@Jack is keeping his job at Twitter, but it’s
likely to be temporary, said Peter Kafka in
Vox.com. Paul Singer’s Elliott Management,
perhaps Wall Street’s most feared inves-
tor, disclosed last week that it had bought
$1 billion worth of Twitter shares, and said
it “wanted to replace Twitter CEO Jack
Dorsey.” Dorsey has been an “inviting target
for critics of every variety.” Conservatives
complain that “the service unfairly silences
them.” Liberals bemoan its “toxic environ-
ment.” And investors wonder about a plan
by Dorsey, whose eccentric habits include ice
baths and frequents fasts, to move to Africa for six months and
run Twitter remotely. This week, instead of the expected share-
holder battle, Dorsey and Singer “announced a temporary cease-
fire” that gives Singer seats on Twitter’s board and promises that
Twitter’s financial performance will improve. In effect, Dorsey
now gets what big companies call “a performance improvement
plan”—a set of goals that nobody really expects him to meet and
that give Singer “the tools he’ll need to boot” the CEO.It won’t be a surprise if Dorsey’s time is soon up, said Emily
Dreyfuss in Protocol.com. His apology tour began in 2018,
when it was obvious that he had lost control of the company
he co-founded, letting it become a megaphone for harassers and
bots. “The Nazis remain. The bots remain. Profits remain small.
Dorsey remains sorry.” Jack Dorsey is “one of the more thought-ful, responsive, and earnest entrepreneurs
in Silicon Valley,” said Kara Swisher in
The New York Times. None of that really
matters. Dorsey’s silent meditation retreats
and other quirks are also “exactly nobody’s
business.” Really this is about money. The
reason that Dorsey finds himself under as-
sault now is that even as Twitter’s impor-
tance has grown in the “global conversa-
tion,” he’s found no way to capitalize on
that. “Twitter is a jewel,” and Dorsey has
been able to make little of it.There’s a “cultural clash” here between Wall Street and the tech
industry, said Matt Levine in Bloomberg.com. If you are the
founder of a high-profile tech company, your role is “to be a
charismatic kooky visionary.” You’re practically not doing your
job unless you also “run a spaceship company, or have a side
project involving curing death or saving humanity from robots.”
Investors, meanwhile, want “focused undistracted competent
CEOs” who care about profit margins. It’s very hard to reconcile
the two visions. Dorsey is vulnerable because unlike many other
tech chieftains, such as Mark Zuckerberg, whose special voting
shares give them almost unbreakable control, he can be deposed
by shareholders. If Singer wins this one, the lesson Silicon Valley
CEOs draw is likely to be that they need Facebook-style dual
class-shares so they can “follow their bliss in a long-term vision-
ary way” without interference from pesky investors.Twitter: A Wall Street–Silicon Valley culture clash
AP(^2
)Google wins spying case
Silicon Valley’s biggest industrial espionage
scandal led to a $179 million judgment last
week against a former Google engineer, said
Thomas Ricker in TheVerge.com. Anthony
Levandowski, a pioneer in self-driving car tech-
nology, has been “embroiled in several legal
actions since being accused of stealing 14,
documents from Google containing proprietary
information about the company’s self-driving
program.” In August, he was charged with
33 counts of theft and attempted theft by fed-
eral prosecutors. Google pursued its own case
against Levandowski for poaching employees,
and this ruling “upholds the award Google
won in arbitration” in December. Levandowski
left Google to start an autonomous trucking
company, Otto, that was acquired by Uber for
$600 million; Uber fired him in 2017.A tourism deal for SpaceX
The private space company Axiom has “forged
a partnership with SpaceX to fly paying tour-
ists to the International Space Station” for 10-
day trips as soon as the second half of 2021,
said Mariella Moon in Engadget.com. Axiom
is the company that NASA chose to provide a
“commercial destination module”—essentially
a space hotel—attached to the space station.SpaceX will ferry three tourists at a time, and
an Axiom staff member, taking one day to
reach the station and one to return. Axiom has
previously put the price of a ticket at $55 mil-
lion. NASA will get only a very small fraction
of that—$35,000 a night for each visitor. A
key job of the staff member: making sure that
the space tourists “don’t interfere with the
NASA crew members doing their job.”New tools to stop child porn
A new bill could hold tech companies account-
able for the sharing of child abuse imagery,
said Michael Keller in The New York Times,
by carving an exemption in Section 230. That
provision in the 1996 Communications De-
cency Act protects companies from liability
for content uploaded on their platforms by
users. However, last year “tech companies
reported nearly 70 million images and videos
related to online child exploitation,” and vic-
tim advocates say they have not done enough
to combat the sharing of illegal imagery. The
bipartisan Senate legislation would also “cre-
ate a 19-member commission to recommend
strategies” for spotting and categorizing illegal
material. U.S. agencies also released a set of
voluntary guidelines developed in conjunction
with the tech industry.Bytes: What’s new in tech
A full-scale
Hollywood
studio backed
by $1.75 billion
is betting on
shows designed
to be watched
on a phone for
10 minutes or
less, said David
Canellis in TheNextWeb.com. Quibi’s
175 planned shows, starting next
month, encompass “unscripted
series, talk shows, sports, news,” and
“movies split up into bite-size chap-
ters.” Quibi—the name is short for
“Quick Bits”—has signed on a raft of
major Hollywood names to act and
direct, including Steven Spielberg,
Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Hart, and
Jennifer Lopez. Quibi uses a technol-
ogy called Turnstyle to seamlessly
switch between horizontal and verti-
cal versions of a show. Each show
will be shot in both orientations;
turning the phone could even pro-
vide “additional camera angles” on
a scene. Quibi’s CEO is former HP
head Meg Whitman, and its backers
include a fund launched by former
Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg.Innovation of the week
20 NEWS Technology
Dorsey: Bowing to Wall Street