Daily Authority: Musk buys Twitter

👻 Happy Friday! We’re getting real close to spook-ville, and although Halloween is officially on Monday, most people will celebrate this weekend. No matter how old you are, stay safe! Remember that the real threat is not spiked candy, but rather traffic accidents.

After months of back and forth, including several lawsuits, social sniping, and general tomfoolery, Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter yesterday for $44 billion. He immortalized the event with a single tweet reading “the bird is freed.”

• Musk initially made his offer early in the year before attempting to back out for various reasons.
• Twitter then sued the billionaire for reneging on the deal. A Delaware judge mandated that the case would continue if the purchase wasn’t completed by October 28, which is today.
• The Verge has an excellent breakdown of events leading to the largest tech purchase of all time.
• Apart from a stunt where Musk carried a sink to the Twitter headquarters to “let that sink in,” he immediately fired several top executives at the company.
• These include former CEO Parag Agarwal and CFO Ned Segal, among others.
• Before you shed a tear for these poor executives, remember that they’re getting a windfall worth tens of millions of dollars.
• Previous rumors also indicated that Musk intended to fire 75% of the company’s workforce, a claim he refuted this week.
• Still, expect major layoffs during the transition.

What’s next for Twitter?

• Aside from Musk’s promises to reduce content moderation and turn the platform into a “digital town square” of enlightened centrism, he appears to have big plans for expansion.
• He has floated the idea of turning Twitter into an “everything app” similar to WeChat in China.
• This essentially combines social media, payments, and several other functions into a single cohesive app.
• He has also promised investors to reach an annual revenue of $26.4 billion by 2028. Twitter’s revenue in 2021 was $5 billion, and it failed to make a profit.
• That’s a big goal considering the platform has been bleeding off its most active users for years.
• Then again, his main stated motivation here is to “try to help humanity, whom I love.”
• Time will tell whether or not his efforts are successful, or if this turns out to be yet another hollow vanity project to stroke his own ego.

It’s not often that we get to glimpse behind the veil of the biggest tech companies, but a Redditor recently acquired a decommissioned Netflix cache server that offered a unique look at the hardware behind the company’s Open Connect network.

• The industrial-grade server is from circa 2013, and it contained a “Supermicro board, a single Xeon E5 2650L v2 processor, 64GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10-gigabit ethernet card.”
• It also housed an impressive (for the time) 36 7.2TB 7200RPM drives and six 500GB Micron SSDs for a total of 262TB of storage.
• His goal is to turn it into a home network attached storage (NAS) device.
• These are typically used as a kind of personal cloud storage for videos, photos, backups, or even running your own Plex server.
• AA‘s own networking tech guru Dhruv recently wrote about the benefits of NAS implementation for home security, as well.

Thinking of giving it a spin? Here’s a quick primer on NAS drives, and remember that you don’t have to convert a decade-old Netflix server, you can also buy them off the shelf.