Pivot - Microsoft's Hard Landing, Bitcoin Bounces Back, and Inside Twitter with Zoe Schiffer

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Kara and Scott discuss Microsoft layoffs, cryptocurrency’s surprising recovery, and Jacinda Ardern’s resignation. Plus, someone bought a Twitter bird statue for $100k, and it wasn’t Kara. Friend of Pivot Zoë Schiffer (@zoeschiffer) joins to discuss all of her recent Twitter reporting, including the work that went in to this week’s major New York Magazine story, which you can read here. Send us your questions! Call 855-51-PIVOT or go to nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher and a Tesla just clipped my Kia. Scott, how you doing? Really? Is that a true story? Yeah. Yeah. Amanda was

driving to work today and driving around DuPont Circle, and this Tesla came out of nowhere, hit her, and just kept going. Well, you know why that happened, right? Why? Well, because Amanda's getting in touch with her feminine side, so she's crashing cars, and soon she'll start ignoring her spouse for no reason. That's good. That's not good. Can you just let me tell you? I don't think Elon's in town, so I don't think it was him. But nonetheless, of course, we took a picture of it, and then the D.C. police has a picture.

This guy, I'm sure it's a guy. Sorry to say, but I'm sure it's a guy. Wait, was it hit and run? Yeah, hit and run. Hit and run. Tesla, of course, it's like sure it's a guy. Wait, was it hit and run? Yeah, hit and run. Hit and run. Tesla, of course. It's like Tesla attacking my beautiful Kia. Yeah.

Kia is actually doing very well from an EV perspective with its, I think it's a Niro it's called, and others. They're really catching up. And they have, I, of course, love my Kia hybrid. But nonetheless, they cannot hit the Kia and get away with you Tesla people. Did someone hit the Kia and then just took off? No, not someone. A Tesla owner did that. Okay.

Assuming there was a person involved. I see. Wow, this is a big scandal. They hit the wrong cowgirl. They hit the wrong Kia. That's scary. Anyway. Anyway, do you miss me from London?

Yeah, it was nice seeing you guys. We had a nice time. We all went out. You met some of my friends, didn't you? Kind of got a taste of that. Yeah, it was nice seeing you guys. We had a nice time. We all went out. We met some of my friends. Did you kind of get a taste of that? Yeah, I did. They came over. They all came over and chit-chatted with me.

That's right. You got a little taste of the dog's lifestyle in the UK. Anyway, it was lovely to be in London. I think these live ones were great, and I think we're going to do a lot more of them in case you're interested. So we're going to do them all across the country in various cities. And we were excited to see our many fans. It's really nice. It was really, I thought it was very good. I thought our debate, we were very debatey. We didn't agree on much, including the government surveillance. You're pro-Megan and Harry. That's what I don't get.

No, I'm not pro-Megan and Harry. I just think it's a little more complex than that. We also didn't agree about government surveillance, you and I. I thought the government was not to be trusted. You said they're more to be trusted than tech companies. That was not my argument, but I don't think the government's particularly trustworthy. But, you know, you did, as said by someone who's never been gay. Oh, you don't know that. I don't know that. A few beers and a couple George Clooney films and a little Arnold from Stay Hungry and, you know.

And a couple of George Clooney films and a little Arnold from Stay Hungry. And, you know. Speaking of secrets, this George Santos thing. Now he's a drag queen. It's crazy. Don't you love it, though, as a Democrat? Don't you love it? I don't know what to think.

I'm like, what? It's hilarious. What? Like, I wonder what the Republicans. I'd love to be in the room with Kevin McCarthy and Marjorie Taylor Greene discussing this. I would pay cash money on the barrel for that. The whole thing, it's hilarious. There was another one yesterday that he cheated this guy out of money, this poor veteran, homeless veteran. Oh, his dog money? His dog with cancer?

Dog money, yeah. And then I'm like, what, now we're moving to drag queen? Like, what is happening? We are in a simulation. No, when I find out that, you know, people do hideous things to other humans, it's meaningfully upsetting. But when you raise money for a dog's health care and then take off with that money, that person should be put in jail. I mean, it's funny that we have a much more visceral reaction around animals than we do around humans. It's funny that we have a much more visceral reaction around animals than we do around humans. Yeah, it's true. All right, we have so much to talk about today. We're going to talk about Microsoft announces one of its largest layoffs ever. Also, the crypto market makes a surprising recovery.

But we'll ask and we'll speak with platformer Zoe Schiffer about how Twitter employees are surviving in the post-Musk company. She and Casey Newton and Al Seath wrote a great cover story for New York Magazine. We'll talk about that. But first, the Twitter bird statue will go to the lucky birder for $100,000. The auction, I didn't get anything for items from Twitter. San Francisco headquarters is over with many items selling for more than the retail price. It's a penny-pinching move. They probably made, I don't know, probably $200,000 or $300,000 at the most would be my guess, maybe a little more.

But they are being sued for not paying rent. The company's revenue is down 40% year over year, which we've predicted would happen. A spokesman for the firm managing auction told Fortune that this sell-off had nothing to do with Twitter's financials and that if anyone generally thinks that revenue from selling a couple computers and chairs will pay for the mountain, they're a moron. I love that quote. I don't believe I didn't win anything. I wanted to get a womb chair, and I wanted to get the Twitter bird, but that went for a lot of money. The bird went for $100,000. I think that would have been kind of cool, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I tried to get Dick Costolo to buy it for me, but he did not. He failed. That would be a big gift, I guess. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, revenues. They announced revenues are down 40%. I bet that is being kind. I would be curious to gift, I guess. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, they announced revenues are down 40%. I bet that is being kind.

I would be curious to know how they calculated that. I thought the revenue was, it sounded to me like the evidence I saw, the revenue is down more like 60 to 70%. But it'll be really interesting to see if, and they just offered, as we talked about in the last podcast, 50% off on their ad card. Yeah. Crazy. Well, we'll talk about this all with our guest platformer, Zoe Schiffer, in a bit. And another embarrassing news, another thing we're going to talk to you about, according to testimony from a senior engineer, a 2016 video promoting Tesla's self-driving capabilities was staged. Elon Musk tweeted the video at the time, Tesla drives itself, no human input at all.

human input at all. The director of autopilot software said the video was not intended to show what was available for customers, but rather what was possible to build into the system. During the four-month period in 2022, 11 people were killed in crashes involving automated driving systems. 10 of those involved Teslas. Wow. I mean, you know, Nikola staged a video too. But, you know, we're going to talk to Zoe about that. There was a great New York Times piece about this too. He's in a trial right now over the stock, not about the crashes. There's a crashes case coming, obviously a severance case, and probably a rental stuff case. There's a lot of, he's going to be legally bound for quite a bit also. Yeah, the thing that's, I think, I mean, obviously it's a bad look because one of the things people talk about with the CEO of Nikola, who my understanding is, is going to jail or gone to jail, is kind of held as a poster child.

And that was the action that everyone points to, is that they had this car that they had to put on a hill that it actually didn't have a motor. And this feels kind of, I don't know, uncomfortably similar to that. I don't know, uncomfortably similar to that. But more than that, and, you know, it's going to be – the court's going to have to figure out if it's – a lot of companies exaggerate about the performance of any product. Sure do. So I don't know if they broke any laws. People smarter than me will figure that out. It's just gross.

Yeah, 100%. It'll create legal liability if the people are killed. You know, he'll be – he's got a lot of court cases going on. He doesn't seem to mind, but that's the way he is. But the bigger story, in my view, is that if you think about the biggest technology fails, whether it's the one playing out around the metaverse or wearables or 3D printing, I mean, kind of the list goes on, right, of things that were supposed to change the world and didn't. We have a new one, and that is autonomous driving. It just has, it looks like it's a giant head fake. And that's not to say it won't happen. But all of these predictions ranging from Musk himself to Business Insider around- He's always been saying that, but it's going to be tomorrow, tomorrow.

Well, three years ago, he said within a year, we'd have a million autonomous Teslas. Yeah, I remember. And then Business Insider, I mean, intelligent, thoughtful media companies projected that we were going to have a lot of autonomous vehicles. And the reality is, it just hasn't panned out. And what you're seeing is you're seeing a lot of companies actually give up on it, saying... It's hard. I've been visiting a lot of car companies lately, and every

single one of them, great engineers are like, Kara, this is just... I don't know when. I don't know when. There's sort of like, it's not... Of course, everything is possible, and it certainly is a physics and logistical, etc. problem, but they all

of them say that. Anyway, we'll see. Interesting, in other news, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced she will step down, saying she does not have the energy for re-election. Ardern said her term will end by early February when a new prime minister will be sworn in. In her statement, she read, the decision was my own. Leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also the most challenging. You cannot and should not do the job unless you have a full tank, plus a bit in reserve for those unplanned and unexpected challenges. She was obviously ran the country during the pandemic. She has small kids. I can't imagine a U.S.

politician ever doing this. Yeah. And you know what? It's really, there's a skill. You're good at this. There's a talent and a discipline and perspective, and it's an admirable one, of leaving while people are plotting. And it's something U.S. politicians aren't known for. Angela Merkel, I would argue, kind of left while people were plotting. But generally speaking, people cling to power. And I mean, Nikki Haley is just an example. She left the Trump administration while she was still fairly well-liked. It's very hard to get out of politics with your reputation intact. Well, I think that was a political calculation not to get sucked up into the shitty stuff. And it was looking like there was a good chance she wasn't going to be

reelected. So it was politically smart. She leaves on a high note, but she serves as a fantastic role model, not only for, I do think part of civics class, so let me back up. So we have more women have been graduating from college in the last 40 years than men. Almost every elected representative has one thing in common, and that is they went to college. So roughly speaking, we should be not only as many women as men, but if we see college and advanced education as kind of the primary requisite for going on to be an elected leader, you would think that we'd have more women elected to office than men. And the reality is we still only have 24% of our elected representatives are women. And I believe that because instinctively or instinctually,

we conflate physical attributes with leadership qualities, specifically height and the depth of your voice. Show me a woman who is 5'1", 130 IQ, works her ass off, has high EQ, and that's hello, school board president. Show me a guy with broad shoulders, 6'2", and a deep voice. Hello, Mr. Senator. civics class needs to hold up people such as Jacinda and say, you can not only be female, but it's important that we have more youth in leadership positions because slowly but surely, the population or the age of our elected- But I think they're making the choice that this is like too much. You know what I mean? Yeah, but that's fine.

She's a younger woman. But that's another great thing. Yeah, I know, but that's what- Leave. Do it while you're young. People, yeah, that's right. We need citizen leaders. We need people who— The one thing I liked about the crazies over on the right that were asking for things from Kevin McCarthy was term limits. Term limits, term limits.

But what do you know— They should not be in office 50 years, period. But what do you know? Our elected leaders— Left or right. Our elected leaders are average age 62, so for every 44-year-old, there's an 84-year-old. average age 62. So for every 44 year old, there's an 84 year old. And what do you know, the child tax credit doesn't get doesn't pass, but we have the largest cost of living increase in history for Social Security. So we have the the our elected leaders are getting too old everywhere. We need more young people. The one that's the one that's a big attention is

Dianne Feinstein. And I think she needs. Well, I mean, that's the worst kept secret. I know, but it's the same thing. It's not even a secret anymore. Everyone's talking out loud and it's just amazing that she won't step down. Anyway, Peter Thiel backed conservative dating app. The right stuff is not making many matches.

The app shocking. The app reportedly raked in less than 12,000 downloads in November. App store rating of 2.5. Users have complained that intense verification system, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, intended to weed out trolls, made it difficult to use. Another notable complaint from the Republican operative to the Daily Beast early on in the app's existence. It's all Mitch McConnell staffers. It's a lot of men, supposedly, I've been told.

Well, we just said this. Let's just take a bow. Well, I mean, first off, they went into a market that already had a player. I mean, the reality is for hard right conservatives. Not unlike social media companies, but go ahead. For hard right conservatives, evangelical Christians in Republican states, they had a fantastic dating site called Ancestry.com. That's good. That's enough on this. Anyway, Peter couldn't happen to a nicer guy. You know my favorite dating site? I like younger women, so I thought it was a dating site, but it ends up 23andMe is not a dating site.

Anyways. Oh, my God. All right. Okay. I have enough with this. Okay. Let's get on. No, no, no.

Let's get on to our first. I find, I go on Tinder, I find a soulmate. I literally find a soulmate, and I think, well, maybe I'll swipe left and I can find a hotter soulmate. Drew, can you cut off the mic for a second? Thank you. All right. Let's get on to our first big story. More tech workers could be out of a job.

Microsoft announced this week it will eliminate 10,000 jobs by April. That's one of the largest layoffs ever at less than 5% of its global workforce. Microsoft already cut 1% of its staff last year. This week, CEO Satya Nadella spoke of changes to the company's hardware portfolio without going into detail. He said, basically, gravity hits everyone. Amazon also having some problem adding more layoffs. It still continues. Yeah, but as you get older, I love what I think it was George Carlin said, question everything. And it really has struck me just how much influence the media has. And you do need to stop and look at the data.

And the headline news here, Kara, isn't that Microsoft laid off 10,000 people today. It's that they hired 30,000 in the last 12 months. And what is that 30,000? That's 40,000 that they hired minus the 10 in the last 12 months. And what is that 30,000? That's 40,000 that they hired minus the 10,000 they laid off today. So again, the media has their hair on fire because they love layoffs because they're dramatic and they're emotional.

Microsoft has hired 40,000 people in the last year. Yes, that's true. But they're moving them into other areas. You know, they've got some hardware issues, obviously. It's a HoloLens group, right? What do you know? Wearable, VR, not working. Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff.

They're in hardware, by the way. They're in hardware, software, cloud, enterprise, social, gaming, and has a $10 billion advertising business. But, you know, yeah, you're right. The areas that this is an opportunity for companies to rejigger themselves in the ways that make sense going forward. And I think every company has got to have to do this. I thought, you know, again, he handled it well, even though it's a lot of people. And they certainly have not done a great job in the hardware area, whether it's the HoloLens or if you remember the Surface Pro.

As I said, we debuted that at Code. And they also have some issues around the deal to buy Activision. But the big moves this year were in that area, in the gaming area, and also the ad deal with Netflix that it got over many others. So it obviously is moving things around. Going back again to employment, and I'm kind of stuck on this. Do you realize, and the headline news again is about all these layoffs at Salesforce and everywhere. Do you realize there's a percentage of total non-farm payrolls layoffs are lower now than they were pre-pandemic? I mean, it's just the employment couldn't be stronger.

And we just keep talking about layoffs at Microsoft and Salesforce. Well, certain employment. And certain employment. But look, Amazon began its largest ever layoffs. And now it's the earliest month it would cut between 18,000 jobs. Workers are using Slack to track which teams are impacted. Also, again, one of the things getting asked

is the charity platform Amazon Smile, which I didn't even know existed. But certainly, if you want to get a job at Chipotle, there's 20 of them for you, like right there. I don't think any of those people are going to have trouble getting a job. What happens is people create a list that is of their criteria that's oftentimes unattainable.

And they're under the impression that pet bereavement and free dry cleaning and getting paid $240,000 a year to be a mediocre systems engineer is kind of how the world, that's the natural state of the world. I mean, look back at your own life with your stocks, with your wealth, with your salary, always anchor off the high mark and think that's the natural state of the world. Yes, that is true. And that's not, that was an anomaly, just like when the market gets beaten up really badly. I don't think these people, I think their biggest, I don't, again, I don't feel sorry

for these individuals. I think their biggest problem isn't what to do, it's what not to do. All right. So you think it's like, you know, one of the things you did note, and I think we quoted Jamie Dimon about this being a mild recession. You thought the U.S. was in a great spot. And these are the companies that did the best over the last couple of years anywhere in the world. So you feel that this is healthy? It's healthy, correct? I think so. This is going to sound, you know, like matcha signaling.

I've been a CEO of a bunch of companies, and I have very basic talents. I know how to communicate. I've always been fortunate, blessed, and pretty good at attracting quality, good people. And also, I know how to fire people. And I mean, a lot of people don't. It's terrible. It's hard to do. And it is really important. And I mean, a lot of people don't. It's terrible. It's hard to do. And it is really

important. And guess what? The sooner you do it, the better. You go deeper than you need to because you don't want to do it twice. And you can be more generous with people. And people should go to where their human capital is going to be best applied. And you cannot be an entrepreneur. Like entrepreneurship is not, you know, entrepreneurship is the history channel. Specifically, it's hand-in-hand combat. It is not the Hallmark Channel. And I think unlike France, one of the things, the reason the U.S. economy is so robust and agile is the faster you fire people, the quicker you can hire them. And so I think it's really important to make hard, crisp decisions around this type of thing.

And again- Well, it seems like they are, all of them. Yeah. And I hate to admit it, but you know who's given them cloud cover for all of this? Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I mean- Yeah, yeah. That's his biggest impact on the business ecosystem. And by the way, did you read that they're laying out more people? Yes, they are. Yes, that's right. We're going to talk about that. So, we'll talk about all those things. You know, it's interesting because, you know, but their businesses are changing. You know, there was a report that Amazon Prime membership has gone down. Amazon's disputing it,

but they certainly have to figure out where to put their money. It's spent big on primetime video offerings like Thursday Football and the new Lord of the Rings, which none of which I watched. You know, Netflix earnings are coming out after record. Everybody is looking about that because the analysts are projecting weak subscriber growth in the last quarter. Prime is probably the best subscription product out there, I think. I find it useful. You know, the subscription business model, it might be under, wherever it happens to be, might be a little bit under pressure. It might have to give us more stuff for what they're doing. I think about that a lot. their credit card out for a subscription, it's just become overinvested. If you look at what's happened with Disney, it's essentially that they have to go into a field streaming media that is so overinvested that they just can't. I'll use another example. Goldman Sachs and Disney both missed on earnings. And I would argue that

it's the same thing, even though they are in unrelated fields. And that is that Goldman decided it was going to try and go toe-to-toe and be a kind of a neobank or get into payments, right? Or go into kind of the new age of consumer banking. And Disney said, we got to go into streaming. Both of those fields, they are competing with younger players that have access to cheaper capital. And it's not that they didn't do a good job of it. Disney Plus is fantastic. It's just that their shareholder base says, no, you're not young and youthful and growing. You're a mature company that's meant to spin off dividends and manage your cost highly

and be profitable. And as a result, both of them have had huge misses because they decided they wanted to be young again. Now, that might have been the right strategy, but it is very hard when you have a shareholder base that's used to you having EBITDA and dividends. Yeah, well, that's a perfect... You mentioned Disney. I mean, the streaming thing, I think it's going to... We'll see what happens to Netflix today. But even over at Disney, Bob Iger has to decide when and for how much money to buy Hulu. And if he's really going to go all in on the streaming market,

obviously he got the Fox stake, Comcast has it. Disney suggested around $27 billion and change. Comcast wants more. I think he's got Nelson Peltz breathing down his necks saying, buy it or get out of the streaming business. He can't really get out of the streaming business because he's the one that really moved Disney into it. So it's really, you know, these are choices that are, you know, are you going to make these investments for the future or do you think they're the future? I think

a lot of companies are trying to figure that out, what to do with the assets they have. But the only thing that's going to solve this problem is when the budgets get rationalized and it becomes less competitive. Because, I'll give you an example. My favorite shows in the world were on AMC Networks, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Probably my two favorite shows. AMC Plus doesn't work, even when you have amazing content. I just saw MGM Plus the other day.

I'm like, that's enough. That would be enough. Well, they have Bond. They have the Bonds. They could keep those away from other people. I'm like, that's enough. MGM Plus. That would be enough. Go ahead. Well, they have Bond. They have the Bonds. They have, you know, they could keep those away from other people. But even that wouldn't be enough. Yeah. What else did they have?

They had a bunch of stuff, but I thought that's just the Bonds, essentially. But they had a couple other things. I forget. MGM Plus. Anyway, it'll be an interesting time. I'm really looking forward to seeing these Netflix earnings and what impact they have. You know, they're all looking at their assets. Jeff Bezos in Washington today didn't call me.

He's visiting the Washington Post. A little trouble over there. Really? You know. Yeah, the publisher is under a lot of pressure. Why? Same one. I love the Post.

Oh, you know, there's been, if you read a lot of the stories, you know, their numbers are off a lot significantly since Trump left office. They haven't diversified the way Meredith Levin, the CEO of New York Times, has, you know, with Wordle and cooking and The Athletic, etc. I feel like he hasn't moved. He doesn't get digital. There's some tension between the editor, Sally Busby, who was just appointed, and him. Allegedly, I think it's 100% true. And I don't think it's allegedly there is. You know, Bezos got a, there's a lot of call, pressure within the Post to what's Bezos going to do here, get a new publisher, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, stuff like that. I think he's been such a fantastic steward of that asset. Yeah, but it's got, I'll tell you, there's a, I mean, my, full disclosure, Amanda works there, knows nothing. I know more about what's happening inside The Washington Post than she does. She just started there full time. But I think they're trying to figure out what to do. And especially since Meredith Levian, who's such a gifted CEO at The New York Times, has really shown how to be aggressive in a really smart way. And they made a bunch of bets. You know, that's what you have to do if you're a media CEO.

And so people are trying to see what Bezos is going to do here for something that he's mostly left alone, and maybe he shouldn't leave it quite so much alone. I guess that's the stuff I get from internally, but we'll see. I just think at the end of the day, it's incredibly difficult to maintain newsrooms and long-form journalism as fact-checking. It's very difficult for it to compete. And slowly but surely, it seems like it's all moving to benign billionaires that see the value in it and just hope to break even. Yeah, but look at the Times. You know, Times is turning into a news monopoly.

You know, I worked there, so another disclosure, but I think she's been really smart. I like Meredith. She's someone I really admire and always did. And I thought the stuff she's doing is interesting, trying very hard to be relevant in cooking and in all kinds of ways. And I think the Post, you know is interesting, trying very hard to be relevant and cooking and in all kinds of ways. And I think the post,

you know, I wrote to Fred Ryan a note and I said, you need to replace yourself. I actually wrote a note saying that. He didn't, he was very polite. He's a very polite guy. I suggested he hire, he buy Vox Media and then hire Jim Bancroft. I was making the point

that he's got to find his successor. Yeah, something. I thought Bancroft would be a good one, Jim Bankoff, who runs Fox. You know, he has to do something. And I think, well, but maybe not. If you're owned by a billionaire, maybe you don't have to do anything. But I think you do. I think all media companies have to be thinking hard about changing at every minute of the day, just like anybody else.

Anyway, let's go on a quick break. And when we come back, Bitcoin bounces back. And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Zoe Schiffer, about what's going on inside Twitter. scammer. What do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world.

These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive?

Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim. And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk. And we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust.

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road. plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Scott, we're back. So is Bitcoin. The crypto market has made a surprising recovery this week. Bitcoin recouped its losses from the FTX meltdown. Now it's trading at $20,000, about where it was in November. Analysts say the cooling inflation and possibility of low

interest rates are behind the bump. And then there's more good news. FTX says it's identified more than five billion dollars of digital assets that could be recovered. However, about 400 million dollars of that was hacked shortly after the company collapsed. Sam Bankman Freed is still on his strange little tour of talking to reporters. And I'm going to be in San Francisco next week and I'm going to write him and see if I can go visit him at his home, his home arrest situation. He's going to say no to me, but says yes to all the other boys. What do you think? Yeah, I was so shocked about when I read that stat that about half of all trading in NFTs is wash trading. It's basically wallets selling NFTs back to one another,

controlled by the same entity in an effort to create a false signal in the marketplace. Sure. That's an old trick. But I don't, without regulation, it just strikes me. I don't, I'm shocked that it's bounced back. And when you think about it, everyone talks about the crash in prices. It's kind of crashed back to where it was maybe two, three years ago. So it's still, you know, I mean, the reality is Bitcoin and Ethereum have been pretty resilient.

I'm just so, I don't know if the term is sanguine or hesitant now or cautious, because I think we've seen slowly but surely across all of these markets when there's an absence of regulation, you know, strange and unwelcome things happen. There's more and there's more to come. Genesis, there's a whole bunch of other ones that are sort of, every day it's a different one. But so you wouldn't put money, you have some money in Bitcoin adjacent. I don't. I'm a no-coiner. I've never owned a coin. The adjacent you're talking about is I have an investment in a ledger. Yep. I have an investment. I'm on the board of ledger, which is a cold storage hardware wallet. But my, all I do on the board is say we need to get into other key digital assets that require confidentiality, whether it's your immigration status, your visa,

your banking records, your health records. I think that's the future of cold storage. And while crypto is still on everyone's mind and people want to get off these platforms and go into cold storage, and we have this Nano X, which so far hasn't been hacked, you know, our business booms. The more there's controversy, more people decide to go to cold storage. But the future is around safeguarding digital assets. But I have never owned a coin. I don't, you know, I barely understand the stuff I invest in, much less this. I've just never. You didn't get a feeling you wanted to buy some Bitcoin when everything was down and assuming it would go up?

I can't get it. It strikes me like I could see Bitcoin at $100,000 or at $1,000. I can envision both scenarios. And I'm at a point in my life where, you know, I'm not about getting economically secure. I'm about staying economically secure. And the key to that is diversification and not investing in shit you don't understand. Right, but you don't understand. I don't understand. I mean, I've always said this. I think the two of us, Cara, understand Bitcoin better than 99% of the public,

and we don't understand Bitcoin. I agree. And that's the thing. And Aswath Tamodar, my colleague at NYU, summed up perfectly. It has no upward bound. If someone says it's worth $100,000 and there's a buyer and seller- That's right. Which is the story of FTX. They were trading their FTX coins and saying, this is the asset. But the flip side of that is because it has no underlying cash flows or what you call asset value, then there's no lower bound on it. And so what I tell young people,

it just goes to an investment recommendation. If you're excited about it, you think it's interesting, young people especially, there's nothing wrong with you taking three, five, 10% of your assets when you're young and investing in things that you get some emotional or psychological reward for

hoping for asymmetric upside. But I would not tell anyone to put a decent amount of their wealth in something. They don't know who the founder is. That's where I run into problems. Yeah. The issues that I think is interesting is that millennials don't feel like they can make money anywhere else. And so they tend towards get-rich-quick schemes. I think we, not, you know, they're more interested in how fast can you get rich versus, because if they put money in the market now, they're just not going to do the same.

They can't get into real estate. That's right. So, these are – this is why they're attracted to these things. And I would agree. I think that's – you know, what's the point of savings anymore given – now, of course, interest rates have gone up again, so there's some attractiveness there. But, you know, with interest rates nearing zero before, it was like there was no upside to anything, essentially, except quick money. It comes back to one basic thing, and that is people under the age of 40 in 1980 controlled 19% of the nation's wealth. Now they control nine.

And look at their primary costs. Education and housing have skyrocketed. And look at their primary costs. Education and housing have skyrocketed. So when the standard operating procedure for building a life of economic security has just been slowly but surely made shittier and shittier, what do you want? You want volatility. You want a chance to make money. Because before it used to be play by the rules, save some money. I bought my first house at 28.

What 28-year-old can buy a house right now? Anywhere. I mean, even people talk about, oh, it's so cheap in Columbus, Ohio. It's not that. No 20. I mean, even if you work at Google, you can't afford a house at 28. So what do you seek? When you don't have, when the standard way of making a living that your parents made a living just doesn't work for you, you embrace volatility. And this is that asset class. Yeah, I would agree. Interestingly, speaking of crypto adjacent, the trading platform, I've read this. I couldn't believe it. Robinhood will launch an independent media brand called Sherwood. It plans to focus on newsletters and social media at the start, but it could

approach video and podcasts down the line, according to its editor-in-chief. Oh, we have some competition in the business brands. Is it going to be like a vice or it's doing Axios? I don't know. I don't know. Money? Finance, I would assume. I don't know how they can make

an investment like this. They've laid off, I guess, Media's Chief and nearly a quarter of its staff. You know, it's probably something around money, like spending, finding. I don't know.

It wouldn't be about, like, Gary and Megan. I'd love if they could make some money finding. I don't know. It wouldn't be about like Gary and Megan. I thought they could make some money there. I don't know. I have no idea. I was like, oh God, you people stop doing, you know, Airbnb did this. And then when Brian Chesky called me about it, I forget what it was called. I was like, could you just, no, do not get out of the, let Condé Nast do its excellent job or whoever, you know, who does good travel stuff. There's a difference. There's content marketing where you create your own research. Generally speaking, when these companies try to develop any media that pretends to have any journalistic integrity, what they're really saying is we want our own journalists who will position us and our sector in a non-journalistic favorable light.

That never works out. Yeah, that's like Future, if you remember. Oh, yeah. That was Andreessen Horowitz? Yeah, that was Andreessen Horowitz, and they closed that down. I laughed in their face when they did that. Like, Coindesk, my understanding is they have outstanding information and content. It actually broke all those Bitcoin stories. It broke all the stories on FTX, right? Yeah, yes, it did. And the digital currency group it owns, it's in a liquidity crisis. They did a really good job as sort of a trade publication. Anyway, they do a great job. They did a great job. Kudos all around to them. Anyway, we'll see. Good luck, Robin Hood. Scott and I will not be working for you in case you're interested. What if they came up to it and they said, here's a million dollars? I don't know. I'm doing a show on Hood Plus. Would it surprise anybody?

Hood Plus. Oh, God. No, you probably would do that. I'm just sitting here waiting for you, Scott. Whatever. Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot. Zoe Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer. She's also one of Elon Musk's chief antagonists over the last year. She's broken some of the must-read scoops about his Twitter takeover. This week, she joined two other journalists, Casey Newton, also of Platformer, and Alex Heath of The Verge, to publish a chronicle of the story in New York Magazine. Welcome, Zoe. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. No problem. I always tell Casey, you're the brains of the operation. I want to put that on the record.

Anyway, one of the most shocking things about your story, and you've had so many scoops, really well done, was Twitter revenue was down 40% year over year. Let's talk about how this happened. Is there anything Musk can do about it to right the ship except selling the furniture, which he did recently? Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, we've seen him auction off a lot of furniture, so maybe that will make a dent. But yeah, yesterday we discovered that Twitter's revenue is down 40% year over year. What we know is that the company was incredibly dependent on advertising. About 90% of its revenue came

from advertisers. And Elon Musk has done almost everything in his power, it seems, to scare those advertisers away. And it appears that they're not coming back. It wasn't, you know, a momentary pause. And now people are assuaged by the thing he's done to right the platform. They're staying away for the moment. For now. They could go back at any time if they want to, right? Because that's happened.

But it's a quality thing. And it's interesting in whether it's effective or not. I've never found Twitter a very effective marketing tool compared to other places. But what does that mean then? What is that? What happens with I think it's probably more than 40, but but he's cut costs, of course. But it's still he went from a $5 billion business to what two point, you know, a little bit over close to three, I guess. What what happens then? Because he's got some payments due. Yeah. So the first interest payment on the debt is due at the end of this month.

How much is that? It's in the billions. It's high. So his options are bankruptcy proceedings. He could sell more Tesla stock. But other than that, doesn't look particularly bright on the horizon for Elon Musk. So that's one. And that's just one of the payments he has to do. And then he has others, right? They come due quite a bit. Yeah, absolutely. So it's going to start ramping up. And his strategy so far has been,

okay, let's shift revenue towards subscriptions. Let's make people pay for Twitter Blue, pay dollars a month to become verified. But not enough people are doing that. And I don't think anyone expected that to actually make a dent in Twitter's revenue. And they really haven't rolled it out. They unrolled it and unrolled it. So I'm just trying to work through the math here. I was shocked that it was only down 40%. I thought it was going to be more like 60 or 70. I'd be curious

how that math was done. But let's assume it's gone from a company that's doing one and a quarter billion a quarter to750 million. I think that the debt payment is going to be around $375 million. So what does that mean? That means that essentially this is a company that is now, it's $1.5, $375 million, so $1.125. I guess my question is, I'm just trying to do the math. When does he need to raise additional equity or restructure the debt? Like where is the wall that he runs into in terms of the company's out of money and he has to go back to his investors and ask for more equity or go try and renegotiate and restructure the debt? When is D-Day? I mean, I don't think we know right

now. It's somewhat dependent on how much of his personal wealth he's able and willing to put on the line. Like, if he's wanting to sell more Tesla stock to fund this operation, then perhaps he will do that. But we know that Tesla's investors are pissed right now. They do not want him kind of doing all of this for Twitter. And, you know, I would assume that he's kind of souring on the option. We know internally he's floated the idea and externally, actually, at this point of bringing in a new CEO. So, you know, this was a company he bought from what we can tell on a whim. And now it's taking up a large portion of his personal wealth, which

has also tanking because investors are not super happy with him paying so much attention to Twitter. He could have to sell off more of his stock and take a larger hit. And he's having to put up with a whole bunch of people being super pissed off at him every day. And lawsuits. And also lawsuits. And those are mounting too. Yeah. I mean, employees, that's every single day we find out about new people. So it's employees, it's the Tesla stock, it's Tesla crashes. There's probably rent people that are coming after him. I mean, there's one after that.

Yeah, landlords. And probably governments because of the severance thing. So who's still working at Twitter? You know, he's apparently laying more people off, you were writing about. Are any of them advocating for users or is it just people who need, as you noted, health and visas issues or like blatant opportunists, which really worst people ever, I would assume. Yeah. So it's split into a few categories. We definitely saw a few people and we highlight them in the article who saw this moment as their opportunity. They were like,

this is a moment of chaos. There's a power vacuum at the top. Previously, I was a random product manager at Twitter working on products that no one cared about. This is my moment. I'm going to be CEO of the payments business or whatever it is. And those people have done very well for themselves. Although it doesn't protect you. Absolutely. As we saw with, you know, one of the three people we highlighted in this piece did everything for Elon Musk, carried out all the orders, was axed largely without warning from what we can tell. But there are those people, there are people who need the healthcare, they're on visas, they can't really afford to leave right now. I mean, this is a tough time to get another job in the tech industry at the moment. But we definitely have sources who feel like it's their duty to stay and make the service as stable.

Sounds like the Trump administration. There's people who told me that during that time. Yeah, I think that comparison has been made quite a lot. But yeah, we do have people who are staying because they care and believe in the service and platform and they've done, you know, years and years of work on it and they don't want to see Elon Musk ruin it overnight. I just, I'm stuck on this. I just did the loose math.

want to see Elon Musk ruin it overnight. I just, I'm stuck on this. I just did the loose math. $750 million a quarter in revenue, $375 million in interest payments. No company is sustainable when 50% of its top line revenue has to go to interest payments. That's just a totally, you can't fire enough people. That's not a sustainable company. Can't sell enough furniture. Have you heard anything about trying to renegotiate with his creditors or find alternative forms of revenue or what? I mean, this is just, the word is unsustainable. You can't, even if he gets through this quarter, this company can't continue to operate that way. Have you heard any sort of big picture ideas? Or rich friends, something like that. What he or the company is planning to do?

I mean, he has tried to raise more capital. I think it was largely unsuccessful. So that's been one thing. We've seen him try and cut costs again and again, not just through layoffs, but through things like closing the data centers and redirecting Twitter's traffic to just two locations, kind of making a gamble that they would make the service a little less stable in order to save money in those areas. But I mean, we're really seeing someone chip away at this enormous pile. Or as you said, like this math that just doesn't work out by doing things like cutting the free lunches. And that's just, this isn't gonna work. And I think internally, the feeling is like, this is unsustainable, this isn't going to work. And I think internally, the feeling

is like, this is unsustainable. Like what is going to happen here? Because it doesn't seem like everyone has a plan. So one person, they were obviously subscriptions was this big move and it's been a disaster. And I have, I know exactly why, because I know the people who are running it. So, but Yoel Roth, who was the safety person there, he warned them of the blue-checked impersonators, that this was going to be a problem. And he said, Elon just said, no, we're not going to agree with you. I think that's what he said in the interview I did with him. Is there any hope that the subscriptions will pick up in some fashion. Obviously, subscriptions are now under pressure at stuff that gives you good stuff like Prime or Disney Plus or anywhere else. The ones that are actually great at what

they do still have pressure. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few different areas here where we can say that Elon Musk has kind of a failure of vision or failure of imagination. I think for employees, it's like, you know, you have to stay and work longer hours and sign up for Twitter 2.0. And they're like, we don't have any idea what the hell Twitter 2.0 even is. Like you haven't told us. And here with subscriptions, we kind of see something similar. He's like, pay $8 a month. This is going to be great.

But what's the great thing? You get a blue checkmark. I mean, that convinced some people. I mean, that convinced some people and we've seen, you know, particularly right wing accounts really use this as a moment to appear more legitimate if they were perhaps, you know, kicked off the platform before and are just kind of ramping up and trying to grow their followings. But they need millions and millions of people to sign up for Twitter Blue in order for it to actually shift any sizable amount of revenue away from advertisers and towards subscriptions. And we're just not seeing that happen right now because what are people getting? Right. That's exactly right. And employees, you know, they're saying are working really hard.

The ones that are there are working very hard doing this. But the ones that have left have organized legal action. What is going to happen there with these severance things? They're just not paying people. I assume right up to the top, right up to the former CEO and others, the head counsel. I'm assuming he's just not paying them, just like he's not paying the rent, the people. Where does that, what happens with that? Where does it get caught into? is really going to depend on the employee. You know, executives are going to have a different outcome than employees and employees in the U.S. are going to have a different outcome than employees in Europe who have a lot more protections and ways to bring legal action.

In Europe, you can't just fire someone without any notice whatsoever. In the U.S., you kind of can. As long as you don't, yeah, as long as you don't violate the Warren Act in California. But he did what he had to do to kind of get around that. But we have seen, you know, a judge in California give a favorable ruling to Twitter on at least one of these points. And so far as employees cannot bring a class action suit against Twitter at this point, they're going to have to deal with the company in private arbitration, which typically is advantageous for the employer. But still, I mean, that's a lot of arbitration proceedings that the company is going to have to deal with. It's hundreds and hundreds of people right now who are

coming forward and saying they were laid off in a way that doesn't abide by federal labor law. So what happens then? You know, labor law in this country is not great, to say the very least. And so Twitter could have to, at the worst possible outcome, from what I know, reinstate people, pay people back pay. But other than that, it's not going to be enormously detrimental. He just doesn't mind. He doesn't mind. No, and he hasn't. I mean, we've seen this at Elon Musk's other companies. He knows that federal labor law doesn't, there's not huge ways to hold companies accountable. So yeah, it moves forward. Maybe it looks bad. He doesn't give a shit if it looks bad in the press. And so, yeah, it looks like employees, you know, have a strong case here. But what happens to Twitter or Elon Musk? Like nothing major. Nothing. So you know this company really well. And I don't know if you felt this way, but if someone had told me that Twitter or that Musk was going to fire 75% of the employees,

that you would see the service collapse. And to his credit, and I hate to admit this, from a consumer standpoint, I stopped posting to Twitter about two months ago. But when I go on it and look at it, it does appear that he's managed to lay off 75% of the workforce and still present a minimally viable product. And so, one, was this thing just enormously, historically overstaffed? Or are we going to start to see glitches in the matrix here? And if so, where do you think it starts to happen? Because so far, you got to give it to the guy from a consumer standpoint. It's not, though, Scott. I wouldn't agree. It's glitchy all the time. And there's ads that are really crazy. Well, the ads are different. They're not different.

They're packed. I had never gotten this many ads. It's a terrible experience. It's a much less experience. But that's not a function. That's a function of the financial desperation, not that they've laid off 75% of the people. I guess what I'm asking Zoe is where do you start to see signs of three quarters of your workforce not being there? I mean, I'm with Kara. I do think that the quality of the service has declined. You know, I personally was not surprised that we didn't see some large scale outage. I've worked at these large tech companies before I switched into journalism. And I've seen firsthand that so much of the engineering resources go towards creating these systems that need as few people as possible. So to answer your first question,

there was a huge amount of glut at Twitter and at many large tech organizations. There were a lot of employees who didn't need to be there. And I think a portion of them were going to be fired, whether Elon Musk came on board or not. But what we have seen is that he's gotten rid of people who had a large amount of institutional knowledge. And so when you ask, when are we going to start to see this come to a head, it's going to be at large events like the World Cup. And when people are brought back, like Donald Trump, one thing we know from talking to people on the inside is that bringing someone back like Donald Trump requires an enormous amount on the back end to kind of restructure the information on who should follow who and who should be recommended to who. And when he was brought back, even though he'd never tweeted, it already created a bunch of

glitches. And it was kind of an all hands on deck moment behind the scenes. They were freaking out because you couldn't even follow Trump from the follow button on his profile page for an hour when he was brought back. If he starts tweeting at another high profile account, that creates an enormous amount of headache and traffic for Twitter engineers to deal with. And right now, there's just not a lot of people on board to do that. And so will we see some massive outage? I don't know. That's not really how tech companies... No, it's resilient. Yeah, it's resilient.

It's resilient. But are we going to see so many bugs over time and so many high profile people leave the platform that it just becomes more annoying and less useful to use? I think that's already happening. I'll tell you, Scott, it switches over things I set six or 10 times a week. I say one thing... What do you mean, Kara? I want nobody to comment at me now because there's so many trolls, for example. That just appeared.

The shitty advertising all of a sudden is a bad experience. Those are both bad experiences. But then I try to say only people I follow can comment here. It constantly is switching it over to everyone. It went private the other day. It switches it for you and trending

without you doing anything. It's very buggy and it never, I'm always like fixing it. And so I don't use it that much except for marketing our show. That's it now. So, because it's so irritating. I have a follow-up question.

And that is, it's just hard to imagine a company like this losing, you lose 75% of your colleagues. I would imagine a lot of people that are still there, I don't want to say don't have a lot of options, but are either there because they think it's an interesting social experiment or they're on visas. I would think the culture, and this is a long-winded way of asking you, you show up to the office there or you get on Zoom calls, what is the environment like right now?

Is it chaos? Is it comical? Is it people doubling down on Elon? How would you describe the culture and the environment at Twitter right now? at this point. We've seen people kind of, you know, joking in the office about how they can get any conference room for like a one-on-one meeting. They're sitting in this enormous cavernous space because suddenly there's no one around. We saw yesterday. Without chairs now. Without chairs. In the Twitter parking lot, like there were no cars. It was empty. And I think it feels like a ghost town. It feels super weird and different. I mean, it's really hard to overstate how completely Twitter's culture has been decimated since Elon Musk took over. This was a company that prided itself on the tech ethos that every tech company had, where anyone could ask anything of the CEO, and the CEO would really respond. Twitter actually really lived that. We've seen Twitter's slack

before the takeover, and it was employees asking Parag and the Twitter AMA channel, everything from like, when are we going to get matcha lattes at the Twitter cafe to like, why did you make this large scale policy decision and explain yourself? Because we're unhappy about it. And he would really play ball. He was actually less responsive than Jack was, but he would actually respond to them. That is like, there is just no culture. Elon doesn't. Who does he talk to? Who's

running? Is it David Sachs? Is it Jason Calacanis? Is it, I know a Tesla engineer left that because he left Tesla who was working on it. Yeah. So he has this, he still has over a hundred engineers who he brought over from Tesla, his other companies. And he has that group of venture capitalists. We know, you know, employees have had a fair amount of face time with David Sachs. And so Elon Musk, like he's not on Slack. I mean, maybe he's, you know, lurking around the channels, but he's certainly not talking. But I think the messages are getting filtered down through that group of engineers. And those are the people saying, hey, this is what he wants to see.

You know, oh, Elon Musk tweeted about this new policy change, all hands on deck, we need to like implement this ASAP. But largely, they're there even like, you know, the top people are looking at his Twitter feed to try and divine like what is coming next. And they're saying things like, this isn't his personal fiefdom, but we need to pay close attention. And, you know, when he tweets, we need to actually follow up and make sure that his vision becomes a reality. So if he just tweeted, I know that the Biden administration was going to, you know, he insinuated that the Biden administration was going to weaponize the federal government against him. What do they do when they see that? I mean, we see kind of late night emergency meetings where people are like, okay, what are we going to do?

Is this going to be a policy change? Do we need to do anything? Do we need to talk to the Biden administration? It's ridiculous. Yeah, of course it's ridiculous. But I think that's what, it's both ridiculous and they have to take it incredibly seriously because it's their jobs,

because it has big implications for like global politics and event. For Elon Musk, it does. But I have one more question that Scott made up. The Twitter files, why wouldn't they give you access to them? One. And then new reporting from The Washington Post shows that Twitter staffers actually gave broad leeway to right wingers from the January 6th committee uncovered a whole bunch of stuff to break rules because they were worried Republican bash clash. So that wasn't quite what the Twitter file said. But why wouldn't you get access to them? What did you think of them? I was extremely disappointed that I wasn't asked to come on board. But I have found that tech CEOs hate talking to me and never give me any sort of

access. So I'm not super surprised. It means you're doing something right. Thank you. But no, I mean, I think they chose people who they thought were going to have a very similar perspective to Elon Musk on this. We saw them, you know, they supposedly had complete acts at carte blanche to kind of go through Twitter systems and find, you know, evidence of kind of suppressing conservative voices and all of that. But we saw them really cherry pick these conversations when they were saying, you know, Twitter had these enormous tools at its disposal to silence conservatives. Those tools were also available to silence liberals or left leaning folks. But we

didn't see those examples kind of come out in the threads. And so I think we're going to see more reporting, just to drop a little hint on kind of the other side of that story. Yes, I know. The January 6th committee seemed to say they were actually very, and that was my experience, was acquiescence. Just on reporting I did way back when. It was constantly acquiescent is what my, you know, and I wasn't even looking for it. You know, they just didn't send in reporters. Would you like to get a hold of those Twitter fighters?

What would you agree to, if you could? Oh, I mean, I think we'd, yes, of course. I think those, the Twitter files are enormously newsworthy, but I think we would need to be able to like tell a complete story. And if it was a story that went completely against Elon Musk's perspective on this, we would need the freedom to be able to tell it. And I think we believe what you believe here, which is that tech companies might have left-leaning workforces for the most part. We've seen that in how people donate and how people vote. But they're so scared of being seen as anti-conservative, as anti-Republican, that they kind of go over the top from what we can tell to not silence conservative

voices, to kind of do everything they can to play nice with those exact people. I would just be curious, try and become, speculate in recognizing nobody has a crystal ball. Any thoughts about Twitter in 12 months? A couple thoughts on what you think might happen here? And recognizing none of us know. So I'm asking you to take off your journalist hat. There's no way to fact check this. Just some thoughts on what you wouldn't be surprised if you had to bet what might happen here. Yeah. I mean, I think that he is going to bring in a new CEO and a lot of-

George Santos, I hear. George Santos. Yeah. I mean, no, I'm not even employee. Well, let's stop right there. Could it be Brett Taylor? Someone mentioned the name Brett Taylor to me. I did. I made it up. I have truly no idea. I have no clue whatsoever. We've seen him kind of joking on Twitter with various people about like who would want to do this job. And I think he's going to want someone who shares his perspective on like free speech, et cetera. You know, with Elon Musk's version of that. What is his perspective?

I can't figure it out. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Zoe. What else? Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's a new CEO that's probably acquiescent. But go ahead. A new CEO that's probably acquiescent. But will that person have the power to actually make the platform useful again for people i think that there we're still

at a point where i feel like twitter has the opportunity to turn things around which i know sounds a little nuts but i agree there's no other platform like we've tried mastodon we've tried these other things in my opinion horrible like as bad as twitter is right now those other alternatives are not great we're seeing people i, journalists are tweeting out scoops or posting scoops on LinkedIn. Like that is a bleak time in the journalism industry. So if Twitter comes back and, you know, Zoe, let me argue with you about that because we use Twitter when I was running Recode, it never delivered compared to LinkedIn. I have to tell you, it's just Twitter was sexier. LinkedIn always had impact. So did Apple Podcasts. But you're talking about from a marketing perspective.

Yes, from a marketing perspective. Yes, exactly. But I'm saying to get people to use our site, Twitter was useless. Useless waste of money, paid advertising, or just tweeting ourselves, useless at the bottom. I think the thing that Twitter always had was its influence because it had all of those influential people using it. And it felt like kind of the center of the conversation. Like if you were going to have something go viral, you wanted it to go viral there. Like that to me was Twitter's power.

And it kind of did that in spite of itself in a lot of ways. And that feels like it's been zapped. Yeah, I can tell you though, it didn't pay the bills, but go ahead. Right, totally fair. Yeah, and can tell you, though, it didn't pay the bills. But go ahead. Right. The actual bills. Totally fair. Yeah.

And we've heard that from marketers, too. It was a very campaign-based platform. Like, people would use it for these, like, specific, you know, the launch of a sneaker or a big event. But it wasn't, like, the big-ticket item in their marketing budgets. But, okay, so going back to where is the company in 12 months, I think there's the world in which maybe a new CEO comes on board, maybe it doesn't. But the kind of service continues to just degrade over time. And Twitter in 12 months is just like even less influential than it is now. We see it as a company that once held this big place in society and in media and in government

and now not so much. And I think there is a world in which a new CEO comes on board and maybe not that much changes on content moderation. and I think there is a world in which a new CEO comes on board and maybe not that much changes on content moderation and maybe advertising is still in like somewhat of a free fall but the platform rolls out some tools and services in such a way that kind of media folks government figures are convinced to come back on board maybe just because there's no great alternative right now and so we're still seeing kind of moderate usage and stuff is kind of staying at the level it is now.

It's kind of a boring prediction, but kind of those are the roads that I see. I would say I use it 50% less just for marketing, just for buzz. That's it. And that's it. That's it. Nothing else,

which is interesting. And Scott's completely off of it. Certainly I read it. I read it passively. I feel like all those passive readers that were there, you know, which is most of Twitter in many ways. Zoe, try post.news. Yeah, I'm off the wait list. So I'm ready and willing to use an alternative. I really did try to pass it on. Or maybe none of them. Maybe none of them, right? Maybe it's a new era of something else, which will be interesting to see. We'll see. Anyway, Zoe, what's your next scoop? You just insinuated something there. I don't know. I don't

want Casey to get mad at me for revealing too much, but we are. I'll evict him if he trusts you. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. We are, we have a few more coming out about Twitter in the next few weeks. And I think we're going to be looking at what tools employees did have available to them on the content moderation side of things and how they were used. How they were used. And everybody, hardcore. Is everyone hardcore there now? Everyone's hardcore all the way. I think you're the only hardcore person I know dealing with Twitter. Anyway, you should read this cover. It has the word hardcore in it.

And it was by Zoe Casey Newton, our friend, and Alex Heath, who's also a tremendous reporter from The Verge. And everybody should read it. It's really good. It's a great synopsis and quite fair, I think. Have you heard from Elon about it? We haven't. He did not respond. I think. Have you heard from Elon about it? We haven't. He did not respond. Okay. All right. Zoe, thank you so much. Her work is at platformer.news. And also, there's The Verge and This Week in New York Magazine, as I said. Thank you again. Thanks for your good work, Zoe. Thank you both so much. That was fascinating. Zoe is such a good reporter. Oh, I love a scoopster.

I just want to just point out, we are now interviewing your roommate's friends. No, she's not a friend. She's one of the top reporters on this story. You stop that. He's not my roommate. He's my tenant. Anyway, she's an amazing reporter. Do not insult her like that. I'm not insulting her. I think she's great. I think she's better than Casey. But meanwhile, these people do all live with you. Just because the excellent people live with me, I don't know how you would hold that against me. All right. One more quick break. We'll be back for predictions. Okay, Scott, let's hear some predictions from you. Disney's going to appoint Nelson Peltz to their board. It's stupid.

It's ridiculous that they haven't already. A board is supposed to be a fiduciary for the relevant stakeholders. And one of the key components of being a fiduciary is that you have aligned interests with shareholders. And Nelson Peltz has a billion reasons why he should be on the board. He bought a billion dollars worth of stock. If you read his deck, and if you like this stuff, it's a fantastic deck. And it basically goes through the obvious things here. They way overpaid for the Fox assets. They have overspent on streaming. They have not managed costs well. And despite having an unparalleled trove of assets, park attendance way up. This is a company whose stock is at a five-year low, has underperformed the S&P, underperformed its peer group. And also, while we all love Bob,

he's hard not to really like, the reality is he really failed on a basic level to create any sort of tangible succession plan, both him and the board. And some of the best talent has left. That's the board's job. I agree with you, but that's the board's job. But go ahead. Okay. The board has failed. And this stock and shareholders have paid the price. And also, Nelson, I don't know Nelson, but I know his history because he's a famous activist. He is not a slash and burn, poison pen activist. He goes on the boards. He's very constructive. He's very operationally minded. And almost every board he's gone on has great things to say about him. So, this is nothing- Well, except for the GE board. He did manage to finally get his own person in place. He sort of

shoved Jeff Immelt out and then his successor. I'm just saying, it's not totally. Other than Bob Iger, the CEO who really knows the company, no other board member has more license to a board seat than Nelson Peltz. Yeah, I would agree. Listen, I agree that he should be on the board, and I've said so, and I'm sure Bob Iger doesn't like saying that. But I think it's hard because I suspect they don't think he knows a lot about streaming or entertainment or whatever. He does know about costs. Look at the other people on the board. That's clearly not a requisite for being on this board. I agree. I'm just saying, he's got to do it. I've said that publicly quite a lot. And it's going to,

we'll see if he does. We've got an annual meeting coming up. This makes all kinds of sense. And slowly but surely- He should do it. The shareholders are going to call Bob and say, Bob, this is a distraction. Just put him on your goddamn board. Yeah, I think so. And he'll be constructive. And the sooner you put him on the board, the sooner they can get back to the hard work of cleaning up this company and getting it to, you know, getting it to command the space it occupies.

It will waste Iger's time if he doesn't. It really will. It will cause him to make it much harder. It'll be a distraction. And this guy's not just someone. He's a very well-regarded activist. So, he's in a bit of a bind. But letting him on is also, I think it's a risk you should take, as I've said. But a good prediction. We'll see. When? So, before the board meeting? Or when do these things happen?

I think the annual meeting, I think this is going to help play out. I think the annual meeting is, I believe, the second week in March. And when it becomes increasingly apparent that a lot of large shareholders say to Bob and other members of the board, you know, maybe this wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. What you don't want to do is go to a board meeting and have him forced on the board by the shareholders. Yes, that's correct. So he should do it himself. So I think this just needs to happen in the next couple of weeks. They put out a blistering statement against Nelson saying that he didn't have the requisite experience. It was just such bullshit.

Makes him look defensive. It's a distraction. It costs shareholder money. Just put him on the board. And if someone. Bob one, don't Scarlett Johansson him. Don't. Don't.

You'll have to end up paying him anyway. Don't Johansson him. Anyways, prediction. Don't Johansson him. In the next 30 days, Nelson Peltz goes on the board at Disney. All right. Okay. That's good.

I think we're. That's good. I like that. Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Okay, Scott, that's the show. This is a good show.

We have a good show. You like it, huh? This is the part of the show where we pat ourselves on the back? No, but I'm just saying I enjoy it. I think they're very, I think they're good shows. You like us? I'm sorry, I don't. I like her.

I like us. That's important. No, but I think it's a good show. I think we could, I think Zoe was great. Enough of that. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Andretat engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Mille Saverio.

Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Don't hit a Swisher car. Hug yourself, Scott. Give yourself a big, warm, fuzzy hug, okay? I deserve it. You deserve it.