Tag: silicon valley
Elon Musk

Did Elon Musk Wreck Twitter Because He's So Lonesome?

Why does Elon Musk have to be the center of everyone's attention every day? Has he no hobbies? Is running an industrial empire less than a full-time job? Perhaps he's just lonely. Perhaps social media is not filling the need for human companionship — as many a depressed adolescent can explain.

At times the richest man on the planet, Musk certainly has options. He's already done remarkable things, such as supercharge the age of the electric vehicle and send rockets into space. Yet he chooses to pick public fights that offend his customers, while having negligible effect on public policy.

There was no business reason for his buying Twitter other than wanting to control a galactic megaphone. OK. But then he destroys its usefulness by letting a sewer of disinformation mix in with the good stuff. And he attacks the valuable creators who were filling up his feed for free.

Makes no sense unless the Twitter thing is a massively expensive form of psychotherapy to treat a lonely man's need for connection.

Musk seemed to be operating under the illusion that the children could never find another place to post their short messages. Mark Zuckerberg over at Meta, home of Facebook, is showing him otherwise.

Zuck's new social media site, Threads, is now trucking Twitter's user base to its feed. Meanwhile, Twitter ad revenue in the second quarter was down about 40 percent from a year ago, and that was before the Threads launch.

As an exhausting exhibitionist, Musk has company among the Silicon Valley CEOs and tech bros in playing the contrarian game. That means uttering controversial hooey meant, it seems, to set them apart from lesser beings plodding through reality.

Not only did Musk make Twitter worthless as a source of actionable information, he turned off users and advertisers alike by shooting off his mouth. He went so far as to traffic in an antisemitic-flavored reference to George Soros. It's pathetic how unoriginal that was.

The last straw was limiting the number of posts users could read each day. "If you think about it," Ashley Mayer, a venture capitalist, tweeted, "Elon Musk is the greatest PR person of all time. He has us rooting for Meta!?!'

Unlike the other challenges to Twitter that didn't get far, Meta has managed to create an easy-to-use site, many of whose features are familiar to Twitter users. And Meta could plug Threads into its enormous Instagram following. Musk is suing Meta for allegedly stealing Twitter employees and trade secrets. Meta says that's not the case.

Psychiatrists are seeing a surge in drug addiction among financial hotshots, in part to fight off loneliness. A good number, The Wall Street Journal reports, "turn to addiction to mask the reality that achieving their goals — like launching their own fund or making $100 million — can still leave them feeling empty."

Even if they want to develop genuine friendships, the billionaires can't be sure who really likes them, who is only after their money. As for intimate relationships, Musk has had two wives, one of them twice. Now he has none.

One would expect Musk to have better things to do than pursue grudge matches with a tech writer. Sure, Kara Swisher is the dean of tech writers, but is Musk so thin-skinned as to send her an email calling her an "a—-hole"? Apparently, yes.

Funny, but Swisher used to be one of his confidants. Now even she seems to be off Musk's "friend" list, though she's getting great mileage out of his attacks on her. As for Zuckerberg's Twitter replacement, all Threads needs to do now is pick up the tweeters left shipwrecked by an evidently troubled man.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Fraudster Holmes Tried The ‘MeToo’ Defense — And Failed

Fraudster Holmes Tried The ‘MeToo’ Defense — And Failed

She entered the headlines as the super-confident entrepreneur who founded a wildly successful tech company at 19. She recruited generals and secretaries of state to her board. Her fresh face and long blonde hair made the covers of Forbes, Fortune and Inc. as the business world marveled at her invention that could allegedly do blood tests with just a pinprick on the finger — no more needles in veins.

Elizabeth Holmes was just found guilty on four counts of fraud for lying to investors in her quest to raise money for her company, Theranos. It turned out that her blood-testing technology never worked.

Here was another unlovely story about the dishonest fake-it-till-you-make-it culture of Silicon Valley. But the trial took a still more sour turn when Holmes tried a MeToo defense. She claimed she had been victim of an abusive relationship with ex-boyfriend and former Theranos executive Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani. He took over her brain, she implied, and forced her to have sex.

That Balwani was 20 years older added to the innocent-young-thing account. Holmes also claimed to have been raped as a student at Stanford University: That was the reason she dropped out.

"I needed to kill the person I was" to become an entrepreneur, she testified. That kind of advice would have made for one strange TED Talk.

Suddenly, the woman who used her marketing and lying skills to turn a smoke-and-mirrors invention into, at one point, about $4.5 billion of stock, tried to argue that sexually violent men had ruined her ability to run a company.

David Ring, a lawyer who represents victims of alleged sexual abuse, called Holmes' testimony "an incredibly risky move." The defense wisely did not call an expert to speak on how such abuse might have affected her behavior as CEO.

The prosecutor, meanwhile, told the jury members that they didn't have to consider such factors in reaching a verdict. "The case is about false statements made to investors and false statements made to patients," he said.

She had the Silicon Valley patter down pat. She was always pictured in black turtlenecks like Steve Jobs. Wearing the same outfit every day, fashion critic Vanessa Friedman wrote, was "the techie's equivalent of the heroic uniform." She built on the tech-genius storyline of having dropped out of college like Jobs and Bill Gates.

Holmes had mastered all those concept-explaining hand gestures and deployed the big-talk catchphrases. When CNBC's Jim Cramer asked her about the doubters, Holmes responded: "First they think you're crazy. Then they fight you. And then, all of a sudden, you change the world."

To round out the resume, she became a vegan.

And that's how Holmes lured the likes of former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry to her board. It's how she extracted $100 million from the very rich family of former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Slapping the logos of Pfizer and other leading drug companies onto her documents (without their permission) helped bamboozle Walgreens into entering a partnership, a deal that gave further weight to the claims.

The defense did make a good point in arguing that the investors were partly to blame: They had failed to perform due diligence to assess the company's assertions.

One wishes that Holmes had taken her lumps. After all, with little business experience she managed to pull one over on some of the most sophisticated minds in America. And most of those she cheated were rich.

Holmes should have held her head higher. Playing the damsel who went bad as the puppet of a powerful man ought to have been beneath her dignity.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

We Need To Tax The Rich — Not Punish Them

We Need To Tax The Rich — Not Punish Them

Taxes are how we raise the money needed to run government. The rich have the wherewithal to bear most of those costs. These points are especially connected at a time when the rich have gotten so much richer and the government needs to do so much more.

But in making the case to raise taxes on the wealthy, it is counterproductive to portray such a scenario as a kind of just punishment for those who have accumulated wealth. Many on the left can't stop themselves from hurting their cause.

It's true that America's billionaires added $1 trillion to their pile during President Donald Trump's four years. But though the 2017 tax cuts mostly benefited the richest investors, a growing concentration of wealth has been going on for decades. So, raise taxes on these guys because they have the money and not because they are supposedly greedy or otherwise in need of moral teachings.

The pandemic did especially nice things for Silicon Valley companies that helped stay-at-home Americans move their shopping and working online. They didn't create the pandemic. They just happened to be in the right businesses when it hit.

Thus, there was no good reason for the Institute for Policy Studies and others to fulminate against "pandemic profiteers," a list heavy with tech entrepreneurs. The dictionary defines profiteer as one who makes "an excessive or unfair profit, especially illegally or in a black market."

What exactly made Zoom founder Eric Yuan one of the pandemic profiteers? Yuan had no idea when he created his videoconferencing service in 2011 that nine years later, economic shutdowns and social distancing would create a huge market for his invention and make him a billionaire several times over.

Liberals should bear in mind that many of the biggest donors to President Joe Biden's presidential campaign are the very billionaires on whom he wants to raise taxes. They include the top people at the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple. One of them, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, saw his net worth, now $17.4 billion, rise 61 percent in the Trump years.

Also note that several factors influence rich people's view of taxes. Some feel morally obligated to help support the society that has done so much for them. Others consider it very much in their interests to have good roads, ports and internet — things their taxes pay for.

The "fairness" argument does remain valid. The wealthiest Americans have received enormous tax breaks while having the ability, in many cases, to set their own number for taxable income. By contrast, the working stiffs see their taxes automatically deducted every week from their paychecks.

That makes Biden's plan to beef up the IRS to go after tycoons who chisel on their taxes long overdue. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig has said that tax cheats deprive the government of something like $1 trillion a year.

Just don't blame the honest economic winners in the pandemic for the hardships of others. New York State Sen. Luis Sepulveda, who represents a working-class area of the Bronx, implied as much when he said, "It makes me angry because in the wealthiest city in the world, it's inexcusable to have such a high rate of unemployment in one area."

His largely immigrant constituents did not lose their service jobs because rich people lived elsewhere in the city. They lost them because a deadly virus shut down the businesses that employed them.

So, there's no need here to spin a morality tale about the evils of great wealth. The case for raising taxes on those who could most easily pay them is good. Let's stick to this more sophisticated argument and skip the reproach.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Nevada Democrats Looking To Silicon Valley To Avoid Another Iowa

Nevada Democrats Looking To Silicon Valley To Avoid Another Iowa

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As four days of early voting begin in Nevada’s 2020 Democratic Party presidential caucuses on Saturday, February 15, the big question is will there be breakdowns in the reporting and counting of votes that echo Iowa’s chaotic 2020 caucus earlier this month.

That question is not speculation as Nevada State Democratic Party (NSDP) officials dropped their plans to use the same precinct reporting app and backend tabulation system that failed in Iowa. The NSDP has been scrambling since to find a substitute for what were the same tasks as in Iowa, but with additional elements unique to Nevada’s caucuses.

Unlike Iowa, Nevada Democrats plan to offer early voting at 80 sites across the state. In addition to processing voter registration, party registration and ranked-choice voting at those early voting sites, the NSDP must securely store those early votes, and then send the local results to nearly 2,000 caucus chairs to begin the February 22 statewide contest.

The NSDP has been updating presidential campaigns with details on how they will do all this in recent days, as well as producing new training materials for volunteers who will run the early voting sites and chair the caucuses. The new system’s hub will be using party-owned iPads pre-loaded with registration and tabulation templates created by Google forms, according to various news reports.

In a remarkable development, it appears that Google is stepping in to prevent Nevada from experiencing the same vote reporting and counting problems as seen in Iowa—even as the NSDP is saying that it will also scan (and count) all of the paper ballots. The NSDP hasn’t released any details on the paper-based scanning process. Instead, it has told the campaigns and the press about its plans to use Apple and Google’s digital tools.

Two Systems—One Paper, One Online

Nevada Democrats have required caucus states to have a paper trail of all votes. In Iowa and Nevada, participants are to fill out and sign presidential preference cards. Party-run caucuses are not secret ballots. Caucus chairs collect these cards and also fill out a results summary sheet that they and campaign representatives must all sign.

But it appears that the primary way that the Nevada State Democratic Party will be reporting and tallying votes is not by examining these paper records, but by using the party-provided iPads and Google forms. In short, there will be two evidence trails created—one paper, one digital. Iowa had a similar system, but it did not expect to have to fall back on the paper to tally its results.

Google’s eleventh-hour entry into the Nevada caucus is potentially very significant. It appears that the Nevada Democrats will use Google forms as a key input for voter registration and also for the recording, counting and reporting of precinct totals and compiling the statewide results. This is in addition to whatever paper records are created.

During the February 11 New Hampshire primary, I had the good fortune to talk to Michael Glover, a PhD engineer and software writer who had worked at Google and was familiar with Google forms’ strengths and weaknesses. He was working with officials in Durham, New Hampshire, and running real-time audits of the same-day voter registration records and ballots cast there. Durham is where the largest University of New Hampshire campus is located and is an epicenter of the state’s student voting.

“If I were to design the ideal system, I’d have it based entirely on paper,” he said. “You get a ballot. You mark it. You have these registration forms—they’re all paper. And you maintain custody of the paper
 You can feed thousands of ballots into a scanner. You can count everything. You can manually verify the counts against various segments.”

“If they design a system that does everything based on paper with these various acceleration mechanisms, then it is brilliant,” Glover continued. “But if they are actually representing the fundamental information, not on paper but electronically, I get really scared, because there are all kinds of ways to hack it—even Google forms.”

Glover explained that using Google forms creates a very simple interface for people to use—launched by a URL or website link—and then puts all of their information into what is essentially a giant spreadsheet. This is the same way that central vote-counting systems work, producing one document filled with rows of precincts and columns of voted choices.

Glover explained the steps Nevada Democrat party officials were likely to take using Google forms.

“You create a form. You’ve got box, box, box. And a box might be a name or your registration information. It might be a Democrat or Republican, or a number [ranking the candidate],” he said. “You can send that form to all of the data entry people [running early voting sites or caucuses]. It pops up as a form on your computer. And you go, ‘select, select, select, click, submit,’ and that will appear as a row on a [backend] spreadsheet. That’s what [using] Google forms does for you. And this form that popped up originally, as well as the spreadsheet, are both represented by URLs.”

Using the system could be a smart solution, Glover said, but there were security risks—especially if someone who wanted to meddle found the URLs. (In Iowa, Trump backers learned the call-in number to the state party’s hotline and intentionally started calling in to thwart the speed of the reporting of precinct results after its digital reporting system failed.)

“If you have that URL, and they didn’t set all the permissions right, conceivably you could throw new data into the spreadsheet, delete data from the spreadsheet or generate false submit buttons. That’s my fear,” Glover said. “If a URL gets loose, and the permissions get out, people can start pouring data in there. Or just create a lot of havoc—enough to just disrupt the process—which, if you were an attacker, would be a victory.”

When asked about potential competition for bandwidth, Glover said that Google forms used “relatively few bits” and said that Wi-Fi was a better platform for transmitting data than cell phones. (Voting security experts contacted by this reporter cringed when told the early voting and precinct totals could be sent on the same pathway as cell phones.)

While the data going into Google forms can be disrupted, Glover said that the way that information is constantly updated in the cloud means that the spreadsheet’s entries could be reverse-engineered to see when something bad may have occurred.

“You end up with a spreadsheet in the cloud,” he said. “The wonderful thing about a Google spreadsheet is anytime you do it [enter data], it will record the history, so you can walk backward and see each of the entry events. So it’s auditable.”

What Else Can Go Wrong?

There have been plenty of reports by national media organizations that have highlighted potential worries about difficulties that users of Nevada’s substitute system might face.

Those worries range from frustrations or mishaps that come from unfamiliar software, to deeper systemic issues such as whether there will be competition for Wi-Fi at caucus sites (which was an issue in Iowa as many voters were on devices using Wi-Fi), to whether there will be adequate security protections surrounding access to the counting system’s backend.

There are other complicating factors that have nothing to do with the NSDP’s efforts to retool its caucus voting system at the eleventh hour.

This week, the Nevada Secretary of State’s office—which said after Iowa’s debacle that it would have “no role whatsoever” in the Democratic Party caucuses, as they are party-run contests—announced its statewide voter database, which the NSDP will use to preload its iPads, contained party affiliation errors. Voters were listed in the wrong party.

A likely consequence of those glitches would be a potentially longer check-in time at the early voting and caucus sites. At worst, Nevadans would have to re-register as a voter and declare their affiliation as a Democrat before being able to participate. (This issue was seen in Iowa, which didn’t take too long to sort out at the entrance to caucus sites.)

But the biggest concerns are not problems that individual voters might face, but problems that could scale and impede many precincts from reporting and the party from producing statewide totals. The NSDP and Democratic National Committee have been working very hard behind the scenes to make sure what occurred in Iowa doesn’t repeat—including bringing DNC staff in from Washington to assist the Nevada state party.

The four days of early voting started on Saturday, February 15, and run through Tuesday, February 18. Depending on what unfolds in early voting, it is possible that there will be more changes to NSDP’s process and technology before its statewide caucus on February 22.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.