PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada has apologized to employees for a cringe-worthy layoff email in which she quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In late January, Tejada sent an email announcing layoffs for roughly 7% of the company’s staff. Throughout the lengthy email, Tejada showed remarkable tone-deafness and spent much of the email cheerleading for the company’s accomplishments and patting leadership on the back — not a good look when announcing layoffs. The worse part, however, was quoting Dr. King at the height of back-patting the company’s leadership.
After predictably swift backlash, it appears Tejada has received the message loud and clear. The CEO posted an apology to employees, which is displayed below in its entirety:
Team,
This has been a difficult week for our company. For those of you who were not able to attend our town hall discussion today, I wanted to share what we discussed. The way I communicated layoffs distracted from our number one priority: showing care for the employees we laid off, and demonstrating the grace, respect, and appreciation they and all of you deserve.
There are a number of things I would do differently if I could. The quote I included from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inappropriate and insensitive. I should have been more upfront about the layoffs in the email, more thoughtful about my tone, and more concise. I am sorry.
Many of you have reached out to me this week with feedback, questions and support – thank you.
Electric vehicle startup Arrival has undergone a major shakeup, appointing a new CEO and announcing layoffs of 50% of its staff.
Arrival has a deal with UPS to provide 10,000 electric delivery vans through 2024. Despite the high-profile contract, the company has struggled financially and is now announcing its second round of layoffs in a year.
Following a detailed review of its operations and its markets, Arrival is now announcing immediate actions to further reduce its operating costs and to optimize the deployment of its current cash resources. This includes the difficult decision to reduce its global workforce by approximately 50% to 800 employees. When combined with other cost reductions in real estate and third-party spending, the company expects to halve the ongoing cash cost of operating the business to approximately $30 million per quarter.
Simultaneously, the company also announced a new CEO, Igor Torgov. Torgov has a long history in the tech industry, with stints at Microsoft, Bitfury, Columbus A/S, and Yota. Most recently, before serving as Arrival’s EVP of Digital, Torgov served as CEO of Atol.
“Accepting this important role at a critical point in Arrival’s journey is a significant responsibility,” said Torgov. “Arrival has developed unique technologies in a market that has huge growth potential and can play a key role in addressing climate change. To unlock these opportunities, we need to make difficult decisions and to take swift action. Following a detailed evaluation of Arrival and the wider EV market during the past two months, the leadership team and the Board have taken decisive action to ensure the most effective use of our current resources and optimize the efficiency of the business. The actions support our journey to become a champion in innovative products and new, more efficient methods of vehicle production, particularly in the important US market for commercial electric vehicles. We are keenly aware that these decisions, while necessary, will have a profound impact on a significant number of our colleagues. We are 100% committed to supporting our employees during this difficult process.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to testify before the House Energy & Commerce Committee to address the company’s privacy and data practices.
TikTok is under fire on all sides, with multiple states and government entities banning the app from government-owned devices. Legislation has been introduced to ban the app from the US entirely, and the EU has signaled it may do the same if TikTok fails to comply with regulation.
The Energy & Commerce Committee wants answers from TikTok’s CEO — his first appearance before a Congressional committee — about how the company intends to address the myriad privacy and data concerns regarding it. The committee also wants answers regarding TikTok’s ties to Beijing.
“Big Tech has increasingly become a destructive force in American society,” said Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers. “The Energy and Commerce Committee has been at the forefront of asking Big Tech CEOs – from Facebook to Twitter to Google – to answer for their companies’ actions. These efforts will continue with TikTok. ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data. Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security, as well as what actions TikTok is taking to keep our kids safe from online and offline harms. We’ve made our concerns clear with TikTok. It is now time to continue the committee’s efforts to hold Big Tech accountable by bringing TikTok before the committee to provide complete and honest answers for people.”
The CEO is scheduled to testify on March 23, 2023.
PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada has set the bar for the most cringe-worthy way of laying off employees.
Like many tech companies, PageDuty is laying off part of its staff to better survive the economic downturn. Tejada informed employees in an email, the contents of which were posted on the company’s site.
In her email, the CEO said the company will be laying off “roughly 7% of roles globally, the vast majority of which are in North America, primarily in our go-to-market and G&A organizations.”
Tejada then goes on to explain why the layoffs are necessary, as they’re designed to help the company better support other business ventures, something the laid-off employees probably don’t care about and would have been better left to another email:
Decisions were predicated on business rationale that included, for example, protecting investments in top product development priorities like our new Incident Workflows, self service and product-led growth (PLG), and continued AIOps and Automation enhancements, improving spans of control and streamlining management layers, expanding teams and roles in Santiago and Lisbon, and addressing our enterprise opportunity with a hybrid strategic and high-velocity GTM motion that continues to improve our productivity
The coup de grâce, however, was quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in an effort to make herself, the company, and its leadership look better:
None of this would be possible without you, our leadership, and our board — thank you for your grit and resilience, your commitment to our customers and your support of our values and people. I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.
Interestingly, while Tejada says the company ‘stands behind its customers, its values, and its vision,’ its interesting that she didn’t say it stands behind its employees.
Predictably, Tejada quoting Dr. King has not gone over well, with the CEO receiving widespread criticism.
While PagerDuty is well within its rights to lay off employees, and may even need to, Tejada would do well to not quote Dr. King in an effort to make such a decision — one that negatively impacts so many lives — look better. Nor should Dr. King’s words be used to pat herself and the company’s leadership on the back at a time when her employees will be paying the price for that leadership’s miscalculations.
Google parent Alphabet has now firmly joined the ranks of companies laying off employees, with plans to cut 12,000 jobs.
Two of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” companies, Intrinsic and Verily, announced layoffs last week, but today the company announced mass layoffs at its core: Google and Alphabet. In an email, which later became a blog post, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company would be laying off some 12,000 employees, surpassing both Microsoft and Meta’s numbers.
In his memo to employees, Pichai called the move “a difficult decision to set us up for the future.”
I have some difficult news to share. We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.
This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.
Like many other executives announcing layoffs, Pichai blamed it on a changed economic reality from the one that led to the frenzied hiring of the past couple of years.
Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.
Interestingly, Pichai said the layoffs were in response to a review of the company’s personnel and roles in an effort to identify “people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company.” This statement seems to confirm fears Googlers had in December that new evaluation methods were being used as a prelude to layoffs.
Pichai says impacted US employees have already been notified, although notifying international employees will take longer because of local laws. In the meantime, employees will continue to be paid during the notification period, a minimum of 60 days.
Alphabet is also offering a severance package that starts at 16 weeks’ pay, plus an additional two weeks for every year at the company. The company will also accelerate a minimum of 16 weeks GSU vesting.
The company also plans to pay all 2022 bonuses and vacation time and provide six months of healthcare, job placements, and immigration assistance.
Pichai tried to reassure employees that the company was well-positioned for the future, despite the layoffs.
All this work is a continuation of the “healthy disregard for the impossible” that’s been core to our culture from the beginning. When I look around Google today, I see that same spirit and energy driving our efforts. That’s why I remain optimistic about our ability to deliver on our mission, even on our toughest days. Today is certainly one of them.
Regardless of how Pichai spins it, the fact remains that these layoffs are a major black mark on Alphabet and Google’s reputation. The company has long prided itself on never laying people off. With this announcement, however, the company has managed to lay off more employees than any other company in the last year except Amazon.
Future tech talent looking for a company to spend their career at may well remember this.
The Iconfactory has announced it is discontinuing Twitterrific following a Twitter API change that killed the app.
Users began noticing in mid-January that some of their favorite Twitter clients were no longer working, with at least one developer confirming the issue. At the time, no one knew if it was an accidental error with the Twitter APIs, or if the platform was targeting third-party clients. Ultimately, it proved to be the latter and Twitterrific is the first confirmed victim.
In a blog post announcing the app’s demise, The Iconfactory makes clear that they did not want to end support for Twitterrific, but that they have no choice given Twitter’s complete lack of communication on the matter.
A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.
Those sentences speak volumes. An app that has existed since 2007 is forced to shut down because of an unannounced and undocumented change. What’s more, the company behind the app says it no longer views Twitter as trustworthy.
The news is also further evidence of the abject failure that has been Elon Musk’s tenure. Under his leadership, the company has refused to honor its rental agreements, suspended journalists’ accounts for posting critical articles, laid off thousands of employees, repeatedly threatened bankruptcy, and now helped kill one of the oldest Twitter clients without even bothering to explain why.
Musk may have once been Silicon Valley’s golden boy, but the mercurial CEO is adding another skill to his resume: showing how NOT to run a company.
Reed Hastings is stepping down as CEO of Netflix, vacating a position he has held since 1999, after co-founding the company in 1997.
Netflix has faced new challenges in recent quarters, experiencing its first subscriber drop in nearly a decade. The company rallied, however, and has once again been posting subscriber growth.
With the company’s future relatively secure, Hastings is stepping down as CEO and following a succession plan that has been in the works for years. Hastings is being replaced by Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, who will serve the company as co-CEOs.
“Our board has been discussing succession planning for many years (even founders need to evolve!),” Hastings wrote in a blog post. “As part of that process, we promoted Ted to co-CEO alongside me in July 2020, and Greg to Chief Operating Officer – and in the last 2½ years I’ve increasingly delegated the management of Netflix to them.
“It was a baptism by fire, given COVID and recent challenges within our business. But they’ve both managed incredibly well, ensuring Netflix continues to improve and developing a clear path to reaccelerate our revenue and earnings growth. So the board and I believe it’s the right time to complete my succession.”
According to Hastings, the change is effective immediately, with him taking on the role of Executive Chairman.
“Starting today, Greg Peters will step up from COO to become Ted’s co-CEO,” Hastings continues. “Going forward, I’ll be serving as Executive Chairman, a role that founders often take (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.) after they pass the CEO baton to others. Ted, Greg and I have been working closely together in different capacities for 15 years. As is common in long, effective relationships, we’ve all learned how to bring out the best in each other. I look forward to working with them in this role for many years to come.”
“When I look at the conversational space I think it’s going to have as much impact as ecommerce or search or social,” says LivePerson CEO Rob Locascio. “The conversational space is going to be just as big. I think you’ll see one day that there will be a trillion dollar company in this space and I want it to be us. The things we’re investing in right now and setting up for will allow us to do that. That’s what’s important.”
Rob Locascio, CEO of LivePerson, predicts that the AI-driven conversational space will ultimately have as much impact and be as big an industry as ecommerce, search, or social. Locascio was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Ecommerce, Search, Social… and Conversational Space?
When I look at the conversational space I think it’s going to have as much impact as ecommerce or search or social. The ability to talk to a machine and have a natural conversation, it’s in the collective consciousness of people. We all believe the Alexa type situation should happen with every company.
We do that with Delta and T-Mobile and all these big brands. What we’re looking at now is how do we take that to the world? LiveIntent is proprietary technology to look at the intent that a consumer is having with the brand. In terms of I want to buy something, we have a way to analyze that and then use machine learning algorithms to then scale those conversations. That’s what this is about.
Healthcare Companies Defending Themselves From Amazon Via AI
In Q4 we signed a couple healthcare companies. They want to talk about defending themselves from Amazon because Amazon said they want to go into healthcare. The way they think they can do that is scaling the conversations they are having with their customers and creating a totally different experience. You go to a doctor, you have an experience with them, you capture that on a messaging platform and an AI will help you with whatever is wrong with you. You want to process a bill instead of calling and being put on hold, you do that through a conversational experience.
They want to game change it. The only way they’re going to defend themselves is to get into the conversational space. That’s what they see and we’re the company they’re trusting to scale their operations with the conversational platform.
Conversational Space Is Going To Be As Big As Search and Social
The conversational space is going to be as big as search and social. I think you’ll see one day that there will be a trillion dollar company in this space and I want it to be us. The things we’re investing in right now and setting up for will allow us to do that. That’s what’s important. The Amazon’s and the Facebook’s and Apple’s, they’re in the space. Jeff Bezos made a big bet obviously in Alexa to say this is the way it’s going to be.
It can’t just be Amazon and Alexa. It has to be other companies getting access to that technology and that’s what we are providing. Who else is providing it? We’re one of the largest companies in the world to do this. Even though we’re not big tech, we are large enough to go ahead and go after them. We are large enough to go ahead and define a space and win it.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has asked for a 40% pay cut, a reflection of feedback from the company’s shareholder meeting.
Cook received $98 million in compensation in 2021, compensation that was supported by 94.9 percent of shareholders. According to 9to5Mac, the most recent shareholder vote saw only 64% of shareholders vote for Cook’s compensation to remain the same.
As a result of the vote, Cook asked the Compensation Committee to reduce his pay. The change was outlined in the company’s annual proxy statement:
Mr. Cook’s 2023 target total compensation is $49 million, a reduction of over 40% from his 2022 target total compensation. Taking into consideration Apple’s comparative size, scope, and performance, the Compensation Committee also intends to position Mr. Cook’s annual target compensation between the 80th and 90th percentiles relative to our primary peer group for future years.
Elon Musk has the dubious distinction of having lost more money than any human being, even holding a Guinness World Record.
Musk’s value has plummeted in recent months amid an economic downturn and headwinds his companies have been facing. The executive also spent a fortune buying Twitter, an investment that has yet to pay off.
According to a Guinness press release, the various factors have combined to make Musk the biggest monetary loser in history.
Elon Musk (South Africa) has officially broken the world record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history.
He has lost approximately $182 billion (£153B; €173B) since November 2021, as estimated by Forbes, although other sources suggest that it could actually be closer to $200 billion.
“Conversion optimization is the same as it’s been for a while,” says Justuno CEO Erik Christiansen. “People still don’t want to focus on the last mile. We’ve kept to the same message that retailers should be investing in their current website visitors. There’s always low-hanging fruit to improve your business. How do you take one marketing dollar and stretch it as far as you possibly can? It’s all about creativity. That’s what marketing is and that’s what retail is.”
Conversion optimization is the same as it’s been for a while. People still don’t want to focus on the last mile. Finally, in 2020, we saw that shift when advertising got so expensive. Everyone is like, okay, we have minimal budgets, how do we stretch them? Finally, with all the competition from COVID where everyone’s shifting online everyone, they are saying that we can’t keep just throwing money at this. We’ve got to come up with the real problem.
When we first launched we had to pivot immediately because when we mentioned the word coupon or the word pop-up people just ran the other way. It’s been ten years of education and we’ve kept to the same message of investing in your current website visitors. Our main job still is to educate the online retailer about the basics. We ask most businesses, as you know with email, are you doing a 30, 60, 90 day, the basics? Are you doing a cart abandonment email? You cover the basics and you get so much further ahead.
There’s always low-hanging fruit
Everyone thinks businesses are run perfectly but most businesses are just a mess. What I’ve been trying to do is challenge my team to look at the basics. There’s always low-hanging fruit to improve your business. When it comes to retail, where’s the low-hanging fruit? Let’s break out your business to the basics like new visitors versus repeat. With the new ones, how many are there? What percentage of emails are we capturing? Are we sending those emails to your ESP? Are we putting in the basic workflows? There’s so much low-hanging fruit.
Then, you’re sending these emails, are you reinforcing those campaigns on-site? You spend so much time designing the email, sending it. Then it comes to that shopping cart abandonment. Do you even know how many people come to your cart each day? Do you know how many carts get abandoned and the dollar value? What can we do? The basics are still very much there in terms of opportunity to help people increase their sales lead capture and sales. How do you take one marketing dollar and stretch it as far as you possibly can? How do you also get creative? It’s all about creativity. That’s what marketing is and that’s what retail is. Retail is retailing and getting your hands dirty.
Retailers Should Focus On The Last Mile, Says Justuno CEO Erik Christiansen
The CEO of TrenDemon, Avishai Sharon, says that they created their cloud-based software solution in order to help companies prove that the marketing content they produced also achieved business goals and sales. In order to show this correlation, the TrenDemon software analyzes all of the different touchpoints the customer has had over his lifecycle and then reverse engineers those successful journeys in order to find out what content is working.
My personal background was heading a marketing agency for many years and one of my biggest struggles was how do I prove our value and our effort to our customers and how do you connect the impact of what we call content marketing to business goals and to sales? When we couldn’t find an easy way to show that correlation three and a half years ago we went ahead and founded TrenDemon to help companies do just that.
We connect their marketing efforts, which today rely mostly on content, you want your audience to consume valuable content, as opposed to just advertising. The big challenge is how do you attribute those efforts to sales? There’s actually a prior problem, how do you actually map the customer journey? How do you track those different touch points into one picture?
Reverse Engineering Successful Customer Journeys
The first thing we do is look at all the different touchpoints that a customer has had over his lifecycle. We ask the question, not just where do they come from, but how deep was their engagement? Did they actually watch the video? Did they actually read the article? Then you can start reverse engineering those successful journeys and say what’s common about all of these successful journeys.
What we found, and this is the interesting thing, we’re working with over 90 companies today worldwide and the vast majority of content the companies produce, over 90 percent, is ineffective at driving business goals. As you guys know it’s very expensive to create quality content and it takes a lot of effort.
If People Read the Right Content They Will Covert to a Sale
The second interesting thing is that if you do manage to find those 10 percent and you find a way to get it in front of the right people you’re actually able to improve dramatically your results. So there’s not just a correlation between what buyers did beforehand, there’s also a causation, a causal relationship, that if people read the right content at the right time they’re more likely to follow a path. We’re not probably as sophisticated as we believe that we are.
We’re a SaaS company, a cloud-based solution. We’re working a lot in the US and one of our biggest markets and growing markets is Japan. They’re investing a lot of content and a lot on technology. Essentially, because we look at the customer journey and not necessarily specific languages we can operate in any environment which allows us to grow pretty much anywhere. As long as they have content, which means that they’re producing something other than just advertising, they want people and audiences to actually engage with what they’re producing and they do have some business outcomes that they’re looking to measure.
About TrenDemon:
Founded in 2013, TrenDemon is the world’s leading content marketing attribution and optimization solution, helping marketers prove and improve their content’s impact.
TrenDemon insights can help you uncover your content marketing ROI, impact on business goals, and engagement to help guide the content strategy. Our optimization units will help you increase conversions and shorten time to convert on your owned assets.
TrenDemon proudly serves a wide range of customers, from Fortune 500s and brands to SaaS, B2B, and financial companies and is backed by leading VCs.
“What the pandemic and the current health situation has done is that it has created yet another inflection point for everything being digital,” says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. “The importance of digital in the marketplace is going to be sustainable for decades. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to engaging digitally and creating content digitally.”
Digital Transformation Is A $120 Billion Opportunity
It was a good quarter all around. All of our businesses performed exceedingly well. On the Creative Cloud and the Document Cloud, not only did we have a great acquisition. in other words, new customers adopting the platform, but we really focused on engagement and demonstrating the value of our products to our customers. Even our retention levels came back to pre-COVID levels which we believe is a really good sign.
What’s happening in the world is the businesses that we’re in, namely creativity and enabling people to tell their story, what’s happening with documents and accelerating document productivity, and what’s happening associated with every single enterprise needing to engage with their customers digitally, when you add all of this up we think it’s over a $120 billion of an addressable market opportunity for Adobe.
Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital
What the pandemic and the current health situation has done is that it has created yet another inflection point for everything being digital. What we will have to continue to monitor is what happens in the spending environment. But as it relates to the overall need for the kinds of solutions that Adobe provides as well as the importance of digital in the marketplace I think that’s going to be sustainable for decades. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to engaging digitally and creating content digitally.
We believe that we’re in this third phase of what is happening in the enterprise. Traditionally, businesses first focused on automating the back office, and then they focused on automating the front office for knowledge workers. It’s absolutely clear that the biggest imperative that exists in the enterprise today is how do you engage with customers? This is a category that we call Customer Experience Management.
Customer Insight Is Key To Your Digital Transformation
If you’re an enterprise today and you’re thinking about digital transformation, what’s top of that stack in terms of where you have to invest is to make sure that you have insight into what your customers are doing. How are they engaging with you? What’s the profile? How do you deliver the personalized experience?
We really believe that what you’re seeing in the enterprise spend environment is that the companies that are focused on this next generation of delivering customer engagement, the customer experiences, and the insight associated with how to take the most advantage of that data, they’re going to be the secular winners moving forward.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen: Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital
“We have seen significant acceleration since the COVID-19 pandemic,” says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer. “A significant portion of that (increase) was due to increased use cases from customers driving that digital transformation faster with services like DocuSign. We don’t see customers going back. Once they’ve got the benefits from that efficiency in their business, the better customer experience, and the better employee experience, they’re going to stay in a digitally transformed world.”
We’ve been really pleased with the growth we’ve had since going public a few years. We have also seen significant acceleration since the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s obviously a horrible pandemic and our number one priority has been the health and wellbeing of our employees so we can take good care of our customers. As you can see in our Q1 earnings we did see an acceleration of our bookings to 59 percent.
Traditionally, if you look at the billings-type metric they have been in the mid-30s’. A significant portion of that (increase) was due to increased use cases from customers driving that digital transformation faster with services like DocuSign.
Companies To Stay In This Digitally Transformed World
One of the things we’ve seen with the pandemic impact is that it has really accelerated the path that companies were already on to drive that digital transformation. We don’t see companies after the pandemic settles down going back and saying they want more paper and more manual processes.
Once they’ve got the benefits from that efficiency in their business, the better customer experience, and the better employee experience, they’re going to stay in a digitally transformed world. They are going to use DocuSign and other fantastic services to do that.
The Future Is Going To Have eSignature At The Center
We really think that the future is going to have eSignature at the center of what we call the overall Agreement Cloud. Companies want to be more agreeable. They want to be easier to do business with and be easier to do business for. They’re going to not just use DocuSign for signature but all of the other components of preparing agreements and managing those agreements digitally once they’ve been created. That’s why we’re excited about our very robust future.
We just past a billion dollars in revenue (for DocuSign eSignature). We are only four percent penetrated today and we’re six times larger than the next biggest player in the space. There’s not a lot of penetration yet in that core business. Notary is still predominantly done manually. We are making investments there. We believe we can bring the same ease of use that we brought to eSignature we can bring to notary.
AI To Power The DocuSign Agreement Cloud
Much bigger than that, even expanding upon the opportunity of eSignature is that broader Agreement Cloud opportunity. We think this is the next big cloud opportunity. You are going to see companies increasingly say I don’t just want to do the workflow and signature. I also want to drive the creations of those agreements. I want to think about artificial intelligence and search capability to manage my agreements. This would enable me to actually manage my business and make my company more agreeable.
Those are some of the investments we’re making. That’s why we just finished the acquisition of Seal Software last month so we can bring additional artificial intelligence and analytic capability to help people run their businesses better.
COVID Accelerated Digital Transformation, Says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer
California Property Trust is suing Twitter for $136,250, saying the company has stopped honoring its rental agreement.
Since buying the company, Elon Musk has been aggressively cutting costs and scaling back expenses. Unfortunately, one of the ways he has been doing that is by reneging on agreements and leaving bills unpaid.
According to Engadget, Twitter stopped paying rent, leaving California Property Trust little choice but to sue in order to get paid. This isn’t the only instance of Twitter defaulting on its rental agreements, with the company reportedly defaulting on agreements for all of its global offices.
Similarly, Twitter is also being sued for refusing to pay for charter flights Musk took in his first days at Twitter..
The news is just the latest example of Musk’s erratic behavior since taking over the social media company.
AMC CEO Adam Aron wants his company’s board of directors to freeze his pay in 2023 over concerns for shareholders.
With an economic downturn, many companies are looking for ways to cut costs and reduce expenses. Many have turned to layoffs as a prime way to accomplish those goals. AMC’s Aron has a different idea, however, calling on his board to freeze his pay for 2023.
1 of 3/ Biggest inflation in 40 years, so in 2023 companies will grant large % salary raises. But I do not want “more” when our shareholders are hurting. So, I recommended to the AMC Board to red circle and freeze both my target cash and target stock pay for 2023. NO INCREASE.
Aron also asked his company’s top executives to follow his lead.
2 of 3/ Despite high inflation, I also “asked” our most senior officers (15 – 20 executives) to forego an increase to their cash salaries for 2023. When CEO’s “ask,”execs to their credit usually agree. I sincerely thank them for that. AMC has a very dedicated management team.
Aron made clear he believes that what he is doing, and asking his management team to do, is the right course of action.
3 of 3/ No increase for those at the top is the right thing to do. I have fans and bashers on Twitter, those who agree or disagree with my decisions. But know this: my motives are pure. I try as best as I know how to lead AMC through the painful aftermath of this horrid pandemic.
Following a poll in which he asked users if he should resign as CEO, Musk has said he will abide by the results and resign.
Musk has always been a big fan of Twitter polls, although he may not have been prepared for the results of his latest one. The CEO asked users if he should resign as CEO, and the majority of respondents voted “yes.”
The controversial CEO has now said he will resign and look for a replacement.
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
In the wake of a poll where Elon Musk asked if he should resign as Twitter CEO, some are speculating that Tesla is the reason.
Musk posted the poll regarding his status as Twitter CEO, promising to abide by the results. The poll ended with 57.5% voting that Musk should resign. While Musk has been noticeably silent since the poll closed, there’s reason to believe Tesla may have been the ultimate reason for him posing the question in the first place.
Musk has been under fire for essentially leaving Tesla leaderless since his purchase of Twitter. One of the largest individual Tesla shareholders went so far as to call for the board to replace Musk as CEO, saying “Elon abandoned Tesla.”
Some believe the poll could be Musk’s exit strategy or, more accurately, Tesla’s exit strategy for Musk.
If you’re asking my opinion, the Tesla board probably had a “come to Jesus” meeting with Musk.
The stock is plummeting. If something doesn’t change, he’ll lose both companies.
This is a way for him to quit and blame it on someone else. Calacanis is my bet for new CEO.
Elon Musk has posted a poll, and promised to abide by the results, asking if users want him to resign as Twitter CEO.
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the tech mogul has made a series of decisions that have drawn widespread criticism and left fans, critics, and skeptics wondering what his end-game is.
The CEO posted his latest poll, promising to abide by the results. At the time of writing, the poll still had roughly four hours left.
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.
A major Tesla shareholder is calling for a new CEO, saying Elon Musk has “abandoned Tesla” over his obsession with Twitter.
Musk wears many hats, serving as CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. Since his acquisition of Twitter, however, the social media company has been taking much of his time.
One of Tesla’s largest individual shareholders, KoGuan Leo, has had enough and is calling Musk out for not focusing on Tesla enough. Leo says the company needs someone more operations-oriented, much like Apple’s Tim Cook.
Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO
Tesla needs and deserves to have working full time CEO
What Tesla BOD should do, do nothing? Elon will find his own successor under BOD independent supervision https://t.co/AJSvij9ncP
Only time will tell if Leo’s call to action is successful, but the longer Musk’s attention remains on Twitter ― no to mention the longer his erratic leadership of Twitter is on display — the greater the chance other shareholders will join in calling for Musk’s ouster.
Elon Musk is showing he doesn’t care about free speech as much as he claims, with Twitter banning critical journalists and links to competitor Mastodon.
Musk purchased Twitter on the promise of respecting free speech and has rolled back many of the content moderation measures that were in place. It appears the CEO is only concerned with free speech that’s not critical of him, however, as leading journalists have been banned for no apparent reason other than being critical of Musk and Twitter’s actions.
According to The New York Times, Ryan Mac of The New York Times; Drew Harwell of The Washington Post; independent journalist Aaron Rupar; Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Matt Binder of Mashable; independent journalist Tony Webster; Micah Lee of The Intercept; and political journalist Keith Olbermann all had their accounts suspended. No reason was given other than a notice on their Twitter profiles that says the accounts “violate the Twitter rules.”
Exactly what rules these accounts violated, however, is up for debate. Some of them covered the @ElonJet account, which tracked Musk’s jet using publicly available information. Musk had previously said he would not ban the account before reversing course and banning it Wednesday. Other journalists merely wrote articles critical of some of Musk’s decisions.
The bans were met with widespread criticism from other journalists, the tech industry, and politicians alike.
The gall of @elonmusk to ban respectable journalists doing important work from his platform while parading as some sort of champion of free speech is, quite frankly, detestable,” tweeted Representative Yvette Clarke. “I’d ask if he feels any shame, but meaningful self-reflection may simply be beyond his capacity.”
Similarly, Twitter users are reporting problems posting links to their Mastodon accounts, one of Twitter’s main competitors. When trying to post links to their Mastodon accounts, users are being met with a message stating the following:
“Your Tweet couldn’t be sent because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”
For someone who is a self-proclaimed champion of free speech, Musk is proving to be more of a foe than a champion, with his tenure as Twitter’s owner taking a decidedly draconian turn.
