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Elon Musk holds all-hands meeting, executives depart Twitter, & Twitter usage continues to rise
Update: Robin Wheeler confirmed that she is still working for Twitter.
I'm still here.
— Robin Wheeler (@robinw) November 11, 2022
Twitter CEO Elon Musk held an all-hands meeting on Thursday, and following that, there have been reports of several executives departing the company as Twitter’s usage continues to grow.
Zoë Schiffer, the managing editor of Platformer, said that multiple sources claimed that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, was leaving.
NEW: Multiple Twitter sources say Yoel Roth is leaving the company.
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 10, 2022
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Shiffer added that Elon Musk told employees if they cannot physically make it to an office and they don’t show up, “resignation accepted.” In an email to Twitter employees before the meeting, Elon Musk said,
“We are also changing Twitter policy such that remote work is no longer allowed unless you have a specific exception. Managers will send the exception lists to me for review and approval.”
“Starting tomorrow (Thursday), everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week. Obviously, if you are physically unable to travel to an office or have a critical personal obligation, then your absence is understandable.”
Read Elons email to employees below. He talks about the state of the company, economy and no more WFH. pic.twitter.com/V5ouGGef0a
— X Daily News (@xDaily) November 10, 2022
In addition to Roth’s departure, Schiffer noted that Elon Musk said that he wasn’t sure how much run rate Twitter has and that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question.”
Schiffer also added that in a message on Slack, Twitter’s legal team said that Twitter’s Chief Information Security Officer, Lea Kissner, Chief Privacy Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer resigned last night. In a tweet posting on Thursday morning, Kissner announced her departure.
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Tweeps, like always, I'm here for you. You can find me at lea.makes.respect@gmail.com if you'd like to catch up.
— Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner) November 10, 2022
Sources have also said that the company’s client solutions leader, Robin Wheeler, is also leaving the company. Wheeler debunked those claims stating on Twitter, “I’m still here.” On Wednesday, Wheeler hosted the Twitter Space Q&A with Elon Musk on advertising and Twitter’s future. Twitter’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran, and chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, were also reported to have left Twitter.
The Federal Trade Commission said it was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern,” and that it was prepared to take action to ensure Twitter complies with a consent order. The consent order requires the platform to comply with certain privacy and security requirements due to allegations of past data misuse that took place before Elon Musk took over.
Douglas Farrar, the agency’s director of public affairs, told The Washington Post,
“No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”
On Wednesday, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter may make a lot of mistakes in the coming months. “We will keep what works & change what doesn’t,” he said. However, his acquisition of the company has brought more attention to it in the form of users. On Thursday, Elon Musk said the usage of the platform continues to rise.
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Despite reports claiming that users are leaving Twitter en masse since Elon Musk took over, the platform’s records show another story, including its monetizable daily user (mDAU) growth of over 20% since his takeover.
Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.
We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022
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Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
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The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
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Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
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This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
