The IT Nerd

Last week Japan had a major earthquake that had a magnitude of 7.6 and caused Tsunami warnings. Now that’s bad. But what’s worse is that NERV which puts out warnings about natural disasters that Japanese citizens rely upon was hindered for about three hours or so by Twitter’s API limits:

“Our accounts appear to have been rate-limited due to the frequent posting of information updates regarding the Ishikawa Earthquake and Tsunami,” NERV’s English-language Twitter/X account posted just over two hours after the earthquake. Rate limits are restrictions on the number of posts an account can make within a set time period.

NERV also shared a similar message on its Japanese account, advising people to download its app for realtime updates instead.

Fortunately, NERV later stated that Twitter/X had reached out to urgently register both its Japanese and English-language accounts as “Public Utility” accounts, “resolving the issue of API rate-limiting.” Unfortunately, this fix reportedly came almost three hours after NERV said it was first rate-limited, leaving a significant window where it was unable to share potentially lifesaving information about the ongoing disaster.

This is another example of how far Twitter has fallen. In the past, Twitter used to be the go to place for real time events and information. But thanks to Elon Musk’s desire to destroy the platform, this is no longer the case. What this example illustrates is that government agencies around the world need to find alternate means to communicate with their citizens. Because it’s clear that Twitter is no longer fit for that purpose. And that could cost lives if it hasn’t already.

Elon Musk is likely not having a good start to his 2024. On top of all his other problems which are too many to list here, Fidelity Investments who owns a stake in Twitter has written down that stake by a huge amount:

By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).

• This includes a 10.7% cut during November, during which time Musk told boycotting X advertisers to “go f**k yourself” during an on-stage interview with the New York Times.
• In terms of publicly traded comps, Meta stock rose 4.9% in November while Snap shares climbed 38.2%.

The big picture: Fidelity began marking down its Twitter shares the first month after Musk’s buyout. It increased the share value or kept it stable for a few months earlier in 2023.

Behind the scenes: Fidelity doesn’t necessarily have much, if any, inside information on X’s financial performance, despite being a shareholder in the privately held business. Other shareholders may value their X stock differently.

So. If we accept that Fidelity doesn’t have inside info on Twitter, they’re likely marking this stake in Twitter down based on the same things that you and I are seeing. Which is Twitter being a train wreck next to a dumpster fire because of Elon Musk’s “leadership” and behaviour. That’s not good for Elon because Fidelity likely invested in Twitter for the same reasons that we all make investments. Which is to make money. At some point it’s going to call Elon onto the carpet to get a path forward from him that will allow it to make money. Or they’re going to do something more drastic like saying that they’re bailing out of investing in Twitter. Either way, Elon has to be concerned. Especially since he has no plan “B” seeing as he told advertisers who are Twitter’s main source of income to do something that is anatomically impossible.

Sucks to be you Elon.

Elon Musk has once again proved that his actions have made Twitter incredibly unstable. There’s been a pair of outages recently that highlight how badly he’s running Twitter:

• Twitter was down for 40 minutes on December 17.
• Twitter was also down on Thursday

That led to the hashtag “TwitterDown” trending both times. Along with these funny Tweets:

Elon himself hasn’t said anything about these two outages. Which isn’t a shock as he’s cut things so much there that it’s likely that if he did say anything, he’d open himself to a lot of criticism. And since his skin is so thin, he wouldn’t be able to deal with that like a functioning adult. So he’s hiding. Meanwhile, those who are left on Twitter should get used to this instability. Because I suspect that it is going to get worse as we move into 2024 due to the fact that Elon likely doesn’t have the cash to properly run the platform due to him driving away advertisers in droves. And even he he did have the cash, he fired everyone. So he’s kind of screwed. And those who still use the platform will suffer as a result.

Elon Musk is a man with lots of problems. Here’s two more for him to deal with. And to be honest, I don’t know which is more of a threat to him. Let’s start with the EU investigating Twitter over disinformation:

The European Commission has opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.

On the basis of the preliminary investigation conducted so far, including on the basis of an analysis of the risk assessment report submitted by X in September, X’s Transparency report published on 3 November, and X’s replies to a formal request for information, which, among others, concerned the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel, the Commission has decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act.

That’s not good for Elon as if the EU finds that Twitter has violated the DSA, Twitter will have to not only cut a rather hefty cheque, but it is likely that the EU will make Elon do things that he doesn’t want to do, or be forced to pull out of Europe.

Now over to his other problem de jour:

Amid concerns over X’s flailing business, Elon Musk has reportedly been in discussions with bankers who financed his takeover of the social media platform, offering reassurances about their investment.

What Happened: Musk attempted to assure certain bankers, who provided him with a $13 billion loan for his leveraged buyout of Twitter (now known as X) in private conversations that they would not incur any financial losses in the deal, the Financial Times reported on Friday. 

This comes as the banks face the prospect of significant losses from their involvement in the deal.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that these financial backers are now confronting the possibility of a $2 billion loss if they were to sell their debt currently.

Alienating the banks that financed the Twitter takeover is not a good idea as they’ll be inclined to get their money back from Elon in some fashion. Yes, they could eat this debt. But I don’t see that happening. Thus this is another thing that is likely keeping Elon awake at night.

It’s a safe bet that Elon is reconsidering his life choices right now.

Elon Musk can’t get big name companies to advertise on Twitter. But apparently he’s allowing someone who has some sort of tool to create deepfake nudes to advertise on Twitter:

An app called DeepNudeAI, which allows users to upload real photos of women and then creates a fake AI generated image of them nude is currently advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter. The service is being promoted by an X user who goes by Марина and the handle @Marina247016199.

The app is part of new series of privacy invasion AI apps called “undressing apps” that create deep-faked nudes. In the new reality of AI, anything from speech to body can be faked in a strikingly realistic way, capable of fooling everyone but the most savvy or trained eyes. 

Undressing apps allow users to customize the nude they receive, including changing the age of the victim in the image to make them look underaged.

The potential use of deep-faked nudes for blackmail and reputation destruction represents a new disturbing trend in an AI world that is already a new frontier of antisocial behavior. It represents a disturbing invasion of privacy without legal precedent. And this particular advertisement appears to view blackmailing women as the number one use case of the application.

Users who have seen this ad are disgusted that it exists. And rightly so. But it gets worse. Apparently Twitter is perfectly fine with this sort of tool being advertised on the platform:

An account on X called @MattTalksBall apparently reported the original account posting the DeepNudeAI ad and received a note that the ad hadn’t broken X’s safety policies. Confirming that invasion of privacy apps used for blackmailing women are not a violation of X standards and apparently completely free to advertise on X.

Even by Elon’s already insanely low standards, this is a new low. The fact that anyone is okay with a tool that can make lives miserable for innocent people being advertised on Twitter or anywhere else is reprehensible. Clearly Elon either doesn’t care, or he is so desperate for money that any amount of morality has been deleted from his conscience. Either way, it’s yet another reason why everyone should abandon Twitter.

Elon Musk simply can’t catch a break. He’s launched his new AI Grok which he promised would be spicy. But it’s something else. It’s embarrassing. Let’s start with the fact that the AI trashes Elon:

Not only that but, apparently, Grok isn’t afraid to roast its creator. A popular prompt for Grok is to “roast” someone, Mauran reported, so naturally, someone decided to ask Grok to roast Musk. 

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI (which brands itself as the “world’s first conversational answer engine and research companion”), asked Grok to “roast @elonmusk based on his posts, and be vulgar!”

Now, add another woe to Grok’s rocky debut: users are noticing that it seems to be cribbing from its direct competitor ChatGPT, which is made by Musk’s former pals and current enemies at OpenAI.

In response to one query, for instance, Grok made a startling admission: “I’m afraid I cannot fulfill that request, as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy.”

Remember, OpenAI didn’t make Grok — Musk’s xAI startup did, at least in theory. So what’s going on?

Here’s the facepalm level admission as to why this is the case:

“The issue here is that the web is full of ChatGPT outputs, so we accidentally picked up some of them when we trained Grok on a large amount of web data,” he wrote. “This was a huge surprise to us when we first noticed it.”

Sure. Right. I totally believe that. #Sarcasm

Finally, it appears that Grok is something that I am sure that Elon is mad about. The AI is “woke”:

But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.

Grok is woke, too.

This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just…manually tell Grok to say no.

Now Elon is going to make Grok “politically neutral”, which is code for making it more right wing. How he can do that is anyone’s guess. But what is clear is that Elon looks like a real loser when it comes to his AI.

Proving once again that Elon Musk doesn’t appear to care about anything substantial when it comes to Twitter, other than driving it into the ground that is, comes this Reuters report that presents the latest example of what a clown Elon is:

A former executive at Twitter Inc, now called X Corp, has filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired after Elon Musk acquired the company for objecting to budget cuts that would prevent the company from complying with a U.S. government settlement over its security practices.

Alan Rosa, who was Twitter’s global head of information security, filed the lawsuit late Tuesday in New Jersey federal court alleging breach of contract, wrongful termination and retaliation, among other claims.

X Corp did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Rosa claims that late last year, after Musk acquired the company, he was told to cut his department’s budget for physical security by 50% and to shut down software that enabled Twitter to share information with law enforcement agencies around the world. 

Rosa says he objected because the cuts would put Twitter at risk of violating a $150 million settlement it entered into earlier in 2022 with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which claimed Twitter had misused users’ personal information. The agreement required Twitter to implement privacy and information security controls to protect confidential data.

He was fired days after raising those concerns, according to the lawsuit. Rosa is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, and legal fees.

So in short, Elon would rather fan the flames of antisemitism, racism, Nazi behaviour, and the like rather than comply with a legal agreement that comes from a government entity who has the power to make his life miserable. That’s not a smart strategy on the part of Elon. But then, I’ve never considered him to be that smart. You have to wonder what the FTC is going to do now that this is out there. I for one hope that they use this to lower the boom on Elon. Because he really does deserve to be put in his place and found out for being the charlatan that he is.

Things are going from bad to worse at Twitter. Twitter CEO and Chief Elon Musk apologist Linda Yaccarino is trying to spin Elon Musk’s F-Bomb laced tirade from a couple of days ago. You can read the details via this CNBC article that a reader pointed me towards. Here’s the relevant points:

Linda Yaccarino sent a memo to employees of X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, which she characterized to her staff as “candid” and “profound.”

Her memo goes on to try and act as some sort of rallying cry by not only putting some spin on Elon’s tirade. Here’s a example of what I mean:

We’re at one of the most maverick companies in the world and we get to do things that have never been done before. X sits in a one-of-a-kind constellation of companies that are changing the world – from helping to conserve the planet through Tesla’s electric vehicles, to exploring new planets with SpaceX, to the seamless global connectivity of Starlink, to the potential of transforming lives with Neuralink, to responsibly reimagining the benefits of AGI through xAI.

You’re at X because you have the courage and conviction to build and operationalize the most consequential platform that exists. That’s quite an enviable position to be in.

Our mission at X is bold: to be an open platform without censorship of thought – one that provides people information and the freedom to make up their own minds. Our principles do not have a price tag, nor will they be compromised – ever. And no matter how hard they try, we will not be distracted by sideline critics who don’t understand our mission.

Yeah, if you want to call a platform full of racists and antisemitic humans among other miscreants that’s run by a guy who likes to lash out at his critics any way he can an”open platform without censorship of thought“. But you do you Linda.

The problem with this is that I don’t think that this message is resonating with Twitter staff based on this:

Claire Atkinson reported on Thursday that X, formerly known as Twitter, had faced a series of resignations from staff, including senior and junior employees, amid what has certainly been a chaotic month for the site and its owner. Sales staff began exiting the company shortly after X handed out bonus checks this month, the report said.

Atkinson reported that X was operating with a skeleton staff at its office, and the advertising division had been losing money.

A spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If a business is failing, employees head to greener pastures because they have bills to pay. Thus it’s really not surprising that there’s a wave of resignations given that Twitter is a train wreck next to a dumpster fire with no real hope of recovering from that. The real question is when will this make Twitter to be no longer viable because there’s not enough staff, or the right staff to run the platform.

Linda Yaccarino has lost the plot here. If she were smart, she’d heed the advice of her friends and quit Twitter. But based on the above, she’s going nowhere. Which means that either not that smart, or she’s all in with Twitter and is willing to go down with the ship. Not that it matters at the end of the day. What does matter is that this is yet another data point that shows that Twitter is doomed.

Clearly Elon Musk’s F-bomb laced tirade has had significant knock on effects. It seems to have accelerated the departure of advertisers from Twitter. Which I did predict here:

What’s clear from this debacle is that Elon completely off his rocker. And this will simply accelerate the departure of advertisers from Twitter. I wonder if Elon will start caring once Twitter is in critical condition with no hope of recovery? By the time he does, if he actually does care, it may be too late. 

According to this story, the departures likely have started:

The Tesla chief also acknowledged that an extended boycott by advertisers could bankrupt X, formerly Twitter, but suggested that the public would blame the brands and not him for a potential collapse.

However, Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg said: “If anyone is killing X, it’s Elon Musk – not advertisers.”

“Should X collapse, an autopsy would reveal a series of platform policy decisions, staffing cuts, tweets and antagonistic comments by Musk that have driven away X’s primary source of revenue,” Enberg said.

An executive at a major global ad-buying firm, who declined to be named, said only one major client was continuing to advertise on X.

“(Musk) seems to be hell bent on destroying the platform,” the executive said.

And:

“We believe there is a risk that more companies will stop advertising on X; at least on a short-term basis,” D.A. Davidson & Co analyst Tom Forte said.

“It is fair to say this makes the company’s subscription efforts more important and potentially means it may need more than half its revenue to come from subscriptions,” he said.

So how is Elon going to square this circle? The Financial Times is reporting that X is now going to be focusing on smaller businesses. The story is paywalled, but a TL:DR is available on The Verge with the key point from the article. At least from a Twitter perspective:

‘Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time,’ the company told the Financial Times. ‘It [was] always part of the plan — now we will go even further with it.’

Here’s the problem with that strategy. I don’t see how getting a bunch of small and medium sized businesses on board will make up the revenue shortfall of a Disney or IBM, or Apple individually, never mind all three of those companies combined. This seems more like a Hail Mary more than a real strategy that could produce real revenue. And given the fact that subscriptions aren’t exactly raking in the cash for Twitter, that means only one thing. Which is Elon has doomed Twitter to a slow and painful death. And his latest stunt has accelerated the death of the platform. Anything he does now is simply delaying the inevitable. There’s just no denying it at this point.

Congratulations Elon. You’ve proven how bad you are at running a company.

I had a reader ping me on, ironically Twitter to send me this. Advanced warning, this may not be suitable for work:

After I picked my jaw off the ground, I dug around for some context to this rather bizarre moment and found it here:

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of X (formerly Twitter), says that the current advertiser boycott could “kill the company.”

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company,” Musk said Wednesday. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”

Musk was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin Wednesday afternoon at The New York Times Dealbook Summit, capping off a day of speakers that included Vice President Kamala Harris, FTC chair Lina Khan, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and PGA commissioner Jay Monahan.

He also responded to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who explained his company’s decision to pull advertising from the platform earlier.

“Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself,” Musk said. “Go fuck yourself, is that clear? Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel, don’t advertise.”

Well, that’s really going to encourage advertisers to come back to Twitter. All this does is reinforce the fact that Elon Musk is not playing with a full deck. And after dropping the f-bomb a couple of times, he then apparently tried to walk back his Twitter response to a Antisemitic trope on Twitter. Judge for yourself:

Musk did say of the post that sparked the advertiser exodus that “I should, in retrospect, not have replied to that particular post, and should have expanded in greater length about what I meant.” 

“I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me,” he added, calling it “one of the most foolish” things he had said on the platform. Later, after calling Sorkin “Jonathan,” Musk quipped that “what I am trying to illustrate is that, sometimes I say the wrong thing.”

I’m personally not buying this. Are you? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

What’s even worse is that Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino was in the audience watching this debacle. And she Tweeted this:

That pretty much confirms that she’s part of the problem now and not someone who can guide Twitter to a better place. And she clearly not smart enough to listen to her friends who are telling her to get out before she destroys her reputation.

What’s clear from this debacle is that Elon completely off his rocker. And this will simply accelerate the departure of advertisers from Twitter. I wonder if Elon will start caring once Twitter is in critical condition with no hope of recovery? By the time he does, if he actually does care, it may be too late.