I’m sorry to post so much about Elon Musk,, but it’s fascinating in a horrifying way to see the nation’s richest person, a man celebrated for his business acumen and technological genius, take over a social media platform with 400 million followers and proceed to disrupt it, frighten advertisers away, and create chaos. After I wrote this post, I read this morning that Musk warned employees that bankruptcy was a real possibility. And more of his top leadership team left.
Twitter’s chief information security officer and chief compliance officer resigned late Wednesday night as the company started implementing changes that would allow users to more easily impersonate major brands and government officials.
The departures came just hours before the company’s new CEO, Elon Musk, sent his first email to Twitter employees, titled “difficult times ahead,” and implementing a mandatory return-to-work policy.
Lea Kissner, the chief information security officer, confirmed they had left in a Twitter post Thursday morning. Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty has also left the company, according to a person familiar with the situation who asked to remain nameless because they were not authorized to speak publicly.https://www3.nbcnews.com/news/embedded-newsletter/rcna56597#amp=1
“I don’t watch Game of Thrones. I certainly don’t want to play it at work,” Fogarty tweeted Monday.
A spokesperson for the Federal Trade Commission said in an emailed statement that it is keeping watch on the situation.
“We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” the spokesperson wrote. “No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”
On Wednesday, Twitter rolled out the new Twitter Blue, which allows any user to purchase a verification badge for $7.99 per month as long as they joined Twitter before Nov. 9. As feared by cybersecurity professionals, users immediately used the pay-to-play feature to impersonate public figures and brands. One user impersonating LeBron James demanded a trade from the Los Angeles Lakers.null
The resignations add to what has already been a chaotic two weeks with Musk at the helm of Twitter, where he recently said the company “will do lots of dumb things in coming months.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I never admired this guy. It seems to me he is always âshowâ and when you scratchâ¦not much below. So many are blinded by this type of personality. vg
Sometimes countries at the top of rankings are simply better at corruption than those at the bottom. (COP 27 meeting) – (and better at hiding it too. vg)
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I could not care less about Twitter, which is really meaningless, but what I find more than a little disconcerting is that this fellow is building rockets that people will (supposedly) fly on.
And we — the American taxpayers — are paying him (through NASA contracts) billions of dollars for the rockets.
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Wise decision-making is critical when lives are at stake. We know what happened to the Challenger Space shuttle when Morton Thiokol management overruled their engineers and launched in cold weather.
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And he is building self driving cars that put everyone on the road at risk.
To say that Musk is basing his decisions on something other than objective logic and reason would be a huge understatement.
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No competent engineer would ever behave this way.
Think about that next time you drive near a Tesla.
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Or, worse still, walk infront of one.
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On a related note, I was run off the road a few months ago by a Tesla on the entrance road going into a parking lot. The Tesla was driving right down the center of a two way lane that had no lane markers. I had to pull off onto the shoulder to avoid a collision.
I have no idea if the Tesla was operating (semi) autonomously and/or if the driver simply was not paying attention. According to Tesla, “Autopilot” does not even turn on when there are no lane markers, but I don’t know what they claim about “FSD beta”.
My suggestion is to take extreme caution when driving around those vehicles.
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He shares with Zuckerberg his “move fast and break things” mentality and manic depressive god complex, not a good combination. They are both doomed to move fast and break themselves. Do I feel sorry for either one of them? Nope.
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It never ceases to amaze me that so many billionaires often approach a new experience by blowing up and disrupting what they have purchased without fully understanding what they are doing. Musk is so confidant he is right he has no qualms about blowing up the lives of many people that work for the company. Change can also occur by watching, learning and making evolutionary changes that will improve the operation of the business, but this is not the direction that a “bold” billionaire wants to pursue. Workers are just replaceable parts to most CEOs.
My son told me that Musk’s identity verification process is a farce. Young people are apparently getting all kinds of bogus identities verified. It is how they are protesting Musk’s eternal arrogance.
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It used to be that a Twitter used “verified” their identity by filling out a lengthy questionnaire. Then they got a blue check next to their account.
Musk is selling the blue check marks for $8 a month, no verification. He’s desperate for revenue. He’s also paying out a billion a year to banks that loaned him money for the purchase of Twitter. He’s obviously destroyed the collegial culture by mass layoffs. He also declared there would be no more free food at work and no one is allowed to work remotely. It’s fascinating to watch this guy operate, with no regard for the culture of the implant or the human lives he’s wrecking.
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“No more free lunch!”
— Elon
No More Twitter
No more workers!
No more lunch!
No more twerkers!
Time for crunch!
No more bliss
And no more fun
Elon’s pissed
That Twitter’s done
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The ink is not even dry on his purchase agreement and Musk is already talking about the possibility of bankruptcy, (undoubtedly chapter 11.)
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What is an anagram for “Lone Skum”?
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Good one!
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Haaaa!!!!
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You keep posting Diana – I appreciate your takes
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I have never had and will never have a Twitter account; Twitter is a silly waste of time, mostly just people yapping at each other in short sound bites. But over the last few days I’ve noticed on all left-wing sites a concern about Twitter censoring people, a concern that didn’t exist when Twitter until just recently often censored people who expressed opinions dissenting from those held by Twitter’s top leadership. The most prominent example of censorship was not allowing information about Hunter Biden’s likely criminal activities to appear on Twitter until after Joe Biden was safely elected. For much of the Left, support for free speech is now purely situational, which as a longtime ACLU member (but no longer) I deeply regret, as do many former top ACLU officials.
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I like Twitter because it sends my posts out to hundreds of thousands of people.
One of my brothers was kicked off Twitter for making a hostile remark about Trump when he was president.
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“Elon Musk biography portrays a brutal character driven by lofty dreams”
“Musk is reported to have turned solid engineers into catatonic wrecks after a bad meeting, and built a culture where his employees adore him and fear him at the same time. For me, it is this aspect of Vance’s portrayal is particularly fascinating.”
https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-biography-portrays-a-brutal-character-driven-by-lofty-dreams-41995
“A REMINDER OF JUST SOME OF THE TERRIBLE THINGS ELON MUSK HAS SAID AND DONE”
Vanity Fair uses bullet points for a long list of terrible thinks about Elon Musk.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-terrible-things-hes-said-and-done
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“Musk is reported to have turned solid engineers into catatonic wrecks after a bad meeting”
Management always takes credit for what the workers do and blames them when things don’t go well.
Elon has hired very good engineers for Tesla and SpaceX, which is THE reason why he is able to make things happen.
If they left, his companies would quickly go to hell.
The companies could survive and even thrive without Elon, but the reverse is not true.
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Bingo .
You left out the role of Government Subsidies and Contracts .
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Frightening. It seems Elon is most interested in creating misinformation to rule the world to the highest degree possible with twitter. When will this be against the law?
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Let’s see –
A billionaire with no morals or ethics,
An unmonitored platform that reaches billions of people,
CEOs fearful of being smeared and lies about products spread,
Legislators (who are either ring-kissers or out of a job) and Supreme Court in control of industrial and financial regulations
Millions of Americans who either got stupid, validated (ideologues and supremacists), or held their noses when bankrolling and voting for detestable candidates.
And, no Walter Cronkites to save us.
Ha! Which author is writing this novel?
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Hello Diane: Similar to some techno-fascists I know, Musk seems to equate (in his mind) what he CAN do, with what is the INTELLIGENT thing to do.
He has plenty of money to enable the CAN part of the equation; however, he announces to the world every day that he has no substantial idea about the INTELLIGENT part of that same equation.
Newsflash: An bank account is not a brain trust . . . and sometimes, just the opposite. CBK
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Nor is a bank account ethics, a connection often missing in billionaires.
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aka retired teacher: I know what you mean about ethics. However, I was including ethics in my statement about the intelligent thing to do. There is a difference in the natural sciences, but in the human world, can what is unethical also be the intelligent thing to do?
The answer to that, of course, is: not often but still, sometimes. . . . precisely because we are not Telsa automobiles but historical human beings who always must think their way into the detailed events of our lives . . . intelligently. CBK
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This is what happens when someone with no social skills tries to run a social media company.
NerDisasters
Elon lacks
The social skills
Techno hacks
Are party kills
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“Narcikissed”
Trump and Elon
Sitting in a tree
“Kiss my ass and follow me!”
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Diane, please don’t apologize for posting about Elon The Clown. He is the richest, most powerful loon the world, worth discussing. He makes Bill Gates look intelligent, and that’s saying something.
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Maybe Elon can apply the Tesla FSD software to Twitter to make it self- destruct..I mean driving.
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“Full Self Destructing” (FSD)
Tesla’s are crashing
Twitter is too
Red lights are flashing
That Musk is just screwed
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SomeDAM Maybe you could finish this: Trump and Musk walk into a bar together . . . CBK
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Love it!
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Trump says to Musk: Twitter kicked me out!
Musk to Trump: That’s nothing: Twitter kicked me in!
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Seems his pro-Putin exhortation to vote RepubliQan in the midterms fell on deaf ears. It’s dusk for Musk. Too little too late Elon, the bird was already freed by Kurt Vonnegut.
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I was directed to a blog by Mark Moss titled The Real Reason Musk Bought Tweeter. It seemed to make some sense of Musk’s decisions.
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West Clast Teacher: I wonder if the Russians funded him to get Trump back in? NOT a conspiracy theory, just speculating. CBK
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There were a series of fake blue check tweets on Thursday. This was perhaps my favorite of a fake tweet responded to by a real account:
https://twitter.com/octal/status/1590882341333110784?s=20&t=2hydkll0rwtCpbbceyuH-Q
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Ryan Lackey Thanks for clearing that up . . . uh . . . . well . . . . Suicide alert! Just kidding, . . . uh . . . . goodbye. Well . . . . . hmmmmm. I’m going back to bed now. Maybe.
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Musk just mocked Senator Ed Market, who has the power to investigate all of Elons companies.
Elon seems determined to destroy his companies and himself in the process.
Is this what “geniuses” do?
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Markey
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Hello Diane: This is not about Twitter particularly, but it’s related.
First this from the Huffington Post this morning:
“CORPORATE AMERICA GOES BIG ON ELECTION DENIERS Large U.S.-based companies plowed millions into the congressional campaigns of Republican election deniers, HuffPost’s Molly Redden reports. Big benefactors included Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the ultraconservative Koch family; Home Depot; UPS; and top military contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Here’s a look at what Corporate America said after Jan. 6 vs. what they did. [HuffPost]”
Second, the election was still close, and many election deniers made it into Congress. How better to reveal the long term import of degenerate forces on PUBLIC EDUCATION, e.g., the reduction-to-absence of teaching history, civics/politics (by whatever name), and the burgeoning insights from the social sciences on last generation of voters, and now on the next.
I didn’t do a poll, but most of the people interviewed that were on the “right” revealed in their interview a lack of knowledge of history and how the government is structured and works. (I found it really cringeworthy.)
The Koch family (as above) is just one example of the power of corporate money to promote and fund the loss of democracy. For education, this means private, charter/etc. schools where the very curriculum can be influenced by the political leanings of powerful people instead of by public schools that are funded by “the people” and are charged to teach directly about the experiment that is democracy and about our founding principles, not to mention the histories of kingships, autocracies, fascism, and a host of other forms of political systems.
People who live in a democracy cannot make intelligent and thoughtful choices without that kind of knowledge. We did dodge a very big bullet, but it’s not over. CBK
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