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🏠 The Ideal Twitter Staff

🏠 The Ideal Twitter Staff

Hard to swallow pills

Jason Levin
October 26, 2022

Gm. Twitter is looking like Fat Thor. Can Elon shape it up?

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter Staff Terrified of Elon Takeover

Elon is buying Twitter and Twitter employees are terrified.

“Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation,” Twitter's employees wrote in a public letter. “A threat of this magnitude is reckless [and] undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform."

Honestly, 75% sounds a bit low.

Skeleton Staff

As JD Ross, founder of OpenDoor and Royal, tweeted, “WhatsApp had 35 engineers for 450 million users, and grew to a team of 50 for 900 million users. Twitter cutting to 2,000 employees from 7,500 is not a ‘skeleton staff’”. Elon replied “🤣”.

Seriously, what are 7,500 people doing at Twitter? Tweeting?

Benedict Evans agreed with Twitter’s bloated staff. He cited that Facebook had 480 million DAUs at IPO in 2011 with 3,200 FTEs. Snapchat has 320 million DAUs and 5,700 FTEs. Twitter, with 220 million DAUs and 7,500 FTEs, has the lowest DAU of the three with the highest amount of full-time employees.

The Ideal Twitter

Elon wants to cut 75%. Let’s cut 99%.

Twitter really only needs a staff of 5 people:

Elon
A 10x engineer for the 1 update/year
The person who chooses what’s trending
The person who makes my DMs randomly disappear
Pete Davidson to judge whether a tweet is “funny” or “cancellable” (seriously, you’d think Pete would’ve got himself canceled by now, but nope, he’s starring in TV shows and Taco Bell commercials)

That’s the entire staff.

Would 10/10 pay to see an SNL skit about this

TECH ECOSYSTEM

Apple Collects Its Tolls

Monday was a busy day in the Apple world.

Along with the release of the new software update iOS 16.1, the App Store Guidelines were also updated. While iOS 16.1 has been well-received, the same can not be said for the new Guidelines.

But why?

The New Guidelines

The controversy, as it so often does, comes from dollars and cents.

With more than $260 billion in sales since its release in 2008, the App Store is big business. Apple, as the inventor and overlord of the App Store, naturally wants to profit from this success as much as possible. To do this, they tax between 15 and 30% on in-app purchases. As you can imagine, this has been very lucrative for Apple and quite frustrating for app developers.

Well, with these new guidelines, it’s about to get more of both.

Until Monday, NFTs and social media “boosts” were not classified as in-app purchases. This meant that NFT designers could sell their JPEGs and Meta could sell their advertising visibility boosts free from Apple’s massive toll.

Now, both are required to be sold as in-app purchases.

As you can expect, people are pissed.

The Aftermath

Both NFTs and Meta are straight-up not having a good time right now.

NFTs are already in a deep bear market, with trading volume down a staggering 97% from its peak in January. This new Apple tax definitely isn’t going to help the cause.

For Meta, this is the second big hit that Apple has landed in recent years. If last year’s Apple ad privacy changes were a shot to the chin of Meta, this year’s new guidelines are a hard blow to the liver. How much more they can take is anybody’s guess.

No wonder Zuck is so into the Metaverse.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: 3 million people have created a Reddit NFT wallet. Is the NFT bull-market back on?

Story we're watching: A prolific NFT scammer known as Monkey Drainer has so far drained $3.5 million worth of crypto in a phishing scam.

Rabbit hole: The Crypto Story by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

Kanye West is cut from Adidas and Gap after offensive antisemitic comments.
Brad Gerstner, founder of Altimeter Capital, wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta Board urging them to “put a cap on metaverse related investments”. Zuck said “No cap bro”.
CashApp users can now send and receive Bitcoin and Venmo users can buy stuff on Amazon. Still patiently waiting to use my crypto on Amazon though.
Meta, L’Oreal, and French b-school HEC Paris launched a new metaverse startup accelerator focused on 3D production, AR, VR, avatar creation, and token economy.

THREE LIES AND A HEADLINE

Three of these headlines are from the satirical news publications like The Onion, while one comes from real life. Can you spot the truth amongst the fakes?

A) The creepiest ways Airbnb owners are spying on you

B) Things to never say to someone who owns a Tesla

C) Pickleball is expanding. Tennis is mad.

D) What to know about 'Quiet Quitting'