Tech News

Elon Musk says in court he doesn’t want to be CEO of any company, tries to walk back SEC insults

Elon Musk stated in court on Wednesday that he doesn’t desire to lead any company as a CEO.Musk made the casual remark while responding to queries from attorneys for Tesla. He stated, “ I frankly don’t want to be the CEO of any company”.

Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick of the Delaware Chancery Court is hearing testimony in a case to decide whether Musk, the richest man in the world, should be required to surrender stock options granted as part of his compensation package to Tesla.

The trial, which began on Monday, will examine whether Tesla’s board acted properly when it authorized Musk’s compensation package, which, at the current share price, is currently estimated to be worth $52 billion. It will also examine if Elon had any undue influence on the decision.

Richard J. Tornetta, a shareholder, has filed a lawsuit against Musk and Tesla, claiming that the CEO’s salary was exorbitant and that the Tesla board’s approval of it constituted a violation of its fiduciary obligations. According to Tornetta, the board gave a part-time boss the biggest remuneration package in the world.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs questioned Musk about previous taunts he directed at the Securities and Exchange Commission and whether it was a good idea for him to have a hostile demeanor with regulators. “SEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon’s” Musk wrote in a tweet on July 2, 2020, when Tesla share price was experiencing a sharp rise.

Many people perceived the message to be filthy in nature and to be a serious insult to the regulating agency. Attorneys questioned Musk about his tweet in the Delaware court, and Musk said that it had been widely misinterpreted. Although the tweet was “interpreted differently,” Tesla CEO claimed in court that he intended the initials to signify “Save Elon’s Company.”

Elon Musk stated in court, “In general, I think the mission of the SEC is good but the question is whether that mission is being executed well. In some cases I think it is not. The SEC fails to investigate things that they should and places far too much attention on things that are not relevant.

The recent FTX thing I think is an example of that. Why was there no attention given to FTX? Investors lost billions. Yet the SEC continues to hound me despite shareholders being greatly rewarded. This makes no sense.”

When Musk claimed in tweets in 2018, that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share and had “funding secured,” the SEC filed charges against Tesla and Elon Musk for making “false and misleading” assertions to shareholders. Following Musk’s tweets, the value of Tesla shares increased by more than 6%, and trading was suspended the same day.

For several weeks following the incident, Tesla’s share prices were volatile. In a settlement deal, Tesla and Musk stipulated that Musk would forfeit his position as chairman of Tesla for three years, pay a $20 million penalty, and refrain from denying the SEC’s claims or claiming innocence.

Musk and Tesla also agreed to have the CEO’s tweets reviewed by a securities attorney before publication if they contained important information about the company that would affect the value of Tesla’s stock.

The attorneys for Tornetta questioned Musk on whether he had a securities attorney evaluate all of his tweets regarding Tesla and why he had maintained maintaining his innocence, even in press appearances.

Musk appeared to admit that he doesn’t have a lawyer first review all of his tweets on Tesla. He stated, “The consent decree was made under duress. An agreement made under duress is not valid, as a foundation of law.”

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Elon Musk publicly fires Twitter engineers who call him out online

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter Inc., has resorted to terminating company engineers who openly disagree with him on the social media platform.

The argument started when Elon Musk apologized for the Twitter Android app being “super slow in many countries.” He asserted that was the result of the app’s poor writing. He tweeted, “Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”

After that, Eric Frohnhoefer, a Twitter engineer, who worked on the Twitter Android app asserted that Mr. Musk’s statement was inaccurate in a quote tweet. Given that he has been working on Twitter’s Android app for about six years, Eric Fraunhoefer asserted that he “can say this is wrong.”

Although Mr. Frohnhoefer acknowledged that Android has “plenty of room for performance improvements,” he disagreed with Mr. Musk’s explanation for the origin of the speed issues.

He claimed that the features that few users utilize, the bloated nature of the app over time as a result of attempts to make additional upgrades, and the poor network communication were the real causes of the issues. Frohnhoefer recommended Twitter to prioritize streamlining the app by getting rid of unnecessary features and limiting the number of new ones.

The two then carried on arguing about Twitter in general, including talking about its lunches at headquarters, as well as the Android app particularly.

Frohnhoefer attempted to express his thoughts in a series of tweets, but one person questioned him as to why he hadn’t privately given his new boss his opinion. Frohnhoefer who has been an engineer at Twitter for over eight years, retorted, “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email.”

Numerous others pointed out that Frohnhoefer was probably placing himself in danger by publicly correcting Twitter’s new owner, particularly given the fact that he has already laid off about half the company’s staff. These warnings came true on Monday. Mr. Musk announced the engineer’s firing via Twitter.

While this was going on, one of the users tagged Musk and asked if he wanted “this kind of attitude” on his team. Musk spoke bluntly and responded, ” He’s Fired”. Frohnhoefer replied by tweeting a salute emoji.

Mr. Frohnhoefer had said he had a variety of opportunities if he was to leave Twitter. He stated that his LinkedIn has “never been more popular,” and a Reddit developer publicly messaged him to recommend that he apply there instead.

Ben Leib, another engineer, lost his job after criticizing Musk. He retweeted the same post from Musk and wrote, “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.” Leib, who spent ten years working for Twitter, acknowledged his termination to Bloomberg on Sunday.

There has been a frenzy of changes ever since Twitter was acquired by entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has made several significant changes to Twitter, including the announcement of Twitter Blue, an $8 monthly membership service, and the firing of close to 50% of the staff.

Many employees are still angry with Musk’s decision to fire half of the company’s 7,000+ employees, including most of the senior management, just one week after his $44 billion acquisition. Additionally, the tycoon rapidly altered the organization’s workplace culture.

Although it was not common practice for Twitter employees to publicly criticize the company’s leadership in the past, before Musk arrived, many employees voiced their concerns or criticisms via email and internal Slack channels.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

YouTube expands shopping features to combat digital ad slowdown

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

According to the Financial Times on November 15, Tuesday, YouTube is adding shopping features to its short-form video service which is like TikTok, as it seeks to broaden its revenue stream, which has been decreased by falling ad spending.

“Viewers in the U.S., India, Brazil, Canada, and Australia can see the tags and interact with them and we’ll continue to bring tagging to more creators and geographies,” a Google spokesperson said.
Source: usnews.com

Ad sales on Alphabet-owned YouTube fell to US$7.07 billion in the third quarter, down from US$7.2 billion the previous year, as advertisers cut back on ad spending in the name of an economic downturn.

According to the newspaper, the streaming platform is also trying out new commission strategies for influencers who sell stuff via links in videos.

Reuters’ request for comment was not immediately responded to by YouTube.

The report information came only months after YouTube introduced a brand-new way for creators to make a living on short-form videos, launching advertising on its video feature Shorts and offering video makers 45 per cent of the profits.

The internet’s most popular video site has had difficulty keeping up with TikTok, the app that began by organising lip-sync and dance video content and has since grown to 1 billion monthly users.

YouTube sincerely hope that the new shopping features will boost its earnings from digital advertising. The site is introducing new features that will allow users to purchase products directly from videos and learn more about the products they are watching.

This is in addition to the existing features, which allow users to add items to their shopping carts and keep them for later use. In addition, when users are watching videos on YouTube, a new “shopping shelf” will show up on the right side of their screen. This shelf will display similar products that users can purchase as well as product information.

Suhani Jain

I am a student pursuing my bachelor’s in information technology. I have a interest in writing so, I am working a freelance content writer because I enjoy writing. I also write poetries. I believe in the quote by anne frank “paper has more patience than person

Former Tesla Australia director pleads guilty to insider trading on lithium deal

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Sandhya Gupta

A former Tesla director has admitted to insider trading after gaining over $30,000 from buying shares of a lithium business 12 days before the company announced a significant contract with Tesla.

A former executive of Tesla’s Australian unit admitted guilty to two occasions of insider trading based on a supply agreement Tesla signed with Piedmont Lithium in 2020. Kurt Schlosser purchased 86,748 shares of U.S.-based Piedmont in September 2020, according to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), after learning the specifics of the five-year spodumene concentrate supply agreement with the company.

The ASIC claimed that once the deal was publicly disclosed and the share price increased, Schlosser sold his Piedmont stocks for a profit of about $28,883. According to the watchdog, Schlosser also disclosed the information to a friend who was most likely to invest in the company.

Piedmont Lithium announced in September 2020 that it has signed a legally binding five-year contract to provide Tesla with a third of its anticipated 160,000 tonnes per year of spodumene concentrate production, a hard rock ore commodity used to make battery-grade lithium compounds. The company’s share price increased six times following the deal.

The company intended to supply the concentrate for Tesla between July 2022-July 2023 However, due to delays in the approval procedure for its mine facility in North Carolina, it had to postpone delivery to Tesla indefinitely last year. The agreement was primarily seen as a way to reduce volatility in the commodity, whose value had been declining since 2019.

Many automakers directly signed such deals with mining companies. The support of a major automaker like Tesla can assist early-stage mining companies like Piedmont to get funding from lenders and enhance their financial position.

Former Tesla Director has not yet received a punishment and will show up in court on December 16 in Sydney District Court. The maximum punishment for insider trading, according to ASIC, is 15 years behind bars.

Piedmont Lithium has dual listings in the US and Australia. The company changed its principal listing to New York, USA last year and relocated its headquarters from Australia to the USA.

Recently, a power steering issue in the Model X and Model S vehicles sold between 2017-2020 led to the recall of over 1000 Tesla vehicles in Australia. On Wednesday, the Department of Transport released the advisory, warning that the issue might raise the possibility of collisions that cause “serious injury or death to vehicle occupants and other road users.”

The most recent Australian Tesla recall was issued for 1012 Tesla vehicles due to a possibility that their Electronic Power Assist Steering system could lose power and demand “a greater steering effort from the driver,”, especially at low speeds. There have been two Tesla recalls in Australia in the past two weeks. In the prior recall, 326 Model 3 cars had a seatbelt problem.

Recently, U.S. Senator Ed Markey reportedly warned Elon Musk to fix his companies “or Congress will,” while the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it was closely monitoring recent events at Twitter “with deep worry.”

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Elon Musk fires thousands of contract workers without notice

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Sandhya Gupta

According to reports, Twitter has terminated thousands of contract workers as Elon Musk appears to be taking strong steps to revive the once-dominant social media platform. Platformer estimates that employment cuts have affected over 4400 out of 5500 contract workers.

The widespread firings, which affect both US-based and international staff working in real estate, marketing, content moderation, engineering, and other departments, were first reported on by Platformer on Saturday night.

According to Platformer’s Casey Newton, Twitter fired a sizable number of contract workers on Saturday, impacting anywhere between 4,400 and 5,500 individuals. Most contract workers didn’t get any notice that they were fired and only learned of their dismissal after being denied access to the company email and inner communications systems.

According to CNBC, the fired employees didn’t discover they had been fired until they lost access to Slack as well as other work networks over the weekend. Twitter states that the job losses are a result of a “reprioritization and savings exercise” in an internal message sent to contract employees that Business Insider was able to obtain.

Platformer’s Casey Newton noted, “Contractors aren’t being notified at all, they’re just losing access to Slack and email. Managers figured it out when their workers just disappeared from the system.”

A bunch of Twitter officials have either resigned or been dismissed since Musk took over, and more employees will probably be let go due to the company’s new in-person work requirement. Elon Musk sacked Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde as soon as he took control of the platform.

Since that time, a number of high-profile employees have left Twitter. Only “exceptional people” are permitted to work remotely, according to a Q&A session between Elon and Twitter employees. Musk remarked, “Basically if you can show up in an office and you do not show up at the office, resignation accepted.” The company’s communications division is no longer in operation.

Since taking over the Twitter business in the final week of October, Musk has been seeking to overhaul the entire system by firing top executives, cutting manpower by 50%, charging users for the “verified” tick, and other measures. The Tesla CEO has received harsh criticism for his handling of the crisis and for firing some employees without notifying them in advance. Twitter even barred access to its headquarters and instructed staff to wait in their homes for company communications.

Silicon Valley is reeling from a slump across the entire sector. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, just announced widespread layoffs, eliminating 11,000 positions, or around 13% of the workforce. The company overhired during the pandemic, but eventually realized the hyper boom isn’t sustainable, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who called the layoffs “some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history.”

In addition to Twitter and Meta, major tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet have announced they will halt hiring or make job cuts due to inflation and recessionary fears. The companies are allegedly operating in a more risky environment, which is causing them to spend less on business expansion.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Google to pay $391M to settle Android location tracking lawsuit

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

Google has consented to pay 391.5 million USD to settle an android location tracking lawsuit filed by an alliance of 40 U.S. attorneys general.

“For years Google has prioritized profit over their users’ privacy,” said Attorney General Rosenblum. “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers,” he said in a statement late on Monday.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com

According to the android location tracking lawsuit settlement, the United States Attorneys General found while investigating a 2018 Associated Press article that Google swindled Android users and monitored their locations ever since least 2014, even when they assumed location tracking was not active.

While Android users were deceived into believing that disabling “Location History” in the smartphone’s settings would deactivate location tracking, this other account setting, “Web & App Activity,” which has been enabled by default, allowed the company to collect, store, and utilize the customers’ personal information i.e. location data.

The agreement reached today also requires Google to implement extra user-friendly account control mechanisms and restricts the firm’s use and storage of certain types of location data.

Google will also be required to be transparent with its users about its location data tracking and collection practises, such as displaying extra details when location-related account settings are toggled and displaying detailed information about what data it harvests and how it is used.

“The company’s online reach enables it to target consumers without the consumer’s knowledge or permission,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said on Monday.

“However, the transparency requirements of this settlement will ensure that Google not only makes users aware of how their location data is being used, but also how to change their account settings if they wish to disable location-related account settings, delete the data collected and set data retention limits.”
Source: bleepingcomputer.com

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined Google 60 million USD in August for deceiving and obtaining location data from Australian Android users for approximately two years which was between January 2017 to December 2018, using the same strategy.

According to the ACCC, Google has taken corrective measures to address the problems that resulted in these financial penalties by 20 December 2018, with customers no longer being shown inaccurate information implying that resetting location history stops gathering data regarding their location.

In January 2022, France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty charged Google $170 million for infringing on internet users’ freedom of consent by making it difficult to reject website tracking the cookies by hiding that option under multiple clicks.

The firm was also charged 11.3 million USD in November 2021 for aggressive data collection, €220 million in June 2021 for choosing its services over competitors, 1.7 billion USD in March 2019 for anti-competitive practices in online advertising and $2.72 billion in June 2017 for misusing its high position in the market to manipulate search results.

Suhani Jain

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