Changes in Twitter are happening fast and it’s hard to keep track of them. That’s why I’m writing this blog, it is to try to capture the historical significance of  Musk‘s purchase of Twitter. I may not go into every single little detail change and I certainly will not write about the daily drama. You already know about The Twitter Files and are most likely very happy they exist. I think Elon‘s recent talk on the all-in podcast had some important information (Davis Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David A. Friedberg all asked Elon Musk questions). I’m going to share 12 main points with you in this article.

• tweets show view counts
• Twitter’s paid verified blue check
• Twitter for businesses/organizations
• Twitter ‘batting average’
• why and how Twitter workforce was reduced
• less hate speech, bots and trolls, a new incentive structure emerges
• Elon’s business model inspires other tech firms
• Twitter will not monetize hate speech: bots versus trolls 
• Elon Musk personally called Paul Graham to apologize for Twitter suspension 
• Twitter to unveil new features in January
• Chamath asks Elon Musk to share his views on a 2023 recession
• Elon Musk’s reason for the Twitter files

TWEETS SHOW VIEW COUNTS

Views are more important than likes for most people.  This has been the case on Youtube for years.  Now you will see view counts on your tweets.  Though a tweet may get 20 “likes,” it could have thousands of views. Elon explains,

Elon: The view thing is huge, that’s why I pushed the views. Actually, it’s a lot harder than you think because of the sheer number of transactions per second. I think it sort of requires systemwide on the order of 3 million transactions a second to actually calculate the view. You know, calculate and display the view count FYI for Twitter global, so it’s like 3 million per second. It’s a lot.

Elon went on to describe what it was like to own Twitter for the first six weeks.

Elon: “Well, it’s been quite a roller coaster which, obviously you’ve witnessed and been on the roller coaster as well (speaking to Jason).

I mean, it’s exciting, but I think it sort of has its highs and lows to say the least but overall, it seems to be going in a good direction and we’ve got the expenses reasonably under control so it’s not like in the fast lane of bankruptcy anymore.

And we’re releasing features faster than Twitter‘s history at the same time as containing the costs and reducing the cost structure by a factor of three maybe four.

TWITTER’S PAID VERIFIED BLUE CHECK

The famous Twitter verified Blue Check is something I wrote about in my article “Goodbye Legacy Twitter, Twitter 2.0 is Here.” Elon explains it further,

Elon: The verified, that’s huge! It’s a revenue stream as well as a means of identifying or like knowing that it’s a real person and not a bot or a troll situation. 

TWITTER FOR BUSINESS / ORGANIZATIONS 

Elon: “Having the organizational affiliation was an idea of David’s (Sacks). 

That was great to have organizational affiliation so that you can know that somebody is an actual professor at Stanford or that this particular handle is actually Disney not someone simply putting “I work at Disney” in their bio.

So I think that’s going to be really helpful, it’s really just having detailed and nuanced verification so of all the things that you say you are, are these things validated by other people and organizations?” 

I wrote about Twitter’s organizational verification of Twitter Blue for Business here.

TWITTER BATTING AVERAGE 

Elon: I am a big believer in like you want to look at the net output. So it’s sort of like you know “what’s the batting average?” It’s like baseball.

The point is not that you hit the ball, but it’s like how many home runs you get and like what’s your actual slugging percentage? Its like you’ve got to swing for the fences you’re going to strike out a bit more but we’re going to swing for the fences here at Twitter.

And we’re going to do it quickly, so I think generally like my error rate, and sort of being the chief twit will be less over time but you know in the beginning, we’ll make obviously sort of a lot more mistakes because I’m new to the… like, ‘Hey I just got here man!’ 

So I mean if you look at the actual amount of improvement that’s happened at Twitter in terms of having costs that are not insane and actually shipping product that on balance is good I think that’s great. Like I think we’re actually executing well and getting things done. I think we’ll have fewer pure gaffes in the future. 

WHY AND HOW TWITTER WORKFORCE WAS REDUCED

Chamath: How did you get to your intuition on what the efficient frontier of employees needed to be to make the product better? 

Elon: Well…

David Sacks: I observed part of this, where you basically ask the question, “who here is critical, and who here is exceptional?”

Elon:  Yes, really what the criteria are trying to apply and obviously you’re not gonna be perfect if you’re moving fast and there’s a lot of people you’re talking about here, is anyone who is exceptional with what they do where the role is critical and they have a positive effect on others and they are trusted meaning they put the company’s interests before their own, should stay.  And you know also who is up for working hard. That was not Twitter’s prior culture.

Chamath: Were you surprised that the intersection of that circle and the people that left was basically 25%?  Were you surprised it was that deep or did you think your intuition was like, ‘It’s probably somewhere in here?’

Elon: Well I think you could just stand back and say, without knowing how many employees Twitter has at all and say ‘how many people are really needed to run Twitter?’

Like let’s say you don’t know what the employee count number is at all. How many people are needed to keep the site operational? Like let’s say if -excluding product evolution-  You basically have to keep the servers going and you have to have a customer support function to take down material that is in violation of the law. what’s the minimum number of people?  It’s not like a giant number.

David Sacks: Twitter still has like 2000 people right? 

Elon: Yeah we still have 2000 people it’s not that nothing and there’s actually on the order of almost 5000 contractors. Almost all the what’s called ‘trust and safety work,’  which is like the support functions for the site are done by contractors. 

LESS HATE SPEECH, BOTS AND TROLLS, A NEW INCENTIVE STRUCTURE EMERGES

David Sacks: You’re doing a lot more to take down hate speech than the company previously was doing. 

Elon: Yeah, absolutely, hate speech Impressions are down by a third and will get even lower. 

David Friedberg: Maybe you could speak a little bit to what we discovered in those early weeks, which was the incentive. Previously it was to create as many accounts as possible and there were a lot of quick fixes to lowering all these, you know, what people might call ‘bot accounts.” In some cases it was people opening many millions of accounts, but we discovered this very early how easy it was for the tech team to lower the bot count and all the fake accounts. 

Elon: Well, we still have a fair number of bots in the system. The incentive structure, the way Twitter was set up previously was this relentless focus on what they call mDau which is monetizable daily active users, although I would say the monetizable part is dubious.

But at least the things that appeared to be monetized or could be passed off as monetizable daily active users. So this created an incentive to turn a blind eye to fake accounts.

So if the incentive structure is like ‘Maximize the appearance of monetizable daily active users,’ then it’s a strong incentive to pretend that a bot is real, and that’s what happened.

So we’re taking a lot of steps to reduce the bots and troll situation, so many!  And I think you’re seeing that in the usage. It’s now relatively rare to have your replies filled with crypto scams. 

ELON’S BUSINESS MODEL INSPIRES OTHER TECH FIRMS

David Friedberg explained that there are many companies in Silicon Valley that want to copy Elon Musk’s method of fast iteration. David said he talks to a lot of tech companies who have CEOs and investors and boards, and they’re starting to say ‘Look at what Elon did at Twitter, how can we do something as aggressive as swift as deep?’ David asked Elon if he thinks much about his business model.

Elon: I mean, to be frank, I’m not thinking about it that much, I’m just thinking about like how do we get Twitter to be in a financially healthy place and fix the engine of engineering so we can have a rapid evolution of new products. and so I guess I’m in some ways in sort of a fortunate position where I don’t have to answer, because it’s not public, and we don’t have a board really.

So I can take actions that are drastic and obviously if I make a bunch of mistakes then Twitter won’t succeed and that will be pretty embarrassing and sad.

But as long as the batting average is good, and the wins significantly outweigh the mistakes, then it will be a great future and I think I’m very optimistic about where things are headed.

TWITTER WILL NOT MONETIZE HATE SPEECH AND BOTS VS. TROLLS 

Jason Calacanis asked Elon about freedom of speech and how he feels about it post Twitter acquisition. 

Elon: Well, the general principle is that we should hew close to the law in any given country, so the laws vary quite a lot by country and so I think we should be doing free-speech that’s close to the law and that’s the general principle.

I think there are other things where it’s like for example, if you’re an advertiser you don’t want your Ad -like let’s say- it’s a Family Movie next to some NSFW content, even if that continent is text. There’s more of an allowance for what somebody might call hate speech on the system, but it’s not going to be promoted. Like, we’re not going to be recommending hate speech, haha,  just at the risk of stating the obvious. (pause) 

And we are not going to monetize hate speech or negative speech.  Nor would advertisers want us to. I think it’s going to be a rare product that wants to be near seriously negative stuff.

Elon explains the difference between bots and trolls in relation to Jason’s question about freedom of speech versus freedom of reach. 

Jason: I was going to say you referred to it as freedom of speech, but not reach because this is a very nuanced discussion. Should this stuff be able to hit the trends? 

Elon: It’s certainly possible that some things that will be regarded as hate speech will hit trends, but I think it’s going to be relatively unusual especially as we are doing a better job of controlling the bots and trolls situation. and I do want to emphasize there’s a difference between the bots and the trolls.

Bots are like fully automated accounts, but a troll farm would be where like you’ve got like 100 people in a warehouse somewhere, each with 100 phones so they’re actually humans and they’re going to pass a capture test and they can reply because actually they’re humans. But it’s 10,000 accounts that are obviously not operating as real people.

So, stuff like that can cause things to trend negatively. That’s why I’m a big proponent of having a low-cost verification capability. 

Elon continued, explaining how he applied his way of thinking to Twitter.  You might know this famous quote: 

“Failure is an option here. 
If things are not failing 
you are not innovating.” -Elon Musk

Elon: This is definitely a work in progress.  One of the first things I said, after the acquisition closed was, we’re going to make a bunch of mistakes but then will try to recover from them quickly.  And that’s what we’ve done. I think we’ve generally succeeded in recovering from them quickly and it’s been going pretty well. 

ELON MUSK PERSONALLY CALLED PAUL GRAHAM TO APOLOGIZE FOR TWITTER SUSPENSION 

David Friedberg asked if the Paul Graham and journalist suspensions were mistakes.  “Have you talked publicly about how that all got resolved at the end?”

Elon: Yes, the Paul Graham suspension was definitely a mistake. I actually called Paul Graham to apologize personally for that one.

On the journalist front, I think the journalist suspensions were not a mistake. For some reason, a bunch of journalists thought they were better than everyone else and that if they engaged in doxxing and breaking the rules in various ways that they’re not subject to suspension even though your average citizen is. I think that’s just messed up.

The same rules should apply to people that call themselves journalists as to anyone else on the system. They shouldn’t be sort of, above the rules. for some reason they thought they should be. so that doesn’t make sense, I don’t think that’s right. 

You can read about how Elon Musk‘s family was put at serious risk by multiple journalists purposely exposing his flight plans ahead of time in This is why Twitter suspended several journalists yesterday. by Johnna Crider. 

TWITTER TO UNVEIL NEW FEATURES IN JANUARY

David Friedberg also asked Elon to elaborate on shadow banning and transparency. Jason explained that if there’s going to be a system of shadow banning that the rules should be clear to everybody. 

Elon: Yeah, absolutely, so that’s something I’m committed to and we will probably be able to roll that out in January.

By the way, we are not going to be rolling out a ton of new features over Christmas and New Year’s and stuff so…. the next sort of feature set will probably roll out mid to late January.

And hopefully, in that we can include information about why an account gets suspended or what is called in Twitter visibility filtering ha ha a.k.a. shadow banning. There’s a lot of things that just happen accidentally. What are the rules in the system that are meant to detect that someone is a bot or a troll and then an account is sort of innocently caught up in that.

So ha ha there’s some accounts that were just suspended yesterday because — temporary suspended, they got like 12 hours suspensions because — someone in trust and safety thought they had posted a nude photo of Hunter Biden or something but they haven’t actually done that (laughter) I don’t know, it was just basically a mistake. There was some account that got a 12-hour suspension yesterday in error and they weren’t sure why it happened. It was essentially a mistake with Twitter Customer support that was corrected.

CHAMATH ASKS ELON MUSK TO SHARE HIS VIEWS ON A 2023 RECESSION

Elon: Well I think it does seem like we’re headed into a recession here in 2023.

The magnitude of that recession is debatable, but I think it’s at least a light to moderate recession potentially on the order of 2009.

So I think it’s wise to prepare for the worst — hope for the best, prepare for the worst — don’t get too adventurous, watch out for margin debt. Like I would really advise people to not have margin debt in a volatile stock market and from a cash standpoint, keep powder dry.

You can get some pretty extreme things happening in a down market. Like Brett Johnson, who is the CFO at SpaceX, was at Broadcom in 2000 and that’s a good company making good products. And he said from peak to trough, I think in less than 12 months Broadcom went down 97%.

So like even if you had a small margin loan there you got crushed. It subsequently recovered to much higher levels but you know if there’s like mass panic in the stock market then you’ve got to be really careful about margin debt.

But this is just, as we know, the economy is cyclic and its somewhat overdue for a recession. And my best guess is that we have sort of stormy times for a year to a year and a half and then things start to … Dawn breaks roughly in Q2 2024.  That’s like my best guess.

Booms don’t last forever but neither do recessions.  

ELON MUSK’S REASON FOR THE TWITTER FILES 

Elon: I think it’s important to, like if you know if we’re going to be trusted in the future to kind of clear the decks for stuff that’s happened in the past so to be totally frank, almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.(laughter from all) Haha, so … is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn’t turn out to be true?

So far, they all turned out to be true. And if not more true than people thought.

Chamath asked Elon what he thought was the most shocking thing about the Twitter files so far.

Elon: The FBI stuff was pretty intense!

Elon mentioned to the group that the FBI was flagging content to take down that had nothing to do with terrorism. He said, “they literally flagged satire.” 

Elon: Maybe they didn’t get the joke, I don’t know, haha! 

Here’s a link to some of the satire that was flagged by the FBI on Twitter and Michael Shellenburgers Twitter thread that exposed this insidious practice.

You can listen to Elon Musk (set one hour in) on the All-In Podcast here.

CONCLUSION

It’s a big deal that Twitter shows view counts, this helps people to know that they are seen. It’s more significant than likes. If you pay 8/$11, you can have a verified blue check eventually. I think it’s a great idea for people who can afford it. David Sacks came up with a wonderful idea that was implemented called Twitter for Business/Organizations. It helps to validate people’s claims that they represent an organization.

As far as Twitter‘s batting average, Elon Musk explains how in baseball you look at the big picture and not the individual strikeouts, etc. Basically, Twitter has an excellent batting average.

Elon admits that mistakes are made and explains that on deciding the Twitter workforce, it’s important to look at what’s actually needed. Not ‘how many people you should eliminate.’

Twitter’s incentive structure is changing and will not be based on hate speech magnified by bots and trolls.

I was surprised to hear that other tech firms in Silicon Valley are inspired by Elon Musk’s business model of making swift and drastic changes. The fact is, he is greatly respected and admired, even though the mainstream media would have you believe otherwise.

Again, Elon emphasizes that Twitter will not monetize hate speech. When you watch the video, he has an earnest demeanor when he says this, even pausing between his words. Twitter will not monetize hate speech. This is great news.

As far as Twitter’s suspensions of journalists and of Paul Graham, the Paul Graham suspension was an accident and Elon announced that he personally called Paul to apologize. However, the journalists were not accidentally suspended because they doxxed his family’s private location. This put his family’s life at risk. This is something normal people could not do, and so journalists should be held to the same level of accountability as regular people.

Elon mentioned that new features will be unveiled in January. We’re all looking forward to that. Elon believes we are heading towards a recession and he shares his information in the podcast and you can read about that above if you’re interested. Basically, Elon reminds us that the dawn will break after the stormy times. And he thinks that time will happen roughly in Q2 2024, that’s his best guess.

Lastly, Elon chuckles over the FBI flagging parody accounts in the Twitter files. I agree it is pretty hilarious that a parody account would actually be the reason for the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The interview ended with Elon giving up his seat to Michael Schellenberger, the writer who released the Twitter files on the FBI.

Fun Sidestory: I had the opportunity to get to know some of the Dogecoin community including Gary Lachance. I met Gary in Austin and I was excited to find out there were T-shirts with the Doge drone show from Cyber Rodeo and Texas Rodeo Doge shirts. Later when I was invited to meet Elon Musk at Giga Texas, I asked Gary if he had any extra shirts. Eventually, I met a friend of Gary’s in Austin who passed me a box of shirts and a ceramic tile. Elon received the Rodeo Doge and Drone Doge t-shirts and was appreciative and grateful for them. It’s cool to see Elon wearing the Rodeo Doge t-shirt.

_{Gail Alfar, author. Exclusive to What’s Up Twitter – December 29, 2022. All Rights Reserved. My goal as an author is to support Twitter 2.0 and Elon Musk in both making lives better on earth for humans and becoming a space-fairing civilization.}