This is a big personnel move: Taylor was promoted to co-CEO last year, and was widely seen as Marc Benioff’s likely successor. (Taylor’s also now the second heir apparent to leave before Benioff. Real Bob Iger vibes over here.)
Taylor said he’s planning to “return to my entrepreneurial roots,” but the guy might also need a break: he was also Twitter’s board chair before Elon Musk acquired it.
That’s the central strangeness of Avatar, and this story does a good job of explaining what happened. It’s a story about movies, but even more about how franchises and entertainment conglomerates have changed the way movies — and culture — get made. And about the bar The Way of Water has to clear to actually matter.
[The New York Times]
After Semafor reported that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried owned a stake in Musk’s Twitter, Musk has been loudly denying that SBF is actually an investor.
Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here. But here’s one theory that makes sense to me: that the FTX balance sheet including Twitter shares was either outdated, or like so many other things about FTX, straight-up inaccurate.
We’ve known that SBF, the former billionaire and former FTX CEO, had come up as a possible partner in Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Musk has since distanced himself from SBF, but according to Semafor, Musk also took his money:
He texted Bankman-Fried just after midnight and invited him to roll the $100 million stake he had owned for a few months into a privately held Twitter.
That $100 million was also reportedly part of SBF’s effort to buy Twitter himself. Which would be the only alternative version of the Twitter story more wild than the real one.
[www.semafor.com]
The FIFA app crashed in Qatar today, ESPN reported, and thousands of fans couldn’t access their tickets or get into games. They had to resort to printing out tickets, like our ancestors once did.
First Taylor Swift, now this? Ticketing is either way harder than it seems, or in serious need of some disruption. (I have a theory on which one it is.)
He talked a lot about betting on distribution vs. content, not giving a crap about the metaverse, and “a world where technology was going to expand the purview of the storyteller.” He also said he was happy being retired, which, whoops! Now, Iger’s back as Disney CEO to execute on his vision for the next couple of years.
