The Indian Panorama

Tag: Jack Dorsey

  • Jack Dorsey steps down from Twitter’s board as Elon Musk fights over fake accounts

    Jack Dorsey steps down from Twitter’s board as Elon Musk fights over fake accounts

    SAN FRANCISCO (TIP): Jack Dorsey has stepped down from the Twitter board of directors, as Tesla CEO Elon Musk fights with the micro-blogging platform to reveal the actual number of fake/spam accounts. Bill Gates ‘poured’ millions into attacking Elon Musk, Tesla CEO tweets ‘wait until you find out what he put in your vaccine’. Dorsey quit as Twitter CEO in November last year, handing over the baton to Indian-origin Parag Agrawal who was then the CTO of the company. At the time, Twitter noted that Dorsey would stay on the board “until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders”.

    Dorsey has categorically said that he will never be the CEO of Twitter again, as reports of him rejoining the micro-blogging platform surfaced after the $44 billion takeover by Musk. Dorsey, who is now running financial payments platform Block (earlier Square), also said that no one should be the CEO of Twitter.

    At the shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday, Twitter’s board voted to oust board member and Musk ally Egon Durban, CEO of private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, reports TechCrunch. Durban led Musk’s deal team during the 2018 failed effort to take Tesla private. Musk has put the $44 billion Twitter deal on hold over the presence of fake/spammy accounts and wants the micro-blogging platform to come clean on the actual number of bots.

    (Source: IANS)

  • Former President Donald Trump announced he is suing Facebook, Twitter and Google

    Former President Donald Trump announced he is suing Facebook, Twitter and Google

    WASHINGTON (TIP): Former President Donald Trump took his fight with three massive tech companies to court, filing lawsuits that legal experts say are all but guaranteed to fail – even as they rally Republican voters, fundraisers and donors. Trump revealed Wednesday, July 7,  that he is suing Facebook, Twitter and Google, as well as their respective CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai, in class-action lawsuits.

    Trump, who has a history of threatening legal action but not always following through, made the announcement at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, alongside two leaders from the America First Policy Institute, the pro-Trump nonprofit group that is supporting the lawsuits.

    Shortly after the news conference wrapped, Trump’s political entities started sending out fundraising messages that touted the lawsuits in their appeals for money. One such text message, written as if it were coming from Trump himself, includes a link to his joint fundraising committee Save America, which also raises money for other Republican political initiatives. The lawsuits were unveiled just over a month after Facebook decided to uphold Trump’s ban from using the platform until at least January 2023. Twitter, Trump’s preferred social media outlet throughout his one term in office, permanently banned him on the heels of the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol by a mob of his supporters. The lawsuit against Pichai also names as a defendant YouTube, the video-sharing website bought by Google in 2006. YouTube indefinitely banned Trump in January. “We’re not looking to settle,” Trump told reporters at Bedminster when asked about the lawsuits. “We don’t know what’s going to happen but we’re not looking to settle,” he said. The three related lawsuits, filed in federal court in Florida, allege the tech giants have violated plaintiffs’ First Amendments rights. The suits want the court to order the media companies to let Trump back on their platforms. They also want the court to declare that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a piece of legislation that stops tech companies from being held liable for what users post on their platforms, is unconstitutional. As president, Trump railed against Section 230 and repeatedly called for its repeal. He even tied the issue to a crucial round of stimulus checks at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the passage of an annual defense spending bill. Legal experts doubt whether Trump’s latest attack on big tech companies will succeed.

  • Dorsey, Musk bat for Bitcoin as future of renewable energy

    Dorsey, Musk bat for Bitcoin as future of renewable energy

    Arguing for Bitcoin as a key driver of renewable energy’s future on Earth Day, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have come forward to support the fast-growing cryptocurrency, saying that Bitcoin incentivises renewable energy.

    Dorsey’s digital payment services company Square and global asset management firm ARK Invest have jointly released a white paper on “Bitcoin as Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future”.

    In a tweet on Wednesday, April 21, Dorsey said: “Bitcoin incentivises renewable energy.”

    Musk replied: “True,” after tweeting that starting next week, “Tesla Solar Panels and Solar Roof will only be sold as an integrated product ‘with’ Tesla Powerwall battery”.

    In the white paper, Square and ARK Invest said that “the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow”.

    The ‘Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative’ has developed a short research paper as a “starting point to share our vision for how bitcoin mining — in conjunction with renewable energy and storage – is especially well suited to accelerate the energy transition”.

    To complement this work, ARK Invest has contributed an open source model that demonstrates how bitcoin mining could augment these renewable + storage systems to supply a larger percentage of a grid’s base-load energy demand for comparable or lower cost unit economics.

    “Bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers in that they offer highly flexible and easily interruptible load, provide payout in a globally liquid cryptocurrency, and are completely location agnostic, requiring only an internet connection,” the paper read.

    Bitcoin miners are an ideal complementary technology for renewables and storage.

    “Combining generation with both storage and miners presents a better overall value proposition then building generation and storage alone,” the research paper noted. “By combining miners with renewables + storage projects, we believe it could improve the returns for project investors and developers, moving more solar and wind projects into profitable territory,” it added.