Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter's product - that kind of unique direct experience and learned wisdom is not easily replaceable.
You are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level.
Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion.
This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
I don't think you have to claim to know what his plan is, to know what it is not. Why would he pay $50 billion dollars to buy Twitter only to leave the same people in charge of what he thinks was a broken platform?
I agree with that assessment. It’s good to keep in mind though that he at some point realised that whatever his plan might be, it wasn’t worth a $50B price.
Yes, but he presumes her "overly woke" perspectives towards community and censorship were anathema to his approach to libertarian free speech and also resulted in deplatforming Trump so away she goes! Why do you need someone in charge of legal and policy if you're going to stop caring about those things wholesale?
Just watching Tim Poole throw hard questions at her and her dodging for two hours on Rogan is enough to make me understand why Musk would fire her. She doesn’t share Musks vision at all when it comes to censorship.
AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya.
I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?)
You're forgetting he has access to teams of competent lawyers (and their networks) who will already have to interact with international law for Tesla et al.
There's a reason lawyers specialize. No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade. The next most qualified person is probably Facebook's general counsel since they deal with all the same problems, and the places they differ probably still benefit from the portable experience. After that, there aren't a lot of people leading work on speech policy at this scale. You can't just drop in an IP lawyer or a real estate lawyer and hope for the best.
The only speech she fought for was for her ideological-religion.
Free, open, and fair debate were never permitted on twitter. She flat out ensured that their opinion became your opinion or you were out, one way or the other.
"No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade."
That's putting forward a ton of assumptions, none of which you cited supporting evidence for; length of time is quite a weak-shallow argument point.
Let's also bring up the fact that maybe they stayed in those positions so long because they were willing to take a knee to the fascists in governments, willingly toeing the line for them - so then therefore lacking principles and integrity - which is an unacceptable foundation to be fighting from for anything.
> but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments
In charge of, but almost certainly not the DRI, or related talent, for any of that. Her direct experience is most certainly minimal, compared to the people actually doing that work. This assumes there's not significant corruption of course.
So the questions would be, will Elon see the value in those groups responsible, and will those groups stick around on their own? I imagine so.
I’m sure there was exposure and involvement, but I would find it incredibly hard to believe if the brute force of the work was not a group of lawyers, with that exposure and involvement being easily exchanged for another, or even more hands off, CEO.
