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Google and Twitter have agreed to an acquisition deal just not the one many expected three months ago.
Google is acquiring Twitters suite of developer products, including its developer suite Fabric which includes the crash reporting service Crashlytics. Twitter acquired Crashlytics back in 2013.
The two companies are not sharing deal terms, but every member of Twitters Fabric team has been offered a job at Google. One source estimated the team at around 60 employees.
Fabric is the collection of products that Twitter rolled out 18 months ago to try and encourage mobile app developers to integrate more closely with Twitters core app.
But when the company announced another round of layoffs back in October, it also added that it would be refocusing the company around what employees call Bluebird, the main Twitter app. This was less than a month after , Flight, a flag that Twitter was trying to figure out what to do with Fabric amid all the changes.
In the fall, Twitter started exploring options to offload its fringe businesses, like Fabric and Vine, the latter of which has since been shut down. At least one other company, Microsoft, showed some interest in acquiring Fabric, according to multiple sources.
But now Google is taking on Fabric and plans to integrate it with its own developer team, Firebase, according to a blog post.
He Also Told Kara Swisher That Elon Musk Is His Favorite Twitter User
Dorsey said Musk’s tweets are, “focused on solving existential problems and sharing his thinking openly.”
He added that he enjoys all the “ups and downs” that come with Musk’s sometimes unpredictable use of the site. Musk himself replied, tweeting his thanks and “Twitter rocks!” followed by a string of random emojis.
Dorsey Also Addressed The Way Twitter Dealt With A Dubiously Sourced New York Post Story About Hunter Biden
When the New York Post published a report about Hunter Biden on October 14 that threw up red flags about sourcing, Twitter blocked users from sharing URLs citing its “hacked materials” policy.
Dorsey subsequently apologized publicly, saying it was wrong of Twitter to block URLs.
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During the Senate hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz accused Twitter of taking the “unilateral decision to censor” the Post.
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Malicious And Fake Accounts
Between January and late July 2017, Twitter had identified and shut down over 7,000 fake accounts created by Iranian influence operations.
In May 2018, in response to scrutiny over the misuse of Twitter by those seeking to maliciously influence elections, Twitter announced that it would partner with the nonprofit organization Ballotpedia to add special labels verifying the authenticity of political candidates running for election in the U.S.
In December 2019, Twitter removed 5,929 accounts for violating their manipulation policies. The company investigated and attributed these accounts to a single state-run information operation, which originated in Saudi Arabia. The accounts were reported to be a part of a larger group of 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior. However, Twitter did not disclose all of them as some could possibly be legitimate accounts taken over through hacking.
Who Owned Twitter Before Elon Musk
Jack, Evan, Biz, and Noah launched Twitter in July 2006. Evan and Noah left Google and started a podcasting company called Odeo, but that companys lack of success led to the idea of creating a small messaging platform where friends could send short notes back and forth to one another. We call them tweets now.
Noahs original concept for Odeo was to turn call-in audio messages into MP3s anyone could access online. The company lost traction when Apple entered the podcasting scene and integrated its own platform into iPods across the globe.
The Odeo platform was built but never used as originally intended. But one of its employees, Jack, had a different idea that ended up working out for everyone: send a text to one number, and everyone on a particular platform could see it.
When Twitter eventually became a public company, its ownership by default was transferred to multiple parties. Its original founders didnt technically own it anymore. Instead, a collection of different investment funds and private companies owned it in separate shares before Elon Musk.
Im so happy Twitter will continue to serve the public conversation. Around the world, and into the stars!
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Stock Price Performance And Quarterly Earnings
Google’s initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. At IPO, the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a of more than $23 billion. The stock performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. GOOG shares split into GOOG class C shares and GOOGL class A shares. The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google’s holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015.
In the third quarter of 2005, Google reported a 700% increase in profit, largely due to large companies shifting their advertising strategies from newspapers, magazines, and television to the Internet.
For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. In 2011, 96% of Google’s revenue was derived from its advertising programs.
From Novelty To News Source
Twitters social networking roots were obvious in April 2009, when actor Ashton Kutcher emerged as the victor in a race with CNN to become the first Twitterer to collect more than a million followers. While celebrity e-watching remained a significant draw to the service, businesses soon began sending tweets about promotions and events, and political campaigns discovered the value of Twitter as a communication tool. In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama dominated his opponent, John McCain, in the social media sphere, amassing almost four times as many Myspace friends and more than 20 times as many Twitter followers. This development virtually ensured that future candidates would include a social networking presence as part of their media strategies.
Having demonstrated its versatility as a high-tech newswire, Twitter drew the attention of those who would prefer to see certain information suppressed. In August 2009 a Georgian economics professor whose tweets recounted the days leading up to the 2008 military conflict between Russia and Georgia was the target of a massive denial-of-service attack that knocked out the entire site for hours. Millions of users attempted to log into Twitter only to be greeted by the services iconic fail whalethe image of a cartoon whale being hoisted into the air by a flock of birds, signaling a site outage.
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In April 2020 Dorsey Announced That He Was Forming A New Charity Fund That Would Help In Global Relief Efforts Amid The Coronavirus Pandemic
Dorsey said he would pour $1 billion of his own Square equity into the fund, or roughly 28% of his total wealth at the time.
The fund, dubbed Start Small LLC, would first focus on helping in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
Dorsey said he would be making all transactions on behalf of the fund public in a spreadsheet.
Tweets About His Vacation In Myanmar Also Provoked An Outcry
Dorsey tweeted glowingly about a vacation he took to Myanmar for his birthday in December 2018. “If you’re willing to travel a bit, go to Myanmar,” he said.
This came at the height of the Rohingya crisis, and Dorsey was attacked for his blithe promotion of the country â especially since social media platforms were accused of having been complicit in fuelling hatred towards the Rohingya.
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I Have Moved Straight To The End What Musk Just Said About His Twitter Takeover Bid
In the Securities and Exchange Commission filing Elon Musk submitted expressing his intent to , Mr. Musk sounded a lot like the activist investor he has become in recent weeks, saying he was not playing the back-and-forth game.
Instead, he added, I have moved straight to the end.
He continued: Its a high price and your shareholders will love it.
Mr. Musk offered to buy the company for $54.20 per share in cash.
In a section of his filing, a 13D, which must be submitted to the S.E.C. when a person acquires more than a certain percentage of a companys shares, Mr. Musk reiterated his concerns about free speech on the platform and said he didnt trust Twitters current leadership.
If the deal doesnt work, given that I dont have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder, Mr. Musk said in the filing. This is not a threat, its simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made. And those changes wont happen without taking the company private.
Mr. Musk, who has nearly 82 million followers on Twitter and frequently posts there, had been quiet in recent days. He posted a link to the filing shortly after it was made public: I made an offer.
I made an offer
Who Created Twitter
In March 2006, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams founded Twitter, which launched in July of that year.
Dorsey, then a New York University undergraduate, introduced the concept of an individual using an SMS service to interact with a small group.
The services initial project code name was twttr, a disemvowelled variant of the word twitter inspired by the image hosting site Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.
Part of the reason for the choice was also that the domain twitter.com was already in use.
The company grew quickly in 2007, it sent out 400,000 tweets each quarter, but by 2008, the number of tweets per quarter had reached 100 million.
Twitter users sent 50 million tweets per day on average in February 2010, and just a few months later, around 65 million tweets were sent per day in June 2010, equating to around 750 tweets sent every second.
Though the creation of Twitter was a team effort, Jack Dorsey is often credited with planting the first seeds of the idea, and served as the companys CEO for two terms between 2006 and 2008, and 2015 to 2021.
At 45 years old, Dorsey has an estimated net worth of $600 million .
He gave his blessing to the takeover in a series of tweets, hailing the decision to let Musk take the social media platform into private ownership and away from its current advertising-based model and Wall Street.
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Who Is Jack Dorsey
Dorsey was born November 19, 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri.
He studied at the University of Missouri-Rolla for two years before transferring to New York University in 1997 and dropping out one semester before graduating.
He reportedly developed his social media network idea while studying at NYU.
He later moved to California where he met Williams in a café and began working on his latest podcasting project, which later turned into Twitter.
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Musk has stated that he believes the site needs to alter in order to grow and better encourage free speech.
But who owned Twitter before Musk? Who is Jack Dorsey, and just how much money do he and other executives stand to make from the multi-billion dollar deal?
Here is everything you need to know.
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Is Twitter A Privately Owned Company
Since the court ruled that Twitter, itself, is a private entity, it indicates that the company has the right to block those they wish. Thats based on the fact that the company isnt a public forum. Its platform is one. Twitter also gives users the ability to turn off comments and retweets on their tweets.
Who Is Parag Agrawal Twitters Chief Executive
When Elon Musk , Parag Agrawal, to tell him that he intended to buy shares in the company and wanted to discuss changes to the platform, Mr. Musk was reaching out to someone who had already shown interest in some of his ideas.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Agrawal, who became the companys leader last year after Jack Dorsey stepped down, are known to be friendly. The current and former Twitter chief executives have both expressed views in the past that appear to align with Mr. Musks larger vision for a less moderated version of the platform.
Mr. Agrawal had been with Twitter for 10 years before taking on the role, most recently as chief technology officer, and acted as Mr. Dorseys confidant. In stepping into the top job, Mr. Agrawal became responsible for bringing to fruition Mr. Dorseys ideas for decentralizing Twitter ideas that Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Musk have discussed publicly on the platform.
In March, Mr. Musk polled his roughly 82 million followers asking them if they agreed that Twitters algorithm should be open source, prompting Mr. Dorsey to swiftly respond: The choice of which algorithm to use should be open to everyone, he wrote in a .
Mr. Agrawal has not made any public comments about Mr. Musk on Twitter since announcing this week that Mr. Musk would no longer join the companys board.
Marie Solis
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What Happens Next In Musks Twitter Takeover Offer
Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter at a valuation of about $43 billion. Here is what will or could happen next:
The board reviews the offer. The board will work with its advisers at Goldman Sachs to review Mr. Musks offer. They will have to consider, among other things, whether the deal fairly values the company, and whether Mr. Musk has the financing to cobble together a deal.
The board cannot simply decide it does not like Mr. Musk as a suitor, but they can come up with reasons why they dont like the bid, like, for example, his ability to fund it, said Steven Davidoff Solomon, a professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.
The board announces its decision. The board will likely take up to a few days to review the offer. If it rejects the offer, it can go in one of several ways: It can put in a defense mechanism known as a poison pill that limits the ability of Mr. Musk, and every other shareholder, to buy up Twitter shares in the open market.
Once it does that, it could still decide to sell itself, but without the pressure of Mr. Musk or any other suitor threatening to acquire it by buying a significant number of shares in the open market.
There are reasons Twitter may opt not to do a poison pill. It might be wary of potential criticism that a poison pill is deflecting the concerns of a highly vocal member of its community.
Still, at least one shareholder has already said the bid undervalues the company.
What Does Musk Want
Teslas chief executive, Elon Musk, is famously enigmatic.
On April 4, when he first disclosed that he had bought enough shares of Twitter to become the social media sites largest shareholder, he didnt have much to say and appeared on the surface to be working amicably with Twitter executives.
Parag Agrawal, the companys chief executive, posted tweets supporting the move, a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need.
But on Thursday, when disclosing that he wanted to purchase the company, Mr. Musk had a lot to say, sharing several critiques of the company and ideas for its future.
I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy, Mr. Musk said in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing announcing his offer.
He added, Since making my investment, I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.
After an account posted a list of the 10 most followed Twitter accounts, including former President Barack Obama and the pop stars Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, Mr. Musk over the weekend responded and wrote: Most of these top accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?
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Elon Musk Said He Personally Contacted Dorsey Following The Hack
During a July 2020 interview with The New York Times, Musk said he had immediately called Dorsey after he learned about the hack.
“Within a few minutes of the post coming up, I immediately got texts from a bunch of people I know, then I immediately called Jack so probably within less than five minutes my account was locked,” said Musk.
Source: The New York Times
Who Owns Google The Shareholding Structure Of Primary Owners
Without a doubt, Google, under parent company Alphabet, is a technology giant, with vast interests in numerous areas. As of June 30, 2020, the firm has a trailing-12 month of $166.03 billion, which is a humungous figure. The companys vast investments have allowed it to reap big profits every year.
Google has grown to be more than a search engine. Its diversification called for centralized leadership, and thus Alphabet was the solution. Alphabet Inc. became the primary firm with five big investors.
The firm has three classes of shares. These are:
- Class A: These are the ordinary shares that have one vote per share and are publicly traded with the ticker GOOGL.
- Class B: These are super-voting shares with ten votes per share. Class B shares cannot be traded publicly and are mostly owned by founders.
- Cass C: People with Class C shares have no voting right and only share on equity. These are publicly traded with the ticker GOOG.
You are probably wondering how much stake all the Google major shareholders have in the company. The firms have five principal shareholders, their ownership rated according to the number of Class C, B and A-shares they possess.
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