Alex Heath
@alexeheath
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deputy editor @verge and author of Command Line, a newsletter about the tech industry’s inside conversation
Los Angeles
Joined May 2008
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I’ve confirmed that Mark Zuckerberg is serious about fighting
@elonmusk
and is now waiting on the details (if Musk decides to follow through)
“The story speaks for itself,” a Meta spokesperson says re: Zuck’s IG post saying “send me location”
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Obama just left a meeting off 5th Ave. Hundred outside cheering.
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Word inside Twitter is that A LOT of employees are not saying “yes” to staying at Musk’s “extremely hardcore Twitter 2.0.” He has been meeting today with engineers to convince them to stay. His deadline to decide to stay or leave expired 6 min ago.
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Hearing from multiple employees that the odds of Twitter breaking in the near future are very high.
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Twitter’s Slack currently has hundreds of employees giving the 🫡 emoji, meaning they decided to not stay for Musk’s “Twitter 2.0” cultural reset. The company had just under 3,000 employees remaining before the deadline to say “yes” or not hit 20 min ago.
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NEW: Have confirmed that LeBron, who has 52 million followers and has said he won’t pay for verification, was emailed by a Twitter employee with the offer to have his sub comped “on behalf of Elon Musk.”
James did not accept but his account is showing that he paid anyway.
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NEW: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 a month for verification. It’s Elon Musk’s first big project.
Oh, and the team building it was told they will all be fired if they don’t meet a launch deadline of November 7th.
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This was sent to all Twitter staff this morning by the legal leader on its privacy team. Pretty remarkable.
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Story to be updated soon with more: Am hearing that several “critical” infra engineering teams at Twitter have completely resigned. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” one current engineer tells me of one such group. Also, Twitter has shut off badge access to its offices.
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Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned.
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Elon Musk showed up 10 minutes late to his first meeting addressing Twitter employees, which is still ongoing. He dialed in from his phone handheld like this
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Re:
@elonmusk
saying he’s going to show up at Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto house, here’s a spokesperson for Zuckerberg:
"Mark is traveling right now and isn't in Palo Alto. Also, Mark takes this sport seriously and isn't going to fight someone who randomly shows up at his house.”
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A Twitter lawyer sent an alarming message to colleagues this morning, saying that Elon Musk “is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users” and is at risk of putting the company in violation of its FTC consent decree
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hours after telling employees that they need to email updates of what they are doing every week, Elon Musk has cut basically all of their company perks, including wellness, productivity, home internet, training, and daycare allowances
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We are collecting departing Twitter employee messages from the company’s Slack and public tweets here
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@elonmusk
Isn’t this the metric you said wasn’t accurate and tried to get out of the deal over?
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An important detail here: If you already have a blue checkmark, Twitter is currently planning to remove it from your profile after 90 days if you don’t subscribe to the more expensive Blue subscription after it launches.
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Am hearing the number of Twitter resignations today is likely over 1,000, though unclear as not all are posting their decision.
Some teams, such as the engineering team that manages Twitter’s core system libraries, are completely gone now.
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confirmed that Rahul “Ligma,” who identified himself as a laid off Twitter employee carrying a box out of the building this morning, does in fact not work at Twitter (LOL)
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Going forward, all Twitter employees are now required to send an email every Friday updating Elon Musk with what they are working on and “code samples” if they are engineers, per internal memo sent out. Hardcore!
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Google just announced internally that 28 employees have been fired in connection with sit-in office protests this week over the company's cloud contract with Israel. Follows 9 employees being arrested yesterday.
Full memo to Google employees warns that "if you’re one of the few…
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On the evening before Thanksgiving, some Twitter engineers received an email saying they were fired because their “code is not satisfactory.” Others received “performance warning” emails asking them to “restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team”
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New: Elon Musk just told Twitter employees in an all hands (that is still ongoing) that no more layoffs are planned and that the company is recruiting now in engineering and sales roles. More on
@verge
soon…
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As Elon nukes legacy checkmarks today, Twitter is saying some celebs, including
@KingJames
, are paying for verification even though they aren’t
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Thread here is collecting resignation tweets from Twitter engineers, many of whom are senior / have been at the company for a long time
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The head of Apple’s App Store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account over the weekend. Not a good sign for Musk’s business relationship with his most critical source of distribution.
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Who else is old enough to remember
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.
Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
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Here is Musk responding to our story and confirming that he is paying for some accounts to be verified
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Re: the banning of reporters who have tweeted about Elon Musk’s jet, Twitter's head of trust & safety Ella Irwin tells me: “Without commenting on any specific accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk."
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As you’re reading this, imagine you are a Twitter employee. Half your colleagues were just laid off by email, your executives keep resigning, and you are getting to hear from Musk for the first time in a meeting he scheduled less than a half hour before
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The Slack message from the Twitter lawyer was shared in a channel viewable by all employees and ends with her recommending they seek whistleblower protection
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Some notes on the latest inside Twitter:
The company lost too many employees too fast. There are still people with “critical” knowledge who haven’t been fully cut off from Twitter’s systems, even though they did not opt into Musk’s “hardcore” cultural reset over 2 weeks ago.
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More: New CEO Emmett Shear has so far been unable to get written documentation of the board’s reasons for firing Altman, which also haven’t been shared with investors
Employees responded to his announcement in OpenAI’s Slack with a “fuck you” emoji
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The lawyer says that Alex Spiro, Musk’s personal attorney and current head of legal, has said internally: “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC”
Twitter’s chief privacy officer, chief information security officer, and chief compliance officer have resigned
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Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” org, which I’m told Musk’s transition team identified as the lynchpin that keeps Twitter operating day-to-day, resigned today. Also entire key infra teams gone. Not good!
Updates from
@alexeheath
on the Twitter staff that's all quit: multiple teams that run core services are all gone
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When asked why he loves Twitter, Elon says: "Some people use their hair to express themselves. I use Twitter"
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I’m at a Spotify event where CEO
@eldsjal
just announced what he calls the “biggest change” to the app since launch of mobile over a decade ago.
It’s a TikTok-like visual feed with clips of music and other stuff, replacing the main tab. Thoughts?
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Can’t make this stuff up: It’s “focus week” for employees at Twitter. They had Monday off and the rest of the week is supposed to be heads-down on projects with minimal meetings. Now they wake up to Elon’s hostile takeover playing out.
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Elon Musk surprised Twitter employees today with a surprise all-hands scheduled less than a half hour before it started. It was his first time addressing the company in a meeting.
I obtained a recording and just published the full transcript:
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Mark Zuckerberg is addressing Meta employees at a virtual all hands right now. He’s explaining the company’s updated values, which are:
- “move fast” is becoming “move fast together”
- "be bold" replaced with "build awesome things"
- “focus on long term impact” is a new one
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Apple’s Safari browser will now block the technology that companies like Google and Facebook use to track you across the web. Facebook was shown onstage as the example of what could be blocked, which is the third time Apple has shown ways to limit FB during this keynote.
#WWDC18
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Breaking: Facebook plans to stop shielding politicians from the content rules it applies to everyone else, a sharp reversal from its position that all speech from elected officials is inherently newsworthy.
Could have big ramifications globally!
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Surprise: Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on the metaverse.
I’m told Zuckerberg is planning a formal unveil next Thursday at Connect, the company’s annual AR/VR conference
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This of course could change again, especially if Stephen King gets involved.
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Something I do not know about this plan: How/if Twitter plans to stop people from paying to impersonate others. Matching profile names to credit cards?
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Also, Twitter amplifies verified accounts everywhere: reply visibility, search, user suggestions, even the main timeline. That’s a lot of distribution advantage that can be purchased now.
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Something else: Musk was originally planning for Twitter’s paid verification subscription to require that existing verified accounts ALSO pay or lose their checkmarks. Now Twitter is saying that paid verification “will not affect existing verified accounts at this time”
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imagining Apple paying a bunch of people to just fall down over and over again to program the failing detection in the new Apple Watch
#AppleEvent
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- last value, and I am not making this up: “Meta, metamates, me”
A slide shows this text in bold all caps next to Zuck talking
I am told Zuck said this without laughing and explained it had to do with a story about ships and shipmates
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the most uncomfortable live interview I have ever witnessed
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NEW: Apple now says it has revoked Facebook’s iOS developer certificate, which Apple intends to be used for a company’s employees to sideload apps without needing the App Store, not for the purpose FB used.
Apple’s statement:
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This thread from Twitter's ex outside counsel argues that Twitter has already violated its FTC consent order
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Mark Zuckerberg recently told Facebook employees he expects boycotting advertisers to “be back on the platform soon enough," and that he won't change policies “because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”
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On Meta earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg says AI-driven recommendations from accounts you don’t follow is roughly 15% in Facebook and a “little more” in Instagram.
He says that percentage will more than double by the end of next year.
Huge departure from the social graph era.
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Niantic appears to have just changed Pokémon “nests” around the world. Electrabuzz is the new Pinsir in NYC
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People should be allowed to "say pretty outrageous things within the law," but it shouldn't be amplified. Repeats the mantra that freedom of speech isn’t the same as freedom of reach.
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All those ❤️ emojis OpenAI employees were posting last night? They were meant to signal who would leave and follow Altman and Brockman to a new company if the board coup succeeds.
It’s most of OpenAI versus the board at this point, I’m told by sources.
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On Tuesday, Twitter’s remaining engineers were told they had to send “code samples” via email every week.
Engineers who were fired via email this evening are being offered 4 weeks of pay in exchange for signing a separation agreement and release of claims.
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intentionally throttling how much people can use your ad-driven service is certainly a choice
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NEW: TikTok says it will challenge the U.S. gov imposed ban this morning, calls it “unjust”
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He suggests adding an “irony” label you could tweet with so people know that you’re trying to be ironic, which, lol
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These are employees who survived the 50% layoffs and opted into Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 reset, which saw about 1k employees resign.
Musk told employees this week that he wants to hire more people “who are great at writing software”
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Elon, it is real.
So this is happening???
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Elon Musk confirmed to Twitter employees today that work is underway to encrypt DMs. “It should be the case that I can’t look at anyone’s DMs if somebody has put a gun to my head,” he said.
Video and voice calling via DMs also in the works!
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Wow. Mark Zuckerberg: “We will start soon labeling some of the content we leave up because it is deemed newsworthy.”
This is a big, big reversal for Facebook.
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“Looking forward to making Twitter the highest performing tech software company in the world,” the memo ends.
Oh, and since it’s a holiday week employees need to send this email on Wednesday this time.
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Elon says that if the company wants more people to use Twitter, they should mimic the approach of the super app WeChat in China. “you basically live on WeChat in China….if we can recreate that with Twitter we’ll be a great success”
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Elon Musk’s mass Twitter layoff today has left whole areas of the company completely gutted, including teams tasked with defending the platform from manipulation ahead of the midterms next week
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OpenAI and Microsoft say it's against their rules to use their GPT APIs to build a competing AI model.
It turns out that ByteDance has been doing exactly that to build its own LLM in China. As a person with firsthand knowledge of the situation put it, “They say they want to…
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Incredible: While the Muller report was being released, Facebook updates an old press post titled “Keeping Passwords Secure” with the new disclosure that millions of Instagram account passwords were internally stored in readable plaintext.
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I’m unaware of another tech co like Google firing this many people in connection with a protest. 28 at once is a lot
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On an IG live with
@mosseri
, Mark Zuckerberg says he had this much sunscreen on because he noticed paparazzi tailing him and thought it would fool them into thinking it wasn’t him
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New: I’ve seen internal Apple renders of its mixed reality headset. It’s a sleek, curved visor with swappable headbands and over a dozen cameras. Artist mockup of the renders:
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Here's my full Snapchat story on Obama in NYC just now. Around 200 people were waiting for him outside. Lots of cheering.
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I should be clear that Twitter employees are being instructed to email a company alias, so Elon’s normal inbox will presumably be spared.
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Update on the OpenAI drama: Altman and the board had till 5pm to reach a truce where the board would resign and he and Brockman would return. The deadline has passed and mass resignations expected if a deal isn’t reached ASAP
@reckless
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Hearing that another round of layoffs is happening at Twitter across a bunch of orgs. Sounds like the deepest cut since when Musk first took over. If you have a sense of the full scope please get in touch.
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Question about layoffs: “Right now costs exceed revenue. That’s not a great situation.”
On working remote: “If someone can only work remotely and they’re exceptional, it wouldn’t make sense to fire them.” But strong bias to working IRL”
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Remaining engineering managers are trying to convince their other reports who have left to come back. It has been communicated that basically anyone can come back if they want. They are being encouraged to negotiate for perks like guaranteed remote work.
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Here is the topline from Musk’s internal Q&A with Twitter employees today:
- Company is hiring again and wanting employee referrals.
- Musk was clear that layoffs are over
- Twitter has about 2,700 employees left out of nearly 7,500 pre Musk
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Musk’s transition team has been slowly going through the list of employees who didn’t check "yes” to being hardcore in a Google form and, if they are marked "critical,” calling them to see if they are sure about wanting to leave.
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Story updated just now with more from Musk’s meeting with Twitter employees:
- “This is not a right-wing takeover of Twitter. It is a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter.”
- Twitter should be used by more than 50% of the population “ideally in every country without exception”
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Also, interesting how mDAU is not reliable until you reluctantly buy the thing and are facing an advertiser exodus!
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What’s left of Twitter’s sales team has been frantically trying to get advertisers to spend again to meet end of year goals. One shared in Slack today that they’d managed to convince Pernod-Ricard to unfreeze and spend 200k this month. Called it “an exciting win.”
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Those fired for shitposting Musk need to talk to his transition team first. This is essentially a pledge of fealty. Musk is still worried about internal sabotage.
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This is technically impossible to know as a third-party app on either iOS or Android
@lindayacc
Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game. I think we may hit an all-time record this week.
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I’m told this is all news to Mark Zuckerberg
The fight will be managed by my and Zuck’s foundations (not UFC).
Livestream will be on this platform and Meta. Everything in camera frame will be ancient Rome, so nothing modern at all.
I spoke to the PM of Italy and Minister of Culture. They have agreed on an epic location.
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Other Twitter product ideas Elon is into: have people pay to be verified and subscriptions/payments. Seems very into the WeChat approach
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Spotify’s head of product
@GustavS
says the company is not optimizing for time spent with this new feed, but instead content you save to listen to later: “Our goal is not to steal time. It’s to help users save time.”
Seems antithetical to an endless feed design though?
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Twitter is now banning the sharing of links or usernames to the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post
Tellingly, paid promotion of these platforms is still allowed.
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