Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 34

Elon Musk has posted an image of a shirt that pokes fun directly at people who believe the $8 fee for Twitter Blue is unreasonable.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO took to his personal Twitter account on November 8, a day before the rollout of Twitter Blue, to post an image of a t-shirt that featured the following text, "Your feedback is appreciated. Now pay $8". The t-shirt also featured the blue verification check mark that has become a matter of controversial opinion, with some people agreeing with Musk on the impact of the new Twitter Blue service being a net positive for the platform, and another group believing the opposite.

When asked if Musk would be paying for Twitter Blue himself, he replied with the "100" emoji, indicating that he would be paying for it. The $8 paywall for Twitter's verification also comes with a slew of new features such as access to uploading longer video and audio content, the ability of monetization on the platform, priority in search and replies, as well as half the amount of advertisements.

Its been around two weeks since Elon Musk went through with the acquisition to purchase Twitter, and now the SpaceX CEO is already announcing that the social media platform has reached a new milestone.

Musk took to his own Twitter account on November 8 to announce that "Twitter usage" has reached an all-time high. The Tesla CEO didn't specify what metric he was specifically referring to, but it can be assumed it would be real-time users on Twitter around the time he made the tweet.

This seeming increase in Twitter's users is part of Musk's plan to make Twitter the most attractive social media platform for users, with the billionaire even stating in his leaked pitch deck that he aims to create the "everything app" which will increase the users on the platform from 217 million to 600 million by 2025.

Mark Zuckerberg has announced mass layoffs at Meta aka Facebook, with 11,000 jobs sliced away -- a significant number, considering the largest social networking site in the world had 87,314 employees at its peak earlier this year.

Meta has been bleeding on the stock market for a while now, and while the headlines are dominated by Twitter and Elon Musk, it seems no one really cares about the bigger issue: the largest social networking site in the world (which owns Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp, and more) has just laid off 11,000+ people right before Christmas. Oh, and within hours of the 2022 midterm elections.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained: "Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that".

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently fired half of the employees at Twitter, and now reports are coming out that the company is asking some of those employees to come back.

The mass layoff happened on Friday, with Musk announcing the news publicly by saying that Twitter's reduction in force of approximately 7,500 employees "unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day", while adding that everyone who was fired was offered 3 months of severance, which is, according to Musk, 50% higher than what is legally required. The layoffs sparked major concern over Twitter's content moderation capabilities and if the platform was able to maintain its standards and policies on the content allowed on the platform.

Twitter's head of safety, Yoel Roth, took to his Twitter account in a series of Tweets where he explained that the layoffs affected approximately 15% of Twitter's Trust and Safety organization, and that front-line content moderation workers were the least affected out of the entire layoffs. Furthermore, Roth explained that more than 80% of Twitter's incoming content moderation volume was unaffected by Musk's 50% reduction in staff and that Twitter's daily volume of content moderation across the platform remained unchanged throughout the firing period.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has announced that It will kick off the infamous (and very exciting) groundbreaking ceremony for its new chip fabrication plant in Arizona, USA... things are getting hairy already.

American engineers who were sent over to Taiwan for their required training are now flying back to the US to start operations at the Arizona plant, with the US engineers experiencing culture shock when they were in Taiwan. TSMC founder Dr. Morris Chang believes that operating a plant in Taiwan is an easier process than it is in the US, and it's all over low costs and the attitude of its workers.

As someone who has been to Taiwan many, many times -- as well as the US even more times than I can count -- I understand this from some perspectives. The difference between the work culture here in my home country of Australia compared to these two countries is very different, as I'm sure anyone would know. But the issue here is that once the American engineers left Taiwan back for US soil, locals in Taiwan started talking about their experiences with the American engineers while they were in Taiwan on social media... and man, things really took a turn.

Elon Musk has set his sights on a major goal for Twitter, while simultaneously announcing his main mission for Twitter.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO took to his personal Twitter account to announce that he desires to make Twitter the most accurate source of information in the world, and that pushing the currently world's second-largest social media platform toward that goal is his and the company's mission. Musk's tweet sparked a response from Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who asked Musk, "accurate to who?", to which Musk replied, "as judged by the people of Twitter via Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch)."

This announcement speaks volumes to Musk's steadfast effort to open Twitter up and allow more free speech on the platform, while simultaneously wanting it to be a place where people can gather reliable news. This balance will certainly be a tricky one to pull off, and seemingly by Musk's announcement, the responsibility will fall on the members of Twitter's Community Notes.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk fired approximately half of Twitter's employees or about 3,700 people, and now he's decided to postpone the launch of Twitter's new verification system.

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has decided to postpone the launch of Twitter's new verification system that will give the iconic verified check marks to accounts that pay the $7.99 a month subscription for Twitter Blue. According to a report by The New York Times that spoke to two people with knowledge of the situation, Musk and Twitter have decided to halt the rollout of verification check marks to Twitter Blue subscribers until after Tuesday's midterm elections.

The decision to delay the launch of blue check marks ahead of the midterms came from widespread concern that many people would have the ability to create verified accounts impersonating important political figures, such as President Joe Biden, prominent lawmakers, or officials, ahead of the election. These illegitimate verified accounts could then post misinformation about the election or even influence the results.

Members from the US Department of Defense (DoD) spoke with a publication regarding the plethora of UFO, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) videos and the origin of the objects in question.

According to a recent report from The New York Times, who spoke with several officials from the DoD, under the assurance of anonymity, said that many of the UFO sightings can simply be chalked up to Chinese surveillance drones, as well as "airborne clutter" such as weather balloons. The anonymous officials said that many of the UFO sightings have now been officially identified as "relatively ordinary" Chinese surveillance drones, which are attempting to steal plans for advanced US fighter planes and the methods the US military use to train its pilots. DoD officials said to the publication that China has done this in the past.

As for other UFO sightings from US military personnel that were able to capture video of objects performing seemingly impossible maneuvers or achieving ridiculous speeds, DoD officials said that many of these sightings are likely a result of optical illusions caused by the camera recording the object. For instance, DoD officials said that the GOFAST UFO video was simply an optical illusion caused by the angle the camera was recording the object and that the object was actually traveling no faster than 30 mph.

Over the weekend, actor Valerie Bertinelli decided to impersonate Elon Musk on Twitter by changing her name and profile picture.

The actor then decided to post and retweet content that showed support for Democratic candidates in an attempt to prove a point with Twitter's coming verification checkmark system. Bertinelli, and many others have voiced concerns that Musk's new $8 verification checkmark system will allow for random people to impersonate other individuals and then spread misinformation under their new identities. Bertinelli decided to illustrate this point by impersonating Musk and posting content such as "#VoteBlueToProtectYourRights" and supportive posts for candidates Gretchen Whitmore in Michigan and Beto O'Rourke in Texas.

Bertinelli has since changed her display name back, saying that she "had her fun" and that "I think I made my point". However, this stunt by Bertinelli has seemingly caught the attention of Twitter owner Elon Musk as the SpaceX CEO recently took to her personal Twitter to make a stark announcement regarding impersonating other individuals on Twitter. Musk wrote that moving forward, any Twitter accounts that are found engaging in impersonation without clearly disclosing that their account is a parody account will be permanently banned from the platform.

Elon Musk has taken to his personal Twitter account to announce two new features coming to the world's second-largest social media platform.

Musk, the official owner of Twitter, took to his account on November 6 to announce that Twitter will soon be getting the ability to attack "long-form text to tweets", which makes the whole craze of users screenshotting walls of text in their notepad and posting images on Twitter obsolete. Musk backs this assumption up by saying this update, "ending absurdity of notepad screenshots". Furthermore, the Twitter owner said that creator monetization will soon be rolled out to Twitter and it will be for "all forms of content".

Additionally, Musk was posed a question that stems from a feature present on Substack where users can subscribe/donate to pieces of writing or authors. Musk was asked if Twitter will get a feature similar to this, which, if Twitter adopted it, would be users subscribing to Twitter accounts or donating money directly to content, which would go to the creators behind that content. Musk replied to this question and said Twitter would "absolutely" be getting subscribe/donate feature.