Editor: Bernard Quayson (Mr. Gelisem) 30/01/2023

Elon Reeve Musk

The Mars (Red Planet) of Elon Musk

Musk was born in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s capital cities. He will turn 52 by June 28 and is currently the Chief Executive Officer and Product Architect of TESLA (Electrical car makers). He is also the founder, CEO, Technoking and chief Engineer of SpaceX. He also invented the famous Paypal.

Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of the American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. He started buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 per cent ownership stake. The business magnate now owns Twitter with a buyout offer of US$ 44 billion. The intent for buying Twitter is to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech.

Musk is the founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. According to both the Bloomberg Billionaires index and Forbes real-time billionaires list, he is the second wealthiest person in the world as at last year December 23, 2022, primarily from his ownership stakes in TESLA and SpaceX. He admits the Russian president (Vladimir Putin) is richer than him.

On February 28, 2022, Elon Musk, with support from other state enterprises, restored Ukraine’s internet service with one of Starlink  satellites from his Spacex company. This was because of Russia’s attack on key infrastructures in Ukraine, including telecommunications ones, and the maintenance of internet access became a critical and urgent matter for Ukraine’s military and other government bodies.

Musk revealed on 28 November 2022, that Apple company puts a secret 30% tax on everything we buy through their App store. He has accused Apple Inc of not supporting free speech and threatening to block Twitter Inc from its app store. “Apple Inc stopped advertising on Twitter, which led to Musk tweeting, “Do they hate free speech in America?,” and  later tagged Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s Twitter account in another tweet, asking “what’s going on here?”

On December 4, 2022, Elon Musk claimed that Apple has “fully resumed” advertising on Twitter, while Amazon is also reportedly planning to return to the platform very soon, in a set of moves that are likely to offer some relief for the social media company after a massive exodus of advertisers over content moderation concerns.

Companies that have reduced their staff.

Twitter Inc.

Twitter on 9 November 2022 fired nearly all its staff in Ghana, which was home to its only office in Africa according to bbc.com. Elon Musk tweeted on 4th November 2022 that “regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
Everyone who exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.” He said the company was open to some fanfare last year and would want to be more “immersed” in African conversations.
CNBC on Friday (20/01/2023) reported that Twitter’s full-time headcount has been reduced to about 1,300 active, working employees, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers by title. Elon Musk, in a response to a tweet quoting CNBC, said: “The note is incorrect. There are about 2300 active, working employees at Twitter,” and “there are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors,” Musk added.
Now the company has rolled out Twitter-verified Blue check-mark as a paid service and also laid off about 50% of staff.

Amazon Inc.

On January 18, 2023, Amazon.com Inc has started its biggest-ever round of jobs cuts — a culling that will ultimately affect 18,000 workers around the globe as the global economic outlook continues to worsen.. The Cuts represent 6% of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees. Amazon began notifying employees by email early Wednesday, Doug Herrington, the company’s worldwide retail chief, said in a memo. The latest layoffs will fall to the retail `division and human resources department.

Read the memo from Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon here; https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/update-from-ceo-andy-jassy-on-role-eliminations l

Google parent

As other tech giants downsize their staff by thousands, Google announced on Friday (20/01/2023) that it will cut about 12,000 jobs, more than 6% of its global workforce, becoming the latest tech giant to retrench after years of abundant growth and hiring.. Google’s CEO (Sundar Pichai) and parent company Alphabet have sent an email to employees to confirm the layoff, following a post published on Google’s blog. The cuts will affect roles across product areas and regions,
https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/

Microsoft

Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday, January 18, 2023, to reduce its headcount by 10,000 positions as part of broader cost-cutting measures, the company said in a securities filing on Wednesday (https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000789019/000119312523009934/d447690d8k.htm). CEO Satya Nadella told employees that the company was “living through times of significant change,” and that the tech giant would lay off 5% of its workforce over the coming months, with some notifications happening immediately.
Read the email sent by Satya Nadella and was posted on Microsoft corporate blogs:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing-on-our-short-and-long-term-opportunity/

In summary…

  • Layoffs have been sweeping the tech sector, including big names like Meta, Spotify, Uber, Coinbase, Shopify and Netflix. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/tech-layoffs-microsoft-amazon-meta-others-have-cut-more-than-60000.html

 

  • But why is this happening? Why are so many companies in the tech sector, even ones still generating big profits, laying off so many people?
  • Pandemic hiring frenzy / Post Covid reality: The downsizing has been driven by a hiring spree during the pandemic lockdowns. Because of the pandemic, many of these companies hired even more workers than they thought would need for a sustained level of higher usage in order to provide protection to the company in the event of a number of key staff leaving. Many tech companies believed that this was the beginning of a new normal. With almost every office worker in the world shifting to working from home. But, since the world has returned back to (pretty much) normal, the vision of the future wasn’t quite on the money, but physical participation of a few will be, at least better than an unconcern
  • Economic situation and a potential recession: The layoffs come during a period of slowing growth, higher interest rates to battle inflation, and fears of a possible recession next year.
  •  Emerging Tech Kit (AI): Human services are being replaced with artificial intelligence for faster and more effective tasks.

TESLA’s shareholder lawsuit #1

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the stand in a California courtroom Friday to testify in the lawsuit over his controversial “funding secured” tweet in 2018.

Tesla (TSLA), Musk, and company directors are facing a shareholder lawsuit over his infamous 2018 tweet, which said that he was thinking about taking Tesla (TSLA) private for $420 a share. This wouldn’t have been a problem if Musk had ended his statement. But he concluded the tweet with two words that have resulted in the CEO having to pay millions of dollars in fines and legal fees: “Funding secured.”

Link:https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/20/business/elon-musk-testimonysecured-trial/index.html

U.S. lawsuit against Google #2

on Tuesday, January 24, 2023, the Justice Department sued Google for monopolizing digital advertising technologies. Through Serial Acquisitions and Anticompetitive Auction Manipulation, Google Subverted Competition in Internet Advertising Technologies.

A landmark lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department against Alphabet’s  Google over its dominance of advertising technology could help rivals and websites that sell ad space, but leave an uncertain future for the advertisers themselves.

Find insight here… https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies