Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Tesla CEO Elon Musk testified in Delaware court on Nov.20 that his takeover and restructuring of Twitter had been largely completed, that he himself would reduce his stay at the company by the end of next week, and that his transformation transition team would gradually withdraw.

During Musk's first few weeks as Twitter CEO, he enlisted a number of close friends as advisers to help transform Twitter, including venture capitalists David Sacks, Jason Calacanis and Sriram Krishnan, according to people familiar with the matter. Over the past few days, the team has become less active. None of the advisers spoke at Twitter's plenary meeting last week at its San Francisco headquarters. After initially enthusiastically using the platform to cheer Musk for change, they also gradually reduced their vocalizations.

Musk's right-hand men were almost everywhere in the early days of taking over Twitter: Sachs, who worked with Musk at PayPal, discussed ideas with the Twitter product team, while Karakanis, who worked at Sequoia Capital, helped reassure advertisers and marketers. Krishnan, who had previously worked at Twitter, helped Musk identify product and engineering team leaders, and Behnam Rezaei, who had always been in charge of Musk's engineering business, worked closely with Krishnan.

In the days after Musk's acquisition of Twitter was completed, all three showed up at Twitter's offices. At first, they tweeted eagerly about their involvement in Twitter's transformation, as Karakanis and Sachs discussed in podcasts hosted by investors Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg.

Karakanis, Krishnan and Sachs, along with two more low-profile venture capitalists, were added to Twitter's internal Slack account, according to a person familiar with the matter. Antonio Gracias, a SpaceX board member and founder of Valor Equity Partners, and Sam Teller, Musk's former adviser and current venture partner at Valor Equity Partners.

In participating in the takeover of Twitter, these people went beyond the traditional authority of VCs. Vcs don't usually play a major role unrelated to investing in startups themselves, but specialize in helping early-stage, high-growth companies. Twitter was founded 16 years ago and went public in 2013. Thanks to Musk's $44 billion acquisition, Twitter is now a private company again. Ayako Yasuda, a finance professor at the University of California, Davis, says it's "strange" that seasoned VCs are putting their time into such a "long-established" company.

But in the weeks after the deal closed, Twitter's already chaotic internal situation became even more chaotic. A new verification tool launched in early November was quickly shelved because it caused a spike in fake accounts posing as celebrities on Twitter. Thousands of employees were fired, but some were wrongly dismissed and asked to come back a few days later. Musk went to great lengths to placate panicky advertisers, even talking about the possibility of bankruptcy.

Through years of networking and mutual investment, Karakanis, Krishnan, and Sachs eventually earned Musk's trust. Musk helped fund Mahalo, a now-defunct search engine launched by Karakanis in 2007. Sachs 'venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, has invested in several Musk companies, including tunneling startup Boring Co, brain-computer interface company Neuralink, and Tesla. Krishnan invested in SpaceX personally, according to his LinkedIn profile. His employer Andreessen Horowitz also provided Musk with financing to help take Twitter private.

These people are also very close to Musk in private. In the past, Twitter accounts have faked Karakanis and Sachs in an attempt to scam cash and bitcoins. Soon after Krishnan joined Twitter as a product manager in 2017, he received a request for help from Musk, who wanted to stop people from impersonating him on Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk has said that the bot problem on Twitter was one of the reasons he wanted to acquire and reform Twitter. Of course, that's why he tried to get out of the deal.

"People might immediately say, I'll pay $5 to $10 a month to support the verification feature, though that's subject to verification," Karakanis said on his All-in podcast late last month. "Since Twitter Blue's launch setback, the podcast hasn't discussed the topic. As of Friday, the $7.99-a-month service remained suspended. Karakanis has more than 600,000 Twitter followers and has sent 42000 tweets, making him the most frequent user of the platform among the three.

Karakanis, 51, was a former tech journalist who founded startup accelerator and investment company Launch. After Musk decided to buy Twitter, Karakanis expressed his willingness to run the company. He wrote to Musk: "Let me be a game coach! Twitter CEO is my dream job. "Karakanis met with Twitter advertisers and marketers in New York on Oct. 31. That morning, he tweeted: "Let's get to work! However, it was later reported that Musk had sent someone to ask Karakanis not to tweet so much because he seemed to be too involved in product development or policy process. Since then, his tweets about Twitter have become less and less.

Sax and Musk had known each other the longest. They met at PayPal, a payments company Musk co-founded in 1999 with Sachs as chief operating officer. Sachs founded Craft Ventures in 2017, which, in addition to Musk's company, backs lender Affirm and business analytics firm Addesar. On Nov. 7, he tweeted that he had "no official identity" on Twitter and just wanted to "help."

Krishnan, a 39-year-old American immigrant born in Chennai, India, seems to have the most experience directly related to helping others. Krishnan's LinkedIn profile shows he worked at Microsoft, Meta, Facebook's parent company, and Snap, Snapchat's parent company. Former Twitter colleagues say Krishnan is gregarious but slow to make decisions. Krishnan did not respond to requests for comment.

According to people familiar with the matter, Krishnan did try to help with the impersonation problem Musk raised in 2017. For a while, things got better, but fraudsters kept coming up with new ways to cheat.

Krishnan joined Andreessen Horowitz in early 2021 as a general partner focusing on crypto technology. Days before Twitter Blue launched, he defended the service on Twitter. But since then he has remained silent on the subject. Lately, he has been posting from Chennai, where he and his wife host their podcast live.

Whether Musk will be able to stick to his plan to reduce the time spent on Twitter remains to be seen. He has announced that verification will be relaunched on November 29, telling remaining employees they need to accept long hours of intense work or leave. For the advisory team, Musk has no such mandatory requirement. And he told them they would keep their day jobs. "Musk is the CEO of Twitter, he runs the company, he's the decision-maker, he makes all the decisions," Sachs said in his November 4 podcast. We're just helping a friend. "

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.