The Morning After: Elon Musk says he’ll step down as Twitter CEO

Twitter news whiplash continues. Elon Musk has said he’ll step down as CEO of Twitter once he’s found a suitable replacement. You might remember Musk ran a poll at the weekend asking if he should leave the role, and the Twitter-using public overwhelmingly told him, well, yes. There was no immediate response to the results of the poll, but by late Tuesday, after suggesting he might change it so only paying users could vote, he seems to be acting on the result. According to his tweet, Musk plans to stay on and run the software and server teams.

The job as Twitter CEO will be viewed by many as a poisoned chalice. Roughly 70 percent of the staff have either been laid off or quit, hate speech and trolls have thrived and many advertisers have dropped or reduced their advertising spending. On top of all that, the company is also now facing increasing pressure from the US government.

– Mat Smith

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Lenovo’s Swiss Army lamp kicks off the weird gadgets of CES 2023

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The hub has a full-function 65-watt USB-C port for laptop power, to start with. It also has a 15-watt Qi compliant charging pad for mobile devices, a 20W USB Type-C port, two USB Type-A 3.1 ports and an HDMI 2.0 output for external displays. This beastly peripheral arrives in March 2023, starting at $329.

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‘Sifu’ is getting an arena mode

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NASA’s InSight lander says goodbye from Mars

“This may be the last image I can send,” the InSight Twitter account said.

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This is likely the final photo NASA’s Mars InSight lander will ever send back to Earth. Since landing on the planet in November 2018, the robot has been snapping pics and gathering data about the Martian environment, accumulating dust on its solar panels that entire time. As NASA predicted earlier this year, the layer of debris has finally become too thick for the solar panels to operate. The InSight Twitter account officially said goodbye on December 19th with a final image from the surface of Mars.

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How Meta flunked its first year as a metaverse company

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Lionel Messi’s World Cup celebration is now the most-liked post on Instagram

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‘Avatar’ sequel’s cutting-edge tech crashed some movie projectors in Japan

Despite being the widest release of all time in Japan, Avatar: The Way of the Waterfailed to claim the top ranking last weekend as it was topped by an anime basketball picture called The First Slam Dunk. On top of that, multiple theaters in the nation reported technical problems, with one in central Japan forced to reduce the 48 fps frame rate down to the traditional 24 fps, Bloomberg reported. 

Fans were reportedly turned away from other screenings and issued refunds. Some of the theater chains cited by fans as having issues, including United Cinemas Co., Toho Col, and Tokyu Corp., declined to comment on the problem.

Not many movie theaters support high frame rate (HFR) 48 fps playback, as it requires the latest projectors or upgrades to existing ones. Normally, movie theaters would be aware of which formats they can play and plan accordingly. But HFR has been used so little that it would be understandable if errors cropped up. 

Avatar: The Way of the Water is available in multiple formats, including 2D 48 fps, 3D 48 fps and regular 24 fps. If you see the 48 fps version, it only uses the HFR tech for action sequences, while dialog and slower scenes are dialed down to 24 fps (by duplicating frames). Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar saw the film at 48 fps and liked it, but added that the technology remains divisive.

Other notable films using HFR were Ang Lee’s Gemini Man and The Hobbit trilogy. When the latter came out in 2012, I argued that high frame rates work best with the 3D format as it helps eliminate potential eye strain and even nausea. That’s not an issue in 2D, so 24 fps gives the most natural look with none of the video game/soap opera effect that many people dislike.

Elon Musk says he’ll step down as Twitter CEO, but won’t sell the company

Elon Musk has said that he will step down as CEO of Twitter once a suitable replacement can be found. On Sunday he ran a poll asking if he should leave the role, and Twitter users overwhelmingly told him to go. He didn’t immediately respond to the results, but by Tuesday he seemed to have accepted the will of the people, after originally suggesting that he might instead change it so that only paying users could vote in Twitter polls.

Of course there’s no timeline for Musk to hand over the reins yet. And as his tweet says it will require finding “someone foolish enough to take the job.” Following a chaoticstring of badpress and thegutting of its staff it might be hard to attract high quality candidates to the position. But, the bar has been set exceedingly low under Musk’s tenure and a simple change of face at the top could do a lot to improve Twitter’s image in the short term.

Of course, there is a chance that the change could be largely cosmetic. Musk tweeted that he planned to stay on and run the software and server teams. And there’s no indication that he plans to sell the company, which he bought in October for $44 billion and quickly took private. So it’s clear that he wants to still be involved in the company’s operation, but it’s unclear just how much. 

It’s hard to imagine the hard driving businessman who made a major spectacle of firing Twitter’s entire executive team and dissolved the board when he took over simply stepping aside at this point. But he has also in his short reign allowed the whim of polls to make several major decisions

Regardless of who eventually takes over as CEO, they’ll be taking over a company that is almost unrecognizable compared to just a few months ago. Roughly 70 percent of the staff have either been laid off or quit. Advertisers have fled the platform as hate speech and trolls have thrived. And the content moderation and safety efforts have completely stagnated. The company is also now facing increasing pressure from the government on a number of fronts.