Twitter - X

Omid Kordestani’s lawsuit, which was reported on by The New York Times, follows a lawsuit from the company’s former CEO, CFO, chief legal officer, and former general counsel over more than $128 million in unpaid severance.

Randal Cooper imagines a response to a user trying to quit the platform formerly known as Twitter:

These actions constitute an illegal one-person boycott that infringes on our client’s constitutional right to free speech, as well as his right to monetize that speech in several ways, and has caused him irreparable harm.

In an all-hands at X, CEO Linda Yaccarino attempted to rally the troops after filing a lawsuit against a coalition of major advertisers, claiming they had coordinated an “illegal boycott” and cost the company billions of dollars.

Yaccarino urged employees to “review the evidence,” a source at X told me. She also hyped up X payments and shopping on the platform, but didn’t announce a launch date, and emphasized X’s “pivot to video.”

X is moving out from the building Elon Musk famously walked into while carrying a kitchen sink, per an internal memo I’ve seen.

In the email to employees, X CEO Linda Yaccarino says the company will “transition to our new primary locations in the Bay Area,” including an office in San Jose and a “shared space” with Musk’s xAI in Palo Alto.

Mark Kalman, X’s engineering lead of media, and his second-in-command, Melissa Merencillo, resigned today. They announced their departures in a company Slack channel on the day stocks vest at X; Merencillo told The Verge that the timing had no bearing on their decision.

This is a big loss for X, a source tells me. Kalman is the main source of knowledge for all things X media infrastructure, and more important than that, he’s good at “handling” Elon Musk.

Update: added comment from Merencillo.

There’s no official confirmation, but the app — which has been abandoned before — has been delisted from the Mac App Store. It’s still functional, although it’s been increasingly buggy since the transition to X. It remains one of the last vestiges of Twitter iconography and terminology which I’ll memorialize in the grab below.

Update:  The Mac app now prompts users to “upgrade” to the iPad version of X, which is a worse experience.

Based on the screenshot below from app researcher Nima Owji, the new checkmark would be in the same menu as other per-post options that let you limit replies. X employee Christopher Stanley confirmed the feature, Engadget spotted.

I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.

One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?

The platform is promoting trending topics including “staged” and “#falseflag” — the kinds of conspiracy theories that other major social networks might moderate away.

That’s a whole lot easier than scrolling through several years worth of bookmarks just to find a particular post. The feature is only available on the web and iOS for now.

As reported by The Financial Times:

In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6 per cent from the same period the year before.

The stalled growth and general turmoil at X, ever since Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, created an opening for Zuckerberg’s Threads to attract 175 million monthly users in its first year.

The best part of X’s post is this reply.

Bloomberg has a big report on X’s efforts to let you make payments through the app, including that it has made agreements with payment processors like Stripe.

Bloomberg also found not-great financials from 2023:

[Documents] show that X generated $1.48 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2023, down almost 40% from the same period in 2022, before Musk bought the company.

If you want the TL;DR, read Kurt Wagner’s Threads thread.

Dorsey donated 14 Bitcoins to Nostr’s anonymous founder in 2022. That founder is Giovanni Torres Parra, according to Business Insider. Parra is a devotee of “far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho,” who “claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses.” 

Proof once again that it’s easier to make money when you already have it, especially at the peak of the AI hype cycle.

Four months ago Musk posted the following after the Financial Times said xAI was seeking investments up to $6 billion:

xAI is not raising capital and I have had no conversations with anyone in this regard

Update 5:08AM ET: Added Musk quote.

It’s been five years since “threadnought,” a giant Twitter thread in which lawyers battled trolls who were trying to silence critics of an anime voice actor accused of sexual misconduct.

Now, with a law firm drafted from the thread’s funniest people, lawyer Akiva Cohen represents many former Twitter employees who are suing Elon Musk over how he fired them after buying the company.