It's been... a week in the tech sphere. So much so that I felt the need to write about it all in a Lightning Round update because it stretches far and wide.
For starters, there's the trainwreck that is Twitter & Elon Musk. To call it a crisis is an understatement. A billionaire with thin skin is running his $44B company into the ground. From public firings to fights with advertisers to enduring shenanigans with their update to the paid "Blue" service that was incredibly foreseeable, Twitter is all over the place. I soooo want to write about it but I also know it's not healthy (nor of the top interest of you who are reading this) to obsess over it. Twitter is akin to the 20-car pileup on the freeway that you feel the instinctual need to stop and gawk.
Aside from that is the bloodbath of companies letting employees go. Shrinking headcount is the "cool thing to do" now and Amazon alone is letting go over ten thousand employees this week. Facebook Meta one-upped them with 11,000 cuts, and Salesforce is likely shedding people too. For all the crazy amounts of hiring done during COVID, it strikes me as odd that the people in charge of being the right size ignored that idea and over-hired. Now too many people are out of work. It's an unnecessary swinging of the pendulum back the other way.
Then finally you get into the 72-hour collapse of crypto firm FTX. Consider me shocked, SHOCKED I SAY!, that a company created to trade digital goods with no intrinsic value had the floor fall out from under it when it was made to prove it had the assets on hand to handle the money people put into it. The investment company that was started by the same guy? Oh, it was mixing in money and borrowing from FTX. Because, of course, it was all a scam. It was a "stable market leader" in crypto and in no time it went belly up. Perhaps Larry David was right to pass on this one.