its deal for the VR fitness app Supernatural.
That was the message from Shou Chew, who runs TikTok for its Chinese parent company ByteDance, at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco I’m attending.
During a rare public conversation today with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Chew said he’s focused on building “technical solutions” to concerns like what user data TikTok does or doesn’t share with China:
We realize that we are a new and young company. The only way that we’re going to build trust in this country and all over the world is to be very consistent with our actions over a long period of time.
But it sure sounds salacious! A court filing unearthed by Gizmodo suggests that two of Meta’s senior executives, including its top policy leader Nick Clegg, accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for blacklisting rival adult sites to OnlyFans. Both companies are denying the allegations, which don’t make much sense to begin with. Still, never a dull moment with Meta!
