General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread

[CEO of Morgan Industries]

You can tell by how thirsty they are when they latch on to any celebrity that disagrees with the left.

But the arts agave never been on the right in society.

Jim Caviezel might be their biggest box-office draw in 2023, and that's only if right-wingers buy up tickets at empty theatres.

That really puts it home. They have Caviezel, Zachary Levi (who just was in a Shazam! movie that bombed), and then the corpse of James Woods and C-listers like Rob Schneider and Gina Carano. It's bleak out there for them.

 

[choc_cardigan]

Jim Caviezel might be their biggest box-office draw in 2023, and that's only if right-wingers buy up tickets at empty theatres.

That really puts it home. They have Caviezel, Zachary Levi (who just was in a Shazam! movie that bombed), and then the corpse of James Woods and C-listers like Rob Schneider and Gina Carano. It's bleak out there for them.

Well they have Dave Chappelle or is it too early to say that

 

[CEO of Morgan Industries]

Well they have Dave Chappelle or is it too early to say that

Dave got old and rich. He wants Republicans to give him low taxes and clearly has sexual hangups that he needs to work out with a consenting trans woman, but I wouldn't quite put him in the same bracket as the people I mentioned.

Maybe Cube is the most prominent black conservative in entertainment? He was out here riding in a car with noted white supremacist Tucker Carlson to talk about why he's anti-vax the other day. He fukks with Steve Bannon. Might be him.

 

[MushroomX]

Jim Caviezel might be their biggest box-office draw in 2023, and that's only if right-wingers buy up tickets at empty theatres.

That really puts it home. They have Caviezel, Zachary Levi (who just was in a Shazam! movie that bombed), and then the corpse of James Woods and C-listers like Rob Schneider and Gina Carano. It's bleak out there for them.

I heard Mel Gibson wants to do PASSION 2, and the last time Caviezel did it... he got crushed by the Cross and got struck by Lightning that required 2 Heart surgeries.

Seems like someone was telling him to stop this bullshyt.

 

[Scientific Playa]

The cojones on this Boer!

Elon Musk to appeal loss in SEC case to Supreme Court​

NEW YORK, July 25 (Reuters) - Elon Musk plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the Securities and Exchange Commission overstepped its authority in enforcing a consent decree that he has called a "muzzle" on his free speech.

Musk would be appealing a decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Manhattan to uphold the decree, which arose from his August 2018 tweet that he had "funding secured" to take his electric car company Tesla private.

A three-judge panel rejected Musk's claim that the SEC, which accused the billionaire of defrauding investors, exploited the decree to conduct harassing investigations into his use of Twitter, which he now owns and this week renamed X.

In an order on Monday, the appeals court denied Musk's request that the panel or all 13 active judges revisit the case.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, confirmed on Tuesday that Musk plans an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The consent decree was part of a settlement where Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million fines, Musk gave up his role as Tesla's chairman, and Musk agreed to let a Tesla lawyer approve some tweets in advance.

In its May 15 decision, the appeals court panel said Musk could not revisit the screening of tweets because he had "changed his mind."

But Musk's lawyers said the SEC had no right to impose an unconstitutional "gag rule" as a condition of settling.

The decision "posits that Mr. Musk either had to forego a settlement with the SEC or give up his right to challenge the constitutionality of the SEC's demands," the lawyers wrote last month. "Supreme Court law holds otherwise."

Last week, the federal appeals court in New Orleans agreed to reconsider its March decision that Musk violated federal labor law by tweeting in May 2018 that Tesla employees would lose stock options if they joined a union.

The Supreme Court typically hears oral arguments in about 70 of the approximately 5,000 cases it reviews each year.

The case is SEC v Musk, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-1291. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

 

[Scientific Playa]

I didn't know until this morning who the Chairman of Tesla is.

Robyn Denholm​

Robyn Denholm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Robyn M. Denholm (née Sammut; born 27 May 1963) is an Australian business executive. In November 2018, Denholm succeeded Elon Musk as chair of Tesla, Inc.[2]

Early life​

Denholm was born 27 May 1963 in Milperra, New South Wales.[1] Her parents met and married in Tripoli, Libya, immigrating to Australia in the 1950s. She has Maltese and Italian ancestry on her father's side and Maltese and Scottish ancestry on her mother's side; her father spoke five languages.[3]

Denholm grew up in the Sydney suburb of Lugarno with her older brother and younger sister. Her father worked as a welder and her mother was a ledger machine operator. When she was seven years old, the family purchased a service station and workshop in Milperra.[3] Denholm handled the financial accounts, repaired cars, pumped petrol and became interested in cars.[4] She attended Peakhurst High School.[3]

Denholm graduated from the University of Sydney with a bachelor's degree in economics, and from the University of New South Wales in 1999 with a master's degree in commerce.[5][4] Denholm is a member of Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia and New Zealand.[6]

Career​

After graduating, Denholm worked in accountancy for Arthur Andersen in Sydney.[4] This was followed by seven years at Toyota Australia.[7][5][4] Denholm worked at the IT companies Sun Microsystems,[7][5] and then Juniper Networks for nine years in finance and operations roles, rising to chief financial officer of Juniper.[4][7][5] In 2014, Denholm became a non-executive director of Tesla, Inc.[7] In the following four years as a non-executive director of Tesla, including as chair of the audit committee, Denholm received US$17 million in Tesla stock options.[4]

In early-2017, Denholm was appointed as chief operations officer (COO) of Telstra, Australia's largest telecoms company,[8] subsequently becoming chief financial officer (CFO) on 1 October 2018.[9] In November 2018, Denholm gave notice of resignation after only five weeks in the role as a result of stepping into the role of chair of Tesla Inc. Telstra CEO Andy Penn announced that Denholm would end her responsibilities as CFO at Telstra on 6 May 2019.[7][10]

Net worth​

Denholm debuted on The Australian Financial Review Rich List in 2021 with a net worth of A$688 million.[11]

 

[Scientific Playa]

Hot off the internet newswires.

TECH

Tesla under investigation by California attorney general over Autopilot safety, marketing​

PUBLISHED WED, JUL 26 2023 3:53 PM EDT

Lora Kolodny@LORAKOLODNY

KEY POINTS

• The California attorney general is investigating Tesla, CNBC has learned, seeking information from customers and former employees regarding Autopilot safety and false advertising complaints.
• “Tesla should offer customers the option to receive a full refund of Autopilot features if they are unsatisfied with the product,” said a Tesla customer, who was contacted by the AG’s office after filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Elon Musk, Tesla boss, runs to a Tesla at the Tesla Gigafactory construction site. In Grünheide near Berlin, a maximum of 500,000 vehicles per year are to roll off the assembly line starting in July 2021.
Julian Stahle | picture alliance | Getty Images


The California attorney general’s office is investigating Tesla, seeking information from customers and former employees about Autopilot safety issues and false advertising complaints, CNBC has learned.

Greg Wester, the owner of a 2018 Tesla Model 3, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in August 2022, regarding “phantom braking” — sudden, automatic braking by a car for no apparent reason — that he would experience when using the company’s driver assistance systems, or Autopilot, on the highway.




Wester also told the FTC that he felt misled by Tesla after paying thousands of dollars for the company’s premium driver assistance option, marketed as Full Self Driving capability (FSD) in the U.S.

By the second quarter of this year, an analyst with California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office left Wester a voicemail seeking to interview him about the issues referenced in the complaint. Wester shared the voice message with CNBC, and provided a copy of the FTC’s automated response acknowledging receipt of his complaint.

CNBC confirmed that the person who called from the California AG’s office works as an analyst there. The government employee did not request confidentiality in the voicemail.

Phantom braking, a known issue that Tesla customers have complained about to federal agencies for years, can leave drivers susceptible to being rear-ended, among other dangers.

Musk has long promised investors and customers that features and functions would be added to Tesla vehicles over time, via over-the-air software updates, that would turn their cars into self-driving or autonomous vehicles. On Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call, Musk called himself “the boy who cried FSD.”




To this day, Tesla has not delivered a self-driving car and sells “level 2” systems, which require an attentive driver behind the wheel who is ready to steer or brake at any time.

“Tesla should offer customers the option to receive a full refund of Autopilot features if they are unsatisfied with the product,” Wester said in an interview. In purchasing FSD, he said, “we bought a full autonomy product and we received a driver monitoring product with partial autonomy.”

Wester isn’t the only Tesla customer to be contacted by analysts with the attorney general’s office after voicing safety and related concerns.

A former Tesla employee, whose family owns a 2021 Model 3 with the FSD option, was contacted by email in July 2023 by a senior legal analyst in the California AG’s consumer protection division. In the email, reviewed by CNBC, the analyst said she was seeking information from the person for an unspecified but active investigation into Tesla.

The former Tesla employee, whose identity is known to CNBC, asked to remain unnamed to protect his privacy. The person had previously voiced concerns about Autopilot and FSD safety issues at Tesla and publicly.

Tesla and the California attorney general’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. The FTC declined to comment.

It’s not unusual for law enforcement offices in the U.S. to obtain consumer complaints filed to the FTC via an online database called the Consumer Sentinel Network. According to the federal agency’s website, the network “gives law enforcement members access to reports submitted directly to the Federal Trade Commission by consumers,” and to other reports shared by “data contributors.”

In its second-quarter financial filing, Tesla said it receives “requests for information from regulators and governmental authorities, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, the SEC, the Department of Justice (‘DOJ’) and various state, federal, and international agencies.”

While the company has previously identified “requests from the DOJ for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features,” Tesla has not disclosed that the California attorney general was investigating the company.

“Should the government decide to pursue an enforcement action, there exists the possibility of a material adverse impact on our business, results of operation, prospects, cash flows and financial position,” Tesla said in the filing.

California has been Tesla’s largest U.S. market for its electric vehicles and is home to the company’s first vehicle assembly plant in Fremont. The company relocated its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas from Palo Alto, California, in 2021.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles has been investigating Tesla’s driver assistance systems for years, and has formally accused the company of deceptive practices in marketing its Autopilot and FSD technology.

Tesla under investigation by California attorney general over Autopilot safety, marketing

The California attorney general is investigating Tesla over the electric car company's driver assistance technology, CNBC has learned.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Scientific Playa]

Screw up after screw up.

Musk’s Twitter Rebrand as ‘X’ Gets Site Blocked Under Indonesia Porn Laws​

XXX
The domain X.com had previously been used by sites running afoul of the country’s rules on “negative” content.

Dan Ladden-Hall​

News Correspondent
Published Jul. 26, 2023

Elon Musk’s radical rebranding of Twitter as “X” led to the site being blocked in Indonesia on Tuesday under the country’s strict laws restricting pornography and gambling.

The Southeast Asian country’s Ministry of Communication and Informatics said the block had to do with the domain “X.com,” which had previously been used to host content that violated the Muslim-majority nation’s laws against “negative” material like adult content, according to Al Jazeera.

The ministry’s director general of information and public communication, Usman Kansong, told local media Tuesday that the Indonesian government had contacted Musk’s company for clarification about the nature of the site. “Earlier today, we spoke with representatives from Twitter and they will send a letter to us to say that X.com will be used by Twitter,” he said.

The snafu meant that Indonesia’s reported 24 million Twitter users were unable to access the platform. Aribowo Sasmito, the co-founder of fact-checking group MAFINDO, said he thought the site may have been blocked due to the potentially negative connotations of the domain. “The name is not too far from XXX, I guess,” he told Al Jazeera.


He added that internet users in Indonesia are faced with a “dilemma” posed by the government’s blocking rules. “Those who prefer freedom are against it but if the context is pornography-related, then it is more related to religious aspects since Indonesia is the country with the largest Muslim population in the world,” he said.

Popular websites have previously been imperiled in similar ways in Indonesia, with authorities threatening to block Netflix, Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Twitter last year if they failed to detail the content that appears on their sites to the ministry before a certain deadline.

All of the sites managed to escape being blocked by making the required submissions, though some companies have faced bans before. TikTok was briefly banned by authorities in 2018 and Telekomunikasi Indonesia, Indonesia’s biggest telecommunications company, blocked Netflix between 2016 and 2020 over concerns about its “inappropriate content,” including pornography.

Twitter’s hiccup in Indonesia on Tuesday is just the latest headache Musk has created for his business since his rebrand to X began in earnest this week. On Monday, the San Francisco Police Department halted the removal of the old Twitter sign from the company’s headquarters after receiving a report of “a possible unpermitted street closure.”

Some critics have also questioned the wisdom of defenestrating a well-known brand with international recognition in favor of the letter X, a character with which Musk has seemingly been infatuated for decades. The specific logo that has been used to begin the rebrand has also been mocked for bearing a striking similarity to a generic Unicode character, though it is subtly different.

‘X’ Rebrand Gets Twitter Blocked Under Indonesia Porn Laws

The domain X.com had previously been used by sites running afoul of the country’s rules on “negative” content.

www.thedailybeast.com

Elon Musk’s Clumsy Twitter Rebrand Falls Flat on Its Face​

BYE BYE BIRDIE

AJ McDougall,​

Noah Kirsch​

 

[bnew]

You can tell by how thirsty they are when they latch on to any celebrity that disagrees with the left.

But the arts agave never been on the right in society.

yup the arts have never been on side the right in any society, it's the antithesis of the rightwing ideology.

the arts and conservatives have always clashed.

 

[Scientific Playa]

Big news! Warren Buffet is in partnership with Chinese brand EV auto manufacturer BVD that is backed by their government.​

​

Teslas Banned From Parts Of Chinese City Ahead Of Xi Visit: Report​

It looks like China is once again treating Tesla as a national security risk.​

By: Dan Mihalascu


Tesla vehicles are reportedly being denied entry into parts of Chengdu, a major Chinese city that will host the World University Games starting on Friday, when President Xi Jinping will attend the opening ceremony.

Authorities in the city of 21 million people in southwest China's Sichuan province have told law enforcement agencies to block Teslas from some areas related to the event and Xi's visit, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

This is not the first time Tesla vehicles have been prevented from entering some areas in the country; EVs made by the US automaker were barred from Chinese military bases and housing compounds in recent years. In addition, Teslas are banned from a resort town that hosts Communist Party summer retreats.

All these restrictions are caused by concerns about sensitive data being collected by cameras built into Tesla vehicles, despite the fact the US EV maker and its CEO Elon Musk have vowed to follow local data rules. Musk has stated in the past that Teslas do not spy in China or any other country, and all data collected is stored on domestic servers.

A video circulated on Chinese social network Douyin showing a Tesla driver being denied entry to a venue in Chengdu. The clip is no longer available, but Bloomberg claims it showed a traffic officer explaining to the driver that he was following an official order for the games.

The city of Chengdu is imposing wider traffic restrictions during the sports event that runs until August 8, including closing off some streets to civilian drivers. China's President Xi Jinping will attend the games opening ceremony and host leaders including Indonesia's Joko Widodo.

China is Tesla's second largest market worldwide after the United States and home to Giga Shanghai, the company's biggest factory that accounts for more than half of its global output.

The EV maker has been in the spotlight in the past for alleged privacy breaches. Most recently, Reuters reported in April that workers at the automaker's San Mateo, California office shared videos and images taken by customer cars' cameras in private one-on-one conversations, including footage of children, crashes, road-rage incidents, and private moments.

Tesla EVs are equipped with eight exterior cameras and one in the cabin, allowing for "360 degrees of visibility at up to 250 meters of range" for the Autopilot ADAS, according to Tesla's website. The cameras are also used as dash cams and for remote monitoring.

Teslas Banned From Parts Of Chinese City Ahead Of Xi Visit: Report

Authorities in Chengdu instructed police to block Tesla EVs from some areas related to Xi Jinping's visit for the World University Games, Bloomberg reports.

insideevs.com

______________________________________________

TECH ·TESLA

Tesla cars are being barred from China’s World University Games ahead of a Xi visit amid worries that their cameras might collect sensitive data​

BY BLOOMBERG
July 26, 2023

Tesla Inc. vehicles are barred from parts of a major Chinese city as it prepares for a visit by President Xi Jinping for the start of the World University Games on Friday, according to people familiar with the matter.

Authorities in Chengdu, a city of 21 million people in southwest China’s Sichuan province, have told officials to block Teslas from some areas related to the event and Xi’s visit, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

Teslas have been prevented from entering Chinese military complexes and housing compounds in recent years, as well as facing bans from a district that hosts Communist Party summer retreats. The curbs stem from concerns about sensitive data being collected by cameras built into the vehicles, though Tesla and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk have vowed to follow local data rules.

Teslas barred from China’s World University Games in Chengdu ahead of a Xi visit

Their cameras might collect sensitive information.

fortune.com

 

[Kyle C. Barker]

AJ Sadauskas (@ajsadauskas@aus.social)

So Elon's a "visionary" who wants to turn X into a single website where you can do everything — kinda like Yahoo! He wants his new MySpaceX portal to be a website... Where you can message people: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Messenger Where you can stream audio...

aus.social

https://archive.is/Kmzzb

Elon's whole schtick is to promise features that will never come to fruition to make his companies appear to be worth more than they actually are.

 

[MushroomX]

 

[Spidey Man]

Going easy on child sex material is a great way to win the advertisers back.

 

[Kyle C. Barker]

I always ask anti vax morons can they explain covid deaths going down after the vaccine was introduced?

They'll say the the virus became less potent while ignoring the impeccable timing of the actual release of the vaccines correlating to less deaths

 

[bnew]

Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford)

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got...

nitter.lacontrevoie.fr

Spoiler: full text

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company.

I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life.

As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly.

You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician.

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”.

Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky.

Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions.

I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that.

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.

A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO.

Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule.

The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.

Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.

My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance.

When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money.

From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition.

I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture.

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.

At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay.

I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it.

I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around.

His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building.

I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence.

Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers.

In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse.

Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform.

Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too.

Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family.

Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self.

The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun.

Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets.

Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.

I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly.

I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist.

This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness.

I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge.

I hope it does.

Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go.

Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love.

After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated.

I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live.

Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior.

Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex.

I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life.

I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution.

I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off.

Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically.

Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride.

https://archive.is/Bvzzn

https://archive.is/XSf16