The IT Nerd

Elon Musk is getting really desperate to get people to pay to use Twitter. In his latest “Hail Mary” to get you to pay up, Elon’s decided to do the following:

Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.

The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.

Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2023

So let’s think about this. Elon Musk is basically going to force Twitter users to pay up by keeping them from voting in polls and not showing them in the “for you” recommendations. I’m pretty sure that this is going to have the opposite effect. As in people will say that it’s not worth being on Twitter if Elon’s going to do this and instead of paying him $8 ($11 if you’re on iOS) a month to be on Twitter, they will instead run to Mastodon. Which appears to already be happening based on this:

For the last week or two, Mastodon has had somewhere between one and two thousand new accounts created every hour. You have to assume those are Twitter users who are fleeing the platform because of Elon’s behaviour, his idiotic policies, or instability of the platform. Such as what happened this morning according to Down Detector:

I am not sure what happened, but clearly something did an hour ago. And I expect this sort of random instability with Twitter to become more and more prevalent. All of that combined will diminish Twitter’s value to users and send them to greener pastures with more stable leadership. That in turn will reduce the value of Twitter to advertisers and deprive Elon of cash. And Twitter will die as a result and Elon will seen as a loser. Which will be a major blow to his fragile ego that I am not sue that he will be able to cope with.

Elon Musk paid $44 billion USD for Twitter. And many said at the time he overpaid. But according to Musk, Twitter at present is worth less than HALF of what he paid for it:

Twitter is now worth just $20billion — less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it six months ago, the world’s richest man told his employees.

In a company-wide email on Friday, Musk said the social media giant has lost so much money in recent months that it is now worth jut $20billion, a whopping $24billion less than what he purchased it for in October.

He then went on to defend his decision to lay off thousands of employees in the months since he took the helm of the company, and sell off a variety of merchandise in recent auctions — claiming that Twitter was once just four months from being bankrupt.

That’s mind blowing. Sure Twitter wasn’t worth $44 billion. But prior to his purchase it was worth more that $20 billion via some quick Googling that I did. That illustrates how much he’s really screwed up here to tank the value of the company by that much money.

Oh yeah, there’s also this:

In his company-wide email on Friday, obtained by the New York Times, Musk defended his decisions to lay off massive swaths of employees, saying the ‘radical changes’ to the company were necessary to save money.

He claimed that Twitter should be looked at as an ‘inverse start-up’ as he tries to rebrand the company, saying: ‘Twitter is being reshaped rapidly.’

And if his efforts are successful, Musk suggested that Twitter can one day be worth $250billion.

His remarks came as he explained the new stock compensation package he is offering to the less than 2,000 employees still left at the company.

Under his plan, Twitter employees will receive stock grants for the company he established to buy the social media platform — the X Corporation — which will operate under the $20billion estimate.

Workers will then be able to sell and cash in on their privately-held stocks every six months. 

Doing so, he said, would allow employees to have ‘liquid stock, but without the stock price chaos and lawsuit burdens of a public company.’

Musk has previously implemented a similar program at his Space X firm. 

I don’t know what drugs Elon is smoking. But nothing that he’s done with Twitter indicates that this company will be worth $250 billion in the future. In fact I would say that Elon has sent Twitter’s valuation in the other direction. Clearly Elon is either stoned or delusional. Perhaps both.

Strangely, the fact that he’s tanked Twitter’s value by over 50% isn’t his worst problem at the moment. This is:

Parts of Twitter’s source code, the underlying computer code on which the social network runs, were leaked online, according to a legal filing, a rare and major exposure of intellectual property as the company struggles to reduce technical issues and reverse its business fortunes under Elon Musk.

Twitter moved on Friday to have the leaked code taken down by sending a copyright infringement notice to GitHub, an online collaboration platform for software developers where the code was posted, according to the filing. GitHub complied and took down the code that day. It was unclear how long the leaked code had been online, but it appeared to have been public for at least several months.

Twitter also asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and any other individuals who downloaded it, according to the filing.

Twitter launched an investigation into the leak and executives handling the matter have surmised that whoever was responsible left the San Francisco-based company last year, two people briefed on the internal investigation said. Since Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, about 75 percent of the company’s 7,500 employees have been laid off or resigned.

The executives were only recently made aware of the source code leak, the people briefed on the internal investigation said. One concern is that the code includes security vulnerabilities that could give hackers or other motivated parties the means to extract user data or take down the site, they said.

Well, this is a huge problem for Elon as anyone who can grab this code from GitHub and evade detection by GitHub as to downloading this code, which frankly someone singular or plural is going to evade detection by GitHub, is going to have the means to make life a living hell for Twitter and Elon. Threat actors would be able to launch attacks on Twitter at will, then rinse and repeat as Twitter will only be able to close the attack vector that was used in any one attack. To have any hope of stopping this, Twitter would have to do a full code review to even begin to close any of the possible attack vectors that they can find. And even then they won’t get all of them as threat actors would be one step ahead of them. Not to mention that threat actors would likely come up with attacks that Twitter would never envision based on what they find in the source code. It’s the ultimate game of “whack a mole” where Twitter is always going to be on the losing end of it.

If you’re one of the few people who are still on Twitter, you might want to buckle up. Because I suspect that things are about to get very bumpy. And Elon is going to be having a number of sleepless nights in the weeks ahead.