By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns—a potentially serious blow, given that the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy.
Twitter’s relaunched premium service—which grants blue-check “verification” labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month—was unavailable Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of impostor accounts.
A Twitter user posing as Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly falsely tweeted that insulin was now free, prompting an apology from the actual company.
The latest erratic move on the minds of major advertisers—that the company depends on for revenue—was Musk’s decision to abolish a new “official” label on high-profile Twitter accounts just hours after introducing it.
The layoffs mark a tumultuous new period in Silicon Valley, as tech giants long known as bastions of economic power and recession-proof have shed huge numbers of workers in recent weeks.
The platform’s new owner issued the warning after some celebrities changed their Twitter display names—not their account names—and tweeted as ‘Elon Musk.’
Musk is expected to proceed with plans to lay off about 50 percent of Twitter’s staff, according to people familiar with the matter.
Elon Musk said Wednesday that Twitter will not allow anyone who has been kicked off the site to return until it sets up procedures on how to do that, a process that will take at least a few weeks.
Days after taking over Twitter and a week before the U.S. midterm elections, billionaire Elon Musk has positioned himself as moderator-in-chief of one of the most important social media platforms in American politics.
Twitter’s new owner fired the company’s board of directors and made himself the board’s sole member, according to a company filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It was unclear whether the problem was an internal issue or whether the social media site had been hacked.
Elon Musk is telling Twitter advertisers he is buying the platform to “help humanity.” The message posted Thursday on Twitter came a day before Musk’s deadline for closing his $44 billion deal to buy the social-media company and take it private.
Polizzi, 31, started making videos on TikTok last year, which caught the attention of the producers of HBO Max’s “FBOY Island,” a kind of self-parodying, in-on-the-joke reality TV show.
While job cuts have been expected regardless of the sale, the magnitude of Elon Musk’s planned cuts are far more extreme than anything Twitter had planned.
TikTok appears to be deepening its foray into e-commerce with plans to operate its own U.S. warehouses, the kind of packing and shipping facilities more associated with Amazon than the social media platform best known for addictive short videos.
Twitter said earlier this week that it intends to close the deal at the agreed-upon price, but the two sides are still booked for an Oct. 17 trial in Delaware over Musk’s earlier attempts to terminate the deal.
The offer comes just two weeks before Twitter’s lawsuit seeking to force Musk to go through with the deal goes to trial.
The stakes are high not just for government and the companies, but because of the increasingly dominant role platforms such as Twitter and Facebook play in American democracy and elections.
The former security chief at Twitter told Congress that the social media platform is plagued by weak cyber defenses that make it vulnerable to exploitation by “teenagers, thieves and spies” and put the privacy of its users at risk.
A former head of security at Twitter has filed whistleblower complaints with U.S. officials, alleging that the company misled regulators about its cybersecurity defenses and its problems with fake accounts.
