ROUNDUP: Now We Know What Happened with Twitter and Musk
USB cleans up its labeling act, and all that stuff Amazon announced
In the case of Twitter vs. Elon R. Musk, et. al, Twitter's legal team submitted court filings that seem to have raised interest among the general public. One is a slide show titled "Argument on Pending Discover Motions" which details the use of Signal by Musk and others to discuss data scientists and estimates of bot prevalence on Twitter. That's sort of fun, I guess. But the bigger interest is in a separate document of evidence labeled Exhibits A through J.
That includes actual email and, specifically in Exhibit H, text messages between folks talking about Twitter, including current CEO Parag Agrawal, former CEO Jack Dorsey and of course Musk, among others.
About a month before Musk offered to acquire Twitter, on March 26, Jack Dorsey texts Musk regarding his tweet "Is a new platform needed?"
In a text message to Musk about the tweet, Dorsey admits “Back when we had the activist come in [[referring to Elliott Management, the activist investor that attempted to oust Dorsey in early 2020]], I tried my hardest to get you on our board, and board said no. That’s about the time I decided I needed to work to leave, as hard as it was for me.”
Dorsey then writes “A new platform is needed. It can’t be a company. This is why I left.” He adds “I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn’t complicated work, it just has to be done right so it’s resilient to what has happened to twitter.”
Musk says “I think it’s worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new.”
Not long after it's announced that Musk is getting appointed to the Twitter board. That did not end up happening, but for a moment Doresey was happy. He wrote to Musk, “I’ve wanted it for a long time. Got very emotional when I learned it was finally possible,” and adds “Parag is an incredible engineer.”
So Dorsey was talking up Twitter CEO ParagAgrwal to Musk. How was Musk doing with Agrawal?
In texts between Musk and Agrawal, Musk says “I just want Twitter to be maximum amazing,” and admits “Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don’t think I should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems.” In response Agrawal says "treat me like an engineer instead of CEO and let’s see where we get to.”
Sounds great.
Two days later Musk is trash talking Twitter on Twitter and Agrawal tries to point out that it isn’t great for morale.
On April 9th, Agrawal texts Musk “You are free to tweet ‘is Twitter dying?’ or anything else about Twitter — but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context.” He also adds "I hope the AMA [[Ask me anything]] will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you."
Two minutes later Musk says “What did you get done this week? I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”
Meanwhile Musk tweets Twitter's board chair Bret Taylor "“Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won’t work. Drastic action is needed.”
So clearly Musk lost patience with Agrawal.
Dorsey tries to smooth things over, texting Musk that “I won’t let this fail and will do whatever it takes." And regarding Agrawal, “He is really great at getting things done when tasked with specific direction.”
But Musk says, “Parag is just moving far too slowly and trying to please people who will not be happy no matter what he does.” So Dorsey finalloy accepts that he’s not going to make them friends and writes, “at least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clarifying.”
A month later, in May, Musk tells banker Michael Grimes that Twitter “asked no good questions and had no good comments” at a meeting, He then asks to slow the deal down in case of World War III.
You can get an excellent timeline look at it all in the Big Technology newsletter.
Reading these exchanges put it all in perspective for me. Dorsey and Musk are friends. Dorsey likes Agrawal. Dorsey gets his friend Musk fired up about a new way of doing things. Musk thinks it sounds kind of fun. But Musk and Agrawal do NOT mesh and Musk finally realizes that maybe he shouldn’t have got into the whole mess and tries to back out. He’s not going to blame his friend Dorsey but he really seems to have changed his mind. The dollars and court problems are not a big deal for Musk. He just wants out.
How many times have you recommended two people you like to get toegther, or wokr together only to have them not get along. It happens. Just usally not on such a big stage at such high dollar amounts. But it’s perfectly, believably human.
Here are some other things I covered int tech this week
Bruce Willis Licenses His Face to a Deepfake Company
USB Changes Labeling to Just Show Speed and Watts.
Zendure Kickstarts Huge Rolling Batteries For Your House
US FCC Requires Deorbiting 5 Years After a Satellite’s Misison Ends
Microsoft Mitigates Two Exchange Zero-day Vulnerabilities
Wing Delivery Drone Hits Power Line and Catches on Fire. No One Hurt
Amazon Announces Kindles, Echos, Voice Features and Automobile Products
Apple removed the app for Vkontakte, Russia's largest social network, from all of its app stores globally
AR Search Comes to Google Maps
Weheelchair-accessible Autonomous Vehicles Come to Minnesota
Bloomberg Says Apple Adjusted Its iPhone Production Orders Down
Samsung Shows Off Slidable PC Display
Intel Announces Unison Call, Text and File Sharing App for iOS, Android and Windows
Artist Successfully Copyrights Algorthm-generated Image
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