Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/05 – Twitter Adds “Passive Investor” Elon Musk To Its Board

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

So much for that “passive” stake. Twitter has appointed Elon Musk to its board of directors. Amazon is gunning for SpaceX in the race to deliver internet from space. Some datapoints around the whole question of wash trading in the NFT market. And what if I told you there was ANOTHER wildly popular thing from the creator of Wordle? Links: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors, teases ‘significant improvements’ (CNBC) Elon Musk Bought Some Twitter (Bloomberg/Matt Levine) Amazon’s Project Kuiper books up to 83 rockets to launch its internet-beaming satellites (The Verge) Microsoft brings Arm support to Azure virtual machines (ZDNet) Axie Infinity Was Losing Gamers Even Before Record Crypto Hack (Bloomberg) The Hottest NFT Marketplace is Mostly Users Selling to Themselves (Bloomberg) Hackers breach MailChimp's internal tools to target crypto customers (BleepingComputer) Internet communities are battling over pixels (The Washington Post) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, April 5th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. So much for that passive stake. Twitter has appointed Elon Musk to its board of directors. Amazon is gunning for SpaceX in the race to deliver internet from space, some data points around the whole question of wash trading in the

NFT market. And what if I told you there was another wildly popular thing from the creator of Wordle? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Remember when I gave you that Elon Musk Twitter news I took the position sort of obliquely that a lot of other people did, that, you know, I mean, clearly Elon was looking to influence Twitter in some way by taking his stake. And yet, that article that I quoted from said the form filed revealing the stake is one typically used when you don't intend to do much influencing to the stock in question. You just want to be a passive investor. But I mean, come on, something didn't sound right about that, right? Well, I think our instincts were correct because Twitter this morning announced that it has appointed Elon Musk to its

board of directors after Musk purchased his 9.2% stake in the company. So that certainly sounds like Musk intends to be active. And yet there's also this interesting detail. Musk cannot own more than 14.9% of Twitter while he's on the board. So I'm no Matt Levine, but doesn't that sound like Twitter is sort of buying Elon off in a way in order to maybe limit what he could do to Twitter? quoting CNBC. Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our board, CEO Parag Agrawal said in a tweet. He's both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on Twitter and in the boardroom to make us stronger in the long term, he added. Musk's term is set to expire in 2024,

according to the filing. For his entire board term, or 90 days after, Musk cannot be the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the company's common stock outstanding. After he was named to the board, Musk on Tuesday teased he would push for adjustments. Looking forward to working with Parag and Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months. Musk said in a tweet, Musk's stake, while the largest among outside shareholders is considered a passive interest, which often means the holder isn't trying to control or influence the company. Still, some investors expected Musk to take an aggressive stance. Hours after his holding in the company was revealed, Musk took to Twitter to poll users on interest in an edit button. Agrawal retweeted the post,

urging people to, quote, vote carefully as the consequences will be important, end quote. I'm not going to quote from it, but in the show notes, I did link to Matt Levine's lengthy post about all this yesterday. Actually, I take that back. I'll at least quote from the opening, quote. Look, this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying, hey, you should try my ideas. And the company might

ignore you or respond politely, but not move fast enough for your liking. it might occur to you, look, I'm the richest person in the world. How much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want. Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn't you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want? The game is Twitter. The richest person in the world is Elon Musk, end quote. But while it sounds like Elon is coming for Twitter, someone else seems to be coming for Elon, or at least one of his companies.

Amazon's Project Kuiper has reportedly reserved 83 satellite launches over five years to deploy most of its 3,236 satellites, which will beam internet service to Earth in direct competition with Space X's Starlink program, quoting the verge. The satellites will fly on powerful rockets currently being developed by European launch, Aerianus Space, U.S.-based United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Space Company. The combined flights up to 83 launches total are set to take place over a five-year period and will allow Project Kuiper to launch the bulk of its planned constellation of 3,236 satellites. Amazon did not provide details on how much the launch contracts cost, but the company

is investing billions of dollars across the three deals, according to James Watkins, a spokesperson person for Project Kuiper. Amazon also claimed that the deal, quote, is the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history, end quote. Project Kuiper needs quite a bit of rocketry in order to get its future megaconsolation into space. The Amazon subsidiary plans to create a massive array of satellites in low-earth orbit designed to provide low-latency broadband internet service to all parts of the globe. To tap into the system, users must purchase one of Project Kuiper's user antennas, which the company previewed in late 2020. The terminals scanned the sky looking for satellites that are overhead. Those satellites relay signals from ground stations, facilities already

plugged into existing fiber optic internet infrastructure, to and from the user antennas. The concept is fairly similar to SpaceX's ever-growing Starlink program, a planned constellation of tens of thousands of satellites, also designed to provide broadband internet from low-Earth orbit. However, Starlink is already quite a few years ahead of Project Kuiper. So far, SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 satellites into orbit and has begun limited service around the world with 250,000 subscribers tapped into the system so far, according to SpaceX. Project Kuiper has yet to launch any of its satellites. However, the company is hoping to change that this year. A year ago, Amazon announced that it had purchased nine launches of the United Launch Alliance's

Workhorse Atlas 5 rocket to send batches of satellites into orbit. Actually, is that Atlas V or Atlas 5? And in November, Project Kuiper revealed its plans to launch its first two prototype satellites on an experimental new rocket ship called the RS1 being developed by startup ABL space systems. The company expects those first prototype flights to occur in the fourth quarter of 2022, with one prototype satellite flying on each RS1 rocket. However, that depends on the RS1 being ready in time. ABL space systems suffered a testing mishap during the development of the rocket in January, which set the company's timeline back by three months, according to space news, end quote.

Microsoft has announced a preview of Arm-based chips for Azure virtual machines using Amper Ultra CPUs, quoting ZDNet. We are now supporting Arm on Azure as well. This has been a long journey to bring up Amper on Azure with Windows as the root host OS. We are also supporting Windows 11 ARMs in preview for developers. Tweeted Harry Polapaka, the director of PM for Azure host OS and the Windows OS platform. FYI, all Windows developers who have been asking for VM support in Azure, it's here now, end quote. Azure VMs with Ampera Ultra Arm-based processors will offer up to 50% better price performance

than comparable X-86-based VMs for scale-out workloads, Microsoft officials said. These new VMs are also for web servers, application servers, open-source databases, gaming servers, media servers, and more, they added. The preview is initially available in the West U.S. to West Central U.S. and West Europe Azure regions, end quote. According to Sky Mavis, Axi Infinity's daily active users had fallen 45% from a November peak to $1.48 million for the week ending March 28th,

which was a day before Ronan's $600 million crypto hack was announced. Quoting Bloomberg. The decrease has been particularly noteworthy since December when updates to the game were announced, and on March 23rd, when hackers stole the Ether, and U.S.D. coin cryptocurrencies from Axis's Ronan Bridge, a side chain built to facilitate faster and cheaper transactions for the game. Sky Mavis, the developer behind Axi Infinity and Ronan, has said that it is committed to reimbursing players as soon as possible, but hasn't given

details on how they plan to do it in case lost funds are not recovered. Meanwhile, on Monday, the hackers started to hide their tracks by moving around 1,400 ether to tornado cash, a crypto asset mixing service, Kondesk reported. earnings dropped, and so did interest in the game. Those that bought in at the heights started to feel fearful and naturally doubt creeped in, wrote an analyst. The analyst added that players are awaiting the game's origin patch that looks to revitalize, improve, and increase the depth of gameplay. The concern is that if the developer isn't able to give a clear timeline on reimbursements, then players will lose trust on the platform and move to other similar games,

further accelerating the decline in users and activity, end quote. And another interesting data point, as I try to wrap my mind around what is really going on in the land of NFTs, according to CryptoSlam, around $95% or $18 billion of the total trading volume on NFT marketplace, looks rare, are users selling tokens to earn rewards, not genuine NFT trades, quoting Bloomberg. Looks Rare was launched in January by two anonymous co-founders who go by Zod and Guts as an alternative to marketly open-sea during the height of the NFT boom. The site had planned to add new features to lure NFT enthusiasts, according to a blog post at the time. Almost all of these initiatives have focused on the incentive program built around the looks token awarded to active users of the

platform. About $18 billion of the trading volume on the platform or about 95% of the total activity can be attributed to what's often referred to as wash sales, according to data compiled by NFT tracker CryptoSlam. The transactions are seen as one of the many gray areas in crypto when it comes to regulation. In this case, the sales are done to win new tokens, rather than to pump up non-fungible token prices to lure unsuspecting buyers. The marketplace benefits from the fees generated by each transaction. At the same time, Lux Rare has effectively helped to mask the cooling demand in the NFT market. Total sales on OpenC have declined every month since January, according to data from Dune Analytics. The site's sales volume is down 67% in the last 30 days, according to data from

DAP radar. The number of traders has decreased 23%. The ability to earn tokens, while a prominent aspect of defy, is a relatively new feature to NFT platforms. Rarable was among those that pioneered the idea last year. LuxRare's fees are also distributed to looks holders. Some legal observers believe wash training that is driving the volume on the looks rare platform is illegal. Quote, I don't care if it is stocks, bonds, Bitcoin, NFTs, or baseball cards, said David Silver, a Coral Springs, Florida-based attorney who works on crypto cases, wash trading is a form of market manipulation in which an investor simultaneously sells and buys the same instrument to create misleading artificial activity in the marketplace, end quote.

MailChimp has disclosed a breach where hackers allegedly accessed 319 accounts and stole, quote, audience data from 102 clients. Fishing scams of crypto users quickly followed, quoting bleeping computer. Sunday morning, Twitter was a buzz. with reports from owners of Treasurer hardware cryptocurrency wallets who received fishing notifications claiming that the company suffered a data breach. These emails prompted Treasurer customers to reset their hardware wallet pins by downloading malicious software that allowed stealing the stored cryptocurrency. Treasure later shared that MailChimp had been compromised by threat actors targeting the

cryptocurrency industry who conducted the fishing attack. In an email to bleeping computer, Mailchimp has confirmed that the breach was more significant than just Treasurer's count being accessed by threat actors. According to MailChimp, some of their employees fell for a social engineering attack that led to the theft of their credentials, end quote. So I'm talking about this story because I sort of have an idle question. All of the hacks we've been seeing lately, and it certainly feels like hacks have been up in the non-state actor variety lately? Is it because so many more people have crypto now than they did, say, three years ago? Something, something you rob a bank because that's where the money is. And when the vector to the wealth is merely

millions of individual people and their personal security habits, I'm genuinely curious to talk to someone who knows the security space to find out if like, is this the golden age of quick hacks at the moment? Because suddenly the money's all in crypto. Finally today, allow me to turn you on to the subreddit R slash place, which lets users build collective art by post. posting a colored pixel every five minutes. R-slash place had 72 million tiles placed by Sunday night, quoting the Washington Post. Reddits R-slash place is a subreddit that functions as an open canvas, where each user can post a single, tiny, colored pixel every five minutes. The project began as an April Fool's Day experiment in 2017, and in its first year, more than a million

Reddit users placed about 16 million tiles on the blank communal digital canvas. Five years later, it's back, and those numbers have skyrocketed. As of Sunday night, nearly 72 million tiles were placed by over 6 million users at a pace of more than 2.5 million tiles place per hour. Because each user can only place a single tiny tile every five minutes, it's impossible to build alone. The five-minute wait time throttles any single person's ability to dominate the canvas. Users are instead forced to work together and build coordinated communities to produce collective works of pixel art. Massive subredits like R-slash trees and R-slash-Ukraine began orchestrating their campaigns early, collectively filling the space with a large marijuana leaf and a Ukrainian flag

respectively. Users from R-slash Star Wars recreated an entire movie poster. The trans community placed a massive trans flag on the screen. The final result is a giant pixelated collage of images and words. Aesthetically, it's reminiscent of the million-dollar homepage, a website built by Alex 2, a 21-year-old entrepreneur who hoped to pay his way through college by selling one million pixels of internet ad space for a dollar each on a homepage in 2005. But unlike the homepage, R-slash place is constantly regenerating. Fandoms unite to overtake other communities' images or vie for space on the board. Some users are bent on destruction. In 2017, a large amorphous black blob called The Void arose and attempted to subsume the project. It resurfaced this. It resurfaced this.

year too, but only momentarily. Some people attempted to sabotage other groups' creations with streams of purple pixels. Though place is a Reddit phenomenon, it was started by Josh Wardle, who went on to create the viral word game Wordle when he worked at Reddit. The success of this year's project has been driven heavily by the rise of other community-oriented platforms like Discord and Twitch. Users have built out dedicated Discord servers to plan their takeovers of certain corners of the Canvas, including Embassy channels where different groups can collaborate and form alliances. There are many college logos and flags from different countries represented. Purdue University and a group seeking to maintain an Irish flag on the canvas formed an alliance.

We put a little heart between the two that represents the alliances between neighboring factions, Ian Jones, a software engineer in Chicago said. Large Twitch streamers also contributed to places growth, directing there thousands of fans to mark the canvas with the logos or symbols of their favorite streamers. Twitch creators like XQC, Mizkiff, Soda Poppin, Poceman, Hassan Piker, Myth, and Asmon Gold had people tune in to watch tiles being placed and do help create new images. Jack Manifold, a British YouTuber and Twitch streamer encouraged his fans to use their pixels to insert 3D glasses on images of people and animals on place, leading to momentary confusion, end quote. Ah yes, a million dollar homepage. The dream of the early odds is alive on Reddit.

Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.