Business
Will celebrities pay for Twitter Blue? Many are ready to lose the check
Twitter’s blue verify marks have lengthy been a standing image of types: They’ve adorned the accounts of those that are well-known or notorious, politician or influencer. Most necessary, they verified that the individuals behind these accounts are who they are saying they’re.
However with hours to go earlier than Twitter deliberate to remove these verification verify marks en masse on Saturday — and hand them out solely to those that pay $8 a month or $84 a 12 months for a Twitter Blue subscription — entertainers, professional athletes and content material producers seemed to be in no rush to enroll, with some emphatically in opposition to it and others taking a wait-and-see strategy.
Twitter’s announcement on the change was met with derision from a number of blue-check-verified customers.
Lakers star LeBron James and NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes each tweeted Friday morning that they’d not subscribe.
“Welp guess my blue might be gone quickly trigger if you understand me I ain’t paying the 5,” tweeted James.
“Some customers on Twitter have been beginning to confuse me for the kind of one that’d pay $8 a month to really feel particular. It was embarrassing,” tweeted TV author and comic Mike Drucker.
Whereas celebrities have already been trickling away from the platform or reducing their exercise in recent times, it’s seemingly the paid verification change will speed up the method.
Media and leisure professionals who work with celebrities on their social media presences expressed reluctance to pay to have their firms or purchasers verified, however have been cautious about discussing the matter publicly, citing Chief Government Elon Musk’s historical past of retaliating in opposition to critics, together with Twitter’s enterprise companions. (When numerous main advertisers paused their spending in November over issues about hate speech and different points, Musk threatened a “thermonuclear title and disgrace.”)
One Los Angeles media govt whose portfolio consists of celeb and leisure manufacturers cited reservations concerning the “optics of getting a blue verify,” referring to the best way Musk’s culture-war antics have polarized sentiment round Twitter.
The manager, who didn’t have her firm’s approval to talk publicly, additionally expressed concern with the dearth of potential to speak to any assist employees at Twitter concerning the change.
One other supply who often confers with celebrities and media firms on social technique reported listening to “from a bunch of expertise groups that they really feel like they’re being extorted they usually’re not doing it.”
Musk also announced that, beginning April 15, solely accounts subscribing to Twitter Blue might be eligible to be promoted in customers’ For You suggestions. Voting in polls can even solely be accessible to paid customers, he stated. Musk later added that the For Additionally, you will embody tweets from {followed} accounts, together with unverified ones.
However many questions stay unanswered concerning the upcoming modifications, reminiscent of how retweets might be dealt with in algorithmic promotion and the way the corporate will forestall imposter accounts from proliferating.
Twitter’s press e mail responded to a request for remark with an autoreply of a poop emoji.
A number of celebrities have publicly declared their intentions to not pay for Twitter Blue or expressed issues about potential impersonation.
The “Star Trek” actor William Shatner, who has 2.5 million followers and is a longtime energetic Twitter person, said in a tweet that “blue [checks] have been guardrails to legitimacy; not meaningless standing symbols.”
Jason Alexander from “Seinfeld” tweeted Monday he would depart Twitter if his verify mark have been eliminated, since with out it, “anybody can allege to be me,” he wrote.
In an instance of impersonation nonetheless taking place, Monica Lewinsky tweeted a few person with the deal with “monicalewinskai” who was verified with a blue verify mark as Monica Lewinsky.
Karl City from Amazon Prime’s “The Boys” stated he was “against spending cash on social media” and warned followers of imposters and scammers in a tweet.
Twitter launched verified accounts in 2009 after the corporate was sued over an impersonation account. When the blue verify mark was first made accessible to paying customers in November, the platform was swarmed with customers posing as public figures reminiscent of LeBron James and George W. Bush.
Solely 475,000, or 0.2% of Twitter’s every day energetic customers, are paying subscribers, in keeping with one researcher’s estimate, and round half have lower than 1,000 followers, Mashable reported.
The corporate has listed some requirements for Twitter Blue standing, reminiscent of having “no indicators of participating in platform manipulation and spam” and “no indicators of being deceptive or misleading,” which incorporates impersonation. Particulars on how the corporate will implement these necessities haven’t been launched.
A number of information organizations, which have turn into heavy customers of the platform in recent times, have additionally stated they won’t be paying for the Twitter Blue verify mark but.
The New York Instances, the Los Angeles Instances, Buzzfeed, Politico, Vox Media and the Washington Put up all have stated they’d not be paying for Twitter verification for his or her organizations nor for his or her reporters, with the New York Instances including: “besides in uncommon situations the place verified standing could be important for reporting functions,” according to CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy.
Organizations might be charged $1,000 a month to entry Twitter Blue as a Verified Group in addition to $50 per affiliate account that may be added for particular person customers in that group to be verified.
Twitter will make exceptions for its prime 500 advertisers and for the ten,000 most-followed beforehand verified organizations, in keeping with the New York Instances.
Instances employees author Wendy Lee contributed to this report.
Business
Google employees stage sit-ins to protest company's contract with Israel
Dozens of Google employees held sit-ins Tuesday at the tech giant’s New York City and Sunnyvale, Calif., offices to protest the company’s work with Israel.
Google and Amazon have a cloud computing and artificial intelligence contract with the Israeli government and military, a deal known as Project Nimbus that is worth $1.2 billion.
The employees participating in the sit-ins wore shirts that said “Drop Project Nimbus” and a banner was hung that read, “No tech for genocide.”
Protesters sat in the office of Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian on Tuesday and remained there for about 10 hours, according to the group.
They demanded Google and Amazon drop Project Nimbus and stop the “harassment, intimidation, bullying, silencing, and censorship” of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim Google workers who have expressed concerns about the company’s work in Israel and the Hamas war.
On Tuesday night, Google ordered the arrest of nine workers in Sunnyvale and New York, who were told they would be locked out of their accounts and offices and were not expected to return to work until contacted by HR, according to a statement from the No Tech for Apartheid campaign.
Officers arrived at a Google facility in Sunnyvale around 10:30 a.m. after getting a call from Google about the protest and saw around 80 participants, wrote Capt. Dzanh K. Le in an email on Tuesday night.
Most of the participants left the area around 12:45 p.m., with five protesters remaining, Le added. When the protesters refused to leave at around 6:30 p.m., they were “arrested without incident for criminal trespassing,” Le wrote.
In a statement, the group of workers who were arrested said they had asked to speak to the Google Cloud CEO but were denied .
“Google executives have ignored our concerns about our ethical responsibility for the impact of our technology as well as the damage to our workplace health and safety caused by this contract, and the company’s internal environment of retaliation, harassment, and bullying,” the workers said in a Wednesday statement. .
Four people were arrested for trespassing at the Google office in New York, according to the New York Police Department.
Google last month fired a worker who protested a speech by Google’s top executive in Israel at a conference in New York.
“As a Software Engineer in Google Cloud, it is horrifying to think that the code I write could be used by the Israeli Military in the first ever AI powered genocide,” said Google Cloud software engineer William Van Der Laar from Sunnyvale in a statement. “We did not come to Google to work on technology that kills. By engaging in this contract leadership has betrayed our trust, our AI Principles, and our humanity.”
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google told Time magazine this year that its Nimbus contract is for work related to Israeli government ministries such as finance, health, transportation and education.
“Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” a Google spokesperson told Time.
Other tech workers, including at Amazon, have voiced concerns about their employers’ involvement in Project Nimbus.
The protests in the tech industry have escalated in the wake of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in response to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 240 taken hostage.
More than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israel’s air and ground offensive, according to Gaza health officials.
Business
Column: With his Truth Social stock, Trump may be laughing all the way to the bank — but his investors have reason to weep
With their life savings, childrens’ college funds and their own retirement prospects at stake, most people probably view investing in stocks as a serious business. Now and then, however, the markets produce comedy gold.
Hello, Trump Media & Technology Group.
The owner of Truth Social, a social media platform exclusively hitched to Donald Trump, staged an initial public offering March 26 amid a torrent of speculation over how many billions the IPO would produce for Trump himself. In the event, the figure was a paper gain of about $5 billion for him, virtually pure profit.
It’s a scam. Just like everything he’s ever been involved in, it’s a con.
— Barry Diller on Trump and Trump Media
The cult of Trump had sent the shares soaring as high as $79.38 on that first day, valuing the company at about $9.5 billion. By the end of the day it had settled back to $57.99. Since then, it has mostly been on the schneid, falling steadily.
As I write, midway in the trading day Tuesday, the shares are quoted at $22.80, down more than 14% on the day. That brings the shares’ slide since they peaked at $79.38 on March 26 to about 70.2%.
Trump, who loves hyperbole, might revel in a three-week plunge that could be some sort of a record. Whether he would call it “beautiful,” one of his favorite superlatives, is another question.
The slide has pared the market value of Trump Media by more than $6 billion from its peak. Trump is still sitting on a paper holding worth more than $2 billion, but his outside investors, many of whom are small investors who bought at or near the top, have been been taken to the abattoir.
“I think they’re dopes,” the veteran entertainment executive Barry Diller said of Trump Media’s investors during a CNBC appearance on April 4.
That’s not to say, given the stock’s volatility, that it might not recover and end up in the green for the day, though whether it can recover the full 69.8% loss, even over time, is subject to doubt.
Still, the raw numbers, being right there for everyone to view in bright red, aren’t as interesting as the underlying grift. Let’s examine that.
It’s fair to say that few if any experienced investment professionals expect Trump Media to have staying power as a high-flying stock. I raised the most pertinent issues a few days before the IPO: The company had meager revenues and huge losses. It was to be taken public via a device — a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC — that was often used to circumvent government rules for disclosures to investors.
Trump Media’s expected value of $5 billion at the IPO swore at common sense, or at any traditional standard of securities valuation. In short, Trump Media looked like any number of other Trump ventures, such as Trump University — all promise, no delivery.
“It’s a scam,” Diller told his CNBC interviewers. “Just like everything he’s ever been involved in, it’s a con.”
No one at Truth Social responded to my request for a comment about Diller’s remark.
Earlier, I asked whether anyone should believe in the valuation projections, and whether anyone in their right mind would invest. My answers were probably not, and probably not. That was conjecture, not investment advice.
After the IPO, however, more issues were disclosed that contributed to the stock’s precipitous slide. The company’s first annual report, issued April 1, incorporated an obligatory section on risk factors to be pondered by investors that included the traditional warnings about the costs of competition, the prospects of litigation, and the dangers of technology failures — and a couple that aren’t normally seen in corporate disclosures.
One covered the downsides of Trump Media’s linkage with Trump — that Truth Social faced “greater risks than typical social media platforms because of … the involvement of President Trump.” Those risks include “harassment of advertisers or content providers, increased risk of hacking of [Truth Social’s] platform, lesser need for Truth Social if First Amendment speech is no longer believed to be suppressed by other similar platforms, criticism of Truth Social for its moderation practices, and increased stockholder suits.”
The report made clear, if anyone was unaware of this, that the value of its brand “may diminish if the popularity of President Trump were to suffer,” as it would from “the death, incarceration, or incapacity of President Trump.”
Perhaps more telling was the company’s disclosure that it was not planning to “collect, monitor or report” the traditional metrics used by other social media platforms, such as Meta and X (formerly Twitter). Among those performance measures are “average revenue per user, ad impressions and pricing, … monthly and daily active users” — in other words, all the statistics that tell a social media company who, if anyone, is using it, and what their participation is worth in dollars and cents.
Having that information would only “divert” the company’s management, the report said, though it wasn’t clear about how management would fashion a strategy for the future if it doesn’t know where it is at present, including just how many users it has.
The annual report also updated Trump Media’s financial statements to cover the full year 2023: The platform lost more than $58 million on revenue of a bare $4.1 million. Previous disclosures had covered only the first nine months of 2023, when the company said it lost $49 million on $3.4 million in revenue.
On Monday, shareholders got another surprise. Trump Media said in a public filing that it planned to issue 40 million new shares to insiders (36 million of them to Trump himself) and that warrant holders were entitled to 21.5 million additional shares of stock, which could be expected to reach the open market almost immediately upon the warrants’ conversion.
That means existing shareholders are about to be heavily diluted, left with less of the company than they anticipated. The shares plunged more than 18% on Monday.
Who benefits from these maneuvers? Trump does. He is in effect the owner of 64.9% of the company, including the 36 million new shares; no one else owns more than 7.3%. For him this isn’t much of an investment; 36 million of his 114.7 million shares are a handout that didn’t require him to put up his own money. The rest were issued to him via the IPO in return for his interest in Trump Media as a private company.
Trump’s financial role in the founding of Truth Social in 2021 may have been minimal or nonexistent; Reuters reported in 2022 that most of the $38 million raised in the company’s first year came from businessmen who were political allies of Trump and from borrowings from unidentified lenders.
Trump has almost no ability to convert his shareholdings to cash in the near term, however. As a Trump Media insider, he is prevented from selling or borrowing against his shares for at least six months.
If and when he places any of his shares on the market, he would be selling into a declining market. Trump Media is the memiest of “meme stocks,” its value entirely divorced from financial fundamentals and based entirely on his involvement in the enterprise.
That places the value of his stake on a knife-edge. Any indication that he is reducing his commitment would almost certainly provoke a stampede for the exits among other shareholders. Trump would be racing to cash in before the value of his holdings reached the vanishing point.
Who are the other shareholders? According to a survey by the Washington Post, many are retail investors who believe that Trump’s touch is gold, or thought that buying his shares was a way to express faith in Trump and perhaps make some money on the side. At this moment, they are staring into the abyss.
Business
The EV market is in trouble: The latest sign is Tesla's layoffs
Tesla is in trouble: Its product line is aging. Sales are stalling. Top executives are fleeing. The stock price is down. The first wave of new Cybertrucks is riddled with quality problems. The low-cost Model 2 recently promised by Chief Executive Elon Musk appears to be dead.
Some of Tesla’s most environmentally conscious buyers are signaling their disgust with the behavior of Musk by turning to other brands, even as price cut follows price cut. Those bargain basement deals are squeezing profit margins, though the company remains profitable and still sells more EVs than other automakers.
The company’s four auto factories have more car-making capacity than the company has customers.
The situation is so serious that on Monday, Musk announced that “more than 10%” of its global workforce would be laid off. How much more Musk did not say. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but Musk said in an internal email explaining the layoffs that the company had to seek cost reductions and higher productivity.
If Tesla were the only electric car maker under pressure, that alone would send shivers through California policymakers, from Gov. Gavin Newsom on down, who in their quest to address climate change and air pollution have set strict mandates that will ban sales of new cars that run only on fossil fuels by 2035.
But the drive to electric vehicles has, at best, hit a rough patch, with little visibility into road conditions ahead. EV sales are still rising but at a far slower pace than the highs reached in 2022 and early 2023.
Ford, General Motors and other major automakers are pulling back on their EV ambitions, putting more of their money behind hybrid vehicles, cutting back on production, and delaying introduction of some EV models. EV startups including Rivian, Lucid and Polestar are laying off workers, as they encounter production problems or fall short of sales targets or both. The financial difficulties at Fisker, the Manhattan Beach electric vehicle startup, became so severe, its stock price so battered, that it’ll get kicked off the New York Stock Exchange on April 22, or, more formally, be “delisted.”
The big question is whether current conditions will prove to be growing pains (however agonizing) on the way to a cleaner transportation economy. And if so, how long the pain will last.
Right now EV sales growth is slowing at a time when rapid expansion is needed to reach climate goals. Across the U.S., EV sale rose only 2.6% year over year for the first quarter of 2024, while EV market share against gasoline cars declined, to 7.3%, from 2023’s 7.6% record high, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Even EV-happy California is bumping into customer resistance: In 2023, EV market share for new car sales topped 21%, far higher than any other state. While 2024 first-quarter California EV sales figures won’t be available until early May, the signs are worrisome: In the last half of 2023, new EV sales declined in California, the first negative growth ever reported.
“We’ve reached a threshold of market intolerance,” said Karl Brauer, auto industry analyst at iSeeCars.com. “The numbers of people who have a personal interest in, or a tolerance for, dealing with EV challenges, or have the means and lifestyle to work with an electric vehicle” appears to be hitting a wall, he said.
Temporary, or long term? Yet to be determined, he said.
His firm looked at EV penetration rates in states and cities and found that sales grew rapidly until market share hit about 8%, and then slowed dramatically or went nearly flat. California is an exception; new EV market share reached over 21% in 2023. Still, in the year’s last quarter, EV sales growth went negative, with Tesla new car sales down 10%.
The current problem for EV advocates: how to move the customer profile from early adopters to mainstream buyers.
More than 90% of EV buyers, Brauer’s research shows, are relatively affluent homeowners who have installed their own chargers and own two vehicles or more — meaning, in most cases, there’s a gasoline car available for long trips.
The majority of car buyers aren’t as well off, so the price difference between gasoline cars and electric cars — about $45,000 on average for gas, compared with about $55,000 for electric — is a big issue. (Even that $45,000 is high for millions of buyers, hence the strength of the used car market.)
EV drivers who live in condos or apartments must rely for the most part on public or workplace chargers.
The public charging infrastructure is notoriously unreliable, outside of Tesla’s charging network, a system the company could afford to build and maintain by maintaining a stratospheric stock price — a stock price that’s suffered mightily over the last year, down nearly 40% in the last six months.
Tesla is beginning to open up its charging network to other carmakers, in part to qualify for federal subsidies.
While EV sales growth is slowing, hybrid cars are blasting off, benefiting companies such as Toyota and Honda.
The Tesla news is reverberating through the auto world. For more than a decade, it was the EV industry. Regulators pointed to Tesla as evidence that customers would buy electric cars if the industry would craft desirable vehicles instead of the glorified golf carts they were producing, weak tea attempts at meeting government regulations. Under pressure from California and 12 other allied states, from regulators in Europe, and a burgeoning EV industry in China, automakers globally are now investing hundreds of billions in electric vehicles.
If California and the world are going to meet their lofty climate goals, policymakers and automakers, including Tesla, have a lot of work still to do.
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