Senior tech reporter for The Verge • Prev:
@fortunemagazine
&
@businessinsider
• Robison (rah-beh-son) not Robinson • Send tips via DM or Signal @ kylie.01
Today is my first day at the Verge!
I <3 scoops so if you work in AI, send tips via Signal to @ kylie.01 or DM me here—and if you live in SF, let’s grab coffee ☕️
an uwu trans polyam anarchist hacking their way into the united state’s no fly list and blogging it on their super cute website at (name) dot crime dot gay is the most biblically accurate depiction of hacking that i’ve seen in the 21st century
SCOOP: Elon has emailed staff following the Twitter outage.
“Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”
Elon Musk is literally talking about how “popular” he is on Twitter, said he was perhaps the most interacted with account even before the acquisition, and legit checked to see how many followers he has during the Tesla earnings call.
Scoop: X/Twitter, is planning a major change in how news articles appear on the service, stripping out the headline and other text so that tweets with links display only an article’s lead image, according to material viewed by Fortune.
SCOOP: Inside Linda Yaccarino’s X all-hands after Elon Musk sued Media Matters: ‘By all means, put your heads together to bring new revenue into the company’
SCOOP: Microsoft’s CMO, who just cashed out $4.4 mil worth of stock, told employees angry about lack of salary raises that their best way to increase their pay is to make the stock go higher, according to screenshots of an internal convo seen by Fortune.
He sent a follow up email. “We should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta and reducing GCP usage until at least next week.”
Scoop: X, formerly Twitter, is now valued at $19 billion, based on the firm's employee equity compensation plan. The privately-held company, owned by Elon Musk, is giving employees RSUs at a share price $45 according to a source familiar with the matter.
Here's the inside situation: A Twitter employee told Fortune that the engineering Slack channels are "going crazy" & the team is floating various ideas around as to why this error has occurred, from changes to the free API feature to a data center outage.
This is a really interesting moment for other advertisers to see — FabFitFun tried to run a GoFuckYourself discount code in solidarity with Elon Musk (?!?) and ended up losing loads of customers because of it.
Elon Musk's email to staff here suggests that the massive technical glitch that halted people from tweeting, following other users and messaging might be related is related to consolidating data centers and reducing GCP usage, which could be a way to reduce costs.
He sent a follow up email. “We should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta and reducing GCP usage until at least next week.”
These details are in the story above, but for thread readers, Sacramento & Atlanta are data centers.
I wrote a story earlier today about how over the last 2 weeks, Twitter has been cutting software licenses left and right, so the timing is interesting!
Elon Musk's email to staff here suggests that the massive technical glitch that halted people from tweeting, following other users and messaging might be related is related to consolidating data centers and reducing GCP usage, which could be a way to reduce costs.
Without text, tweets will only show an image with the URL overlay, which could have major implications for publishers who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites as well as for advertisers.
Elon Musk tweeted that he’s “up for a cage match” with Mark Zuckerberg. In response, Zuck posted a screenshot of Elon’s tweet on his IG story with the caption “Send me location.”
Comment sent to me from Meta:
"The story speaks for itself."
personal news… today is my last day at
@fortunemagazine
! i’m not sure i can fit into 280 characters how much my time at fortune meant to me — especially thankful for my incredible editor
@lexnfx
and EIC
@ajs
for growing me into a better reporter (and human)
So excited to share with you all my first ever COVER STORY FOR
@FortuneMagazine
!!!!
It was incredible to get to sit down with OpenAI CTO
@miramurati
alongside
@mlevram
🌟
Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.
This…
the verge did an incredible job with photos 😭 mayhaps new pfp but my current one of me on the fire escape of my old house in SF has been my pfp for so long
Day 2 of Elon's securities fraud lawsuit. The judge is saying the court took on "great pains" to make this happen.
"I'm not going to accept 150 pages of stuff every night," the judge said of objections. "Are you devoting any other time to cases? Yeah, I didn't think so."
i’m genuinely asking here
@lindayaX
— why do you continue to defend the way elon treats your staff, your users, and your customers? what do these empty twitter platitudes do for who you’re employed to serve?
Today
@elonmusk
gave a wide ranging and candid interview at
@dealbook
2023. He also offered an apology, an explanation and an explicit point of view about our position. X is enabling an information independence that's uncomfortable for some people. We're a platform that allows…
I'll spend time writing this out, but its worth talking about now — Twitter's former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth was a surprise guest at Code, just an hour before Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, took stage.
The dynamic that followed on stage ... is interesting
Bit of a Friday scoop… Elon Musk wants to make Grok AI an option for X premium users to compose tweets. Musk told engineers do it a few months ago, and according to a source, the team is stalling.
a source at X/Twitter told me that staff really hate this update
source added that it also makes very little sense because leadership wants users to stay on the app but this getting people to leave unintentionally (clicking link thinking its an image)
re, what i scooped in august () elon has internally said he wants to reduce the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on screen
i have so many thoughts but also, this tweet from yesterday
The company also published “Not-a-Bot Terms and Conditions” today outlining its plan for a paid subscription service that gives users certain abilities on their platform, like posting content and interacting with other users.
"Yes, some advertisers may have temporarily paused but I do want to go on record, I had several really good conversations today. Some customers have still paused their investments because of some misleading or manipulated information in an article," Yaccarino said. "But the data…
X claimed in the blog post that it has made advertising “more relevant and impactful,” resulting in a 22% increase in total ad engagements. Yet many users complain that many ads are from low quality marketers pitching counterfeit luxury goods.
Elon Musk said on stage during the
@Dealbook
summit, "If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go FUCK yourself," then called out Disney CEO Bob Iger in the audience, which paused advertising on Twitter. "Hi Bob!"
i havent been able to find THE sriracha in over a year, been trying to scrape by on one bottle (using it extremely sparingly)
guess what i found at a local market today
If you're not familiar with today's topic, Elon Musk got Tesla tangled up in a securities fraud lawsuit for tweeting this. The funding was not, in fact, "secured."
But wait, there's more! Instead of playing along with what X would like us useless journalists to say, I wrote about what they're actually doing.
This earned me an angry “comms” call and a block. This is what beat reporters have to work with. We hate you, write what we want.
For today’s Datasheet, I wrote about Elon Musk’s secret PR machine at X.
Musk hates the media, has voiced his distaste for PR, yet X’s “biz ops” is sending out embargoes to journalists about celebrity partnerships. What gives?
A new form of free access will be introduced as this is extremely important to our ecosystem – limited to Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month for a single authenticated user token, including Login with Twitter.
Right on cue, Elon is tweeting. The judge just finished talking about how he's tired of them objecting to the NYT article. "How many times do I have to rule on that," the judge said.
Some of you may recall the SEC fined him $40 million in 2018 as a result, and forced him to step down as chair of Tesla’s board. Now, he's getting sued by investors who owned stock over a 10-day period (August 7th–17th) claiming the tweet cost investors "billions."
sooo its official … i’ve been a tech journalist for 3 years now!
i agree, it does seem like its been much longer, and the accomplishment are thanks to -- many sleepless nights, amazing editors, lots and lots and lots of incredible sources, equal parts luck and hard work (1/?)
Incredible call by
@andrewrsorkin
to ask Musk about his mental state. Musk is now diving into how his mental state is admittedly stormy, not in a good way, and now he's getting philosophical.
"My life is finite, really a flash in the pan in a galactic timescale," Musk said.
A source let me know that the company pushed a change to the web version of Twitter. Typically, you can get a list of who has liked or retweeted a post by clicking the like/retweet numbers. Now, its stashed in the upper right hand menu (example below).