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Warm up
—- * * FOR NEW STUDENTS ** ————————————— ————
- What industry do you work in and what is your role?
- What are your responses in your role / position?
- Can you describe to the function of your workplace / company?
- How many departments, how many offices. National or International?
- What are the minimum requirements for employment ie Education or Experience?
- How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
- What is the process for changing job roles ie Interview? Test?
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- Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
- Anything of interest happening?
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1. Last week folks like me spent a lot of time writing about Elon Musk becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder, taking a board seat, and generally throwing the company’s future into uncertainty. Musk’s trickster-god persona seemed to augur a new period of chaos for Twitter after a few years of relative calm, and indeed, he spent the weekend tweeting various lunatic ideas about the company that would have landed lesser employees in a meeting with HR.
2. But you can know you’re dealing with a top-tier chaos muppet and still find yourself unprepared for the next turn of events. And indeed I found myself unprepared for the development that upended the timeline on Sunday night: Musk now won’t be taking a board seat after all, and in fact had already decided not to before he spent the weekend shitposting about whether Twitter should (for example) change its name to Titter.
3. The news came directly from Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, whose life used to be way easier than this Musk’s revolving-door trip through Twitter’s boardroom raises two obvious but so far unanswerable questions: what changed? And what happens next?
What do you think Musk’s main motivations are? What do you think he hopes to gain?
4. Agrawal’s tweeted explanation for Musk’s change of heart offered several tantalizing hints about what might have happened. There is, for example, the highlighting of a board member’s fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, a responsibility that Musk has so far shown no interest in. It is commonly (and correctly, I think) understood that Musk bought 9.2 percent of Twitter primarily for fun.
5. As a board member Musk would have had to represent the interests of the common shareholder, or at the very least not spooked the markets by tweeting things like “Is Twitter dying?” And I imagine it became clear to him over the past few days that this would be an actual ongoing legal obligation, and would absolutely not be any fun, and that was that.
6. In any case, the mood inside Twitter today is one of exhausted relief. There had been strong internal opposition to his board seat, for some of the reasons linked in my quick foreground check above. Musk’s posture toward the company has been almost entirely antagonistic, filled with criticism over its content moderation policies, its lack of an editing button, and, um… the decision not to use its company headquarters as a homeless shelter.
Do you think there is a problem with free speech on social media (twitter or elsewhere) ?
7. Many Twitter employees take justifiable pride in the steps they have taken in recent years to reduce abuse and harassment on the platform, including by labeling tweets that contain misinformation and removing accounts that violate its policies. For them, Musk’s hasty exit from the boardroom likely feels like a dodged bullet.
8. Musk could buy way more Twitter stock; he is no longer bound by an agreement with the board to cap his investment below 15 percent of shares. Finally, there is a world where Musk maintains the size of his Twitter position but continuously tweets edgelord content about how bad Twitter is, along with memes about how everyone should tweet 69 times on 4/20, or whatever. This strikes me as the likeliest near-term outcome, as it lets Musk achieve his main objective with a Twitter stake (having fun) while avoiding further entanglements with the SEC.
If you were in a position similar to Musks, what changes would you like to make to social media? (this could include anything from functionality to culture)
Phonetic Chart
