Elon Musk has disclosed that he had sold another $3.6 billion worth of Tesla stock. Credit...Matt Rourke/Associated Press. The New York Times, 15 December 2022.
Musk loses $100bn in a year
What we know:
Musk’s net worth has fallen below that of France’s Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of luxury goods maker LVMH (CBS);
His wealth has dropped by more than $US100bn this year, more than the GDP of Bulgaria, Croatia, Iceland and Uruguay;
Musk this week sold about $US3.6bn in Tesla shares, despite declaring earlier in the year he had no further plans to sell shares (CNBC);
It comes as he takes legal action against the holder of a Twitter account that tracks his private jet, and suspends the user, a month after declaring he would allow it to keep running (BBC);
Musk has meanwhile allowed a host of contentious fringe figures to rejoin Twitter, apparently including anti-vaxxer Pete Evans (Crikey);
As advertisers flee the platform and revenue crumbles, Twitter has reportedly stopped paying rent on offices and is considering not paying severance packages to former employees (New York Times);
Musk has sacked more than half of Twitter’s workforce, including reps who oversaw relationships with advertisers, staff in charge of complying with regulations, and a team devoted to enterprise products that brought in hundreds of millions a year (Bloomberg);
Musk’s vast borrowing to overpay for the acquisition means he faces $US1.2bn a year in interest payments, at a variable rate, with the first cheque due to the banks at the end of January;…..
The Guardian, 16 December 2022:
A number of prominent journalists who have reported on Twitter and its new chief executive, Elon Musk, appear to have been suspended or banned from the platform.
In a series of evening tweets, Musk wrote that sharing his real-time location on Twitter was forbidden, and accused journalists who he alleged had been sharing information about his location of posting “assassination coordinates”.
Accounts of tech journalists at CNN, the Washington Post, Mashable and the New York Times were suspended in quick succession on Thursday evening. All had recently published articles about Musk’s suspension of a Twitter account that had shared publicly available data about the movements of his private jet. Each of these articles had highlighted the tension between Musk’s stated commitment to “free speech” and his choice to ban an account that he personally disliked.
The Twitter account for rival social media company, Mastodon – which some Twitter users have migrated to after Musk’s takeover of Twitter – also appeared to have been suspended.
Links to individual Mastodon accounts also appeared to be banned. An error message notified some users that links to Mastodon had been “identified” as “potentially harmful” by Twitter or its partners.
Ryan Mac, a New York Times tech reporter, wrote on a new Twitter account that he was given “no warning” before his account was suspended and that he had received no communication from the company about the reason his account was “permanently suspended”…..
Read the full article here.
Musk or one or more of his companies appear to have been involved in an impressive amount of litigation, according to Wikipedia and, on 16 December Bloomberg Law reported:
Twitter Inc. has parted ways with Regina Lima, its former head of international legal and sole remaining deputy general counsel, as Elon Musk continues to overhaul the embattled social media company.
Lima’s departure—confirmed by four sources familiar with Twitter’s operations—comes as the company nears the two-month mark of Musk’s turbulent takeover.
Lima didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. She was based in Miami before being summoned to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters last week.
Most of Twitter’s roughly 200-employee legal staff has either been laid off, resigned, or otherwise departed during that time. The reductions in force come as the company copes with a variety of legal and regulatory entanglements.....
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