E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more

**David Sacks** (0:01)
What are you wearing, Jason?

**Friedberg** (0:03)
What?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:03)
Oh, Uber had a big week, so this is the Uber Montclair crossover hat.

**David Sacks** (0:06)
Oh, look at that.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:07)
And I also bought a Montclair shirt.

**David Sacks** (0:09)
You bought that or I sent it to you? Oh, what? You got the watch and the mug?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:13)
Oh, you don't know about the Apple Montclair watch? Or the commemorative mug?
Or the new tach? You don't know about the new neck tats that are coming from Montclair? Sacks, the new neck tats?

**David Sacks** (0:30)
Oh, so good.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:31)
Like you say, somebody got their beak wet. I'm not saying that I got a $100,000 sponsorship, but we don't have a rule in the agreement about logo placement, do we?

**David Sacks** (0:43)
Listen, J Cal, if anyone was willing to sponsor you, every square inch of your clothing will be covered in ads like a race car driver.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:50)
It is.

**David Sacks** (0:51)
Look. You'd be like wearing a jumpsuit every day.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:53)
You know, Montclair sponsorships are great. It's five dollars plus seventeen dollars of shipping from France on its Etsy.
I'm ready to go.

**Friedberg** (1:18)
How was everyone's week? What did you guys do this week?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:21)
I'm just busy working, trying to be helpful where I can. And that will be the extent of my comments today.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:27)
How is Market Street this time of year?

**David Sacks** (1:29)
Look, there's all sorts of wild reports. I've gotten all sorts of inbound from people asking me if I'm like leaving craft ventures to do something at Twitter. No, it's not true. We're just Jason and I are just pitching in and helping out while Elon establishes his permanent team at that company. Elon is the CEO, he's running it, he's the decider, he's making the decisions.
And some of us are just kind of helping out in any way we can. And that's really the extent of it. It's a very much part-time thing. We're just helping a friend.
But it's been blown up by the media into something much more than it actually is.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:01)
It is a hundred percent accurate. I am still doing my day job, podcasting, investing in a hundred companies a year, just helping out on the margins.
That's it, the end.

**David Sacks** (2:10)
I do want to try talking about one issue that's already public because it's already been tweeted. So Elon had a tweet this morning about how there's now like an advertiser boycott going on. This falls on the heels of a bunch of reports that came out over the last couple of days that supposedly there's been a big influx of racist tweets. Jason and I actually saw what was really going on, which was it's all not true. I mean, what happened is that within hours of Elon taking over the company on Friday, there was a 4chan attack where basically people from this message board created bots to post hundreds of thousands of spam messages that contained racist words and epithets. And within hours, this has been detected and Yoel, who runs the trust and safety implementation, he met with me and Jason and Elon directed him to shut it down.
And Yoel actually posted a tweet storm about it. That's the only reason I feel comfortable talking about it is because you already posted a tweet storm, but maybe people haven't seen it or they haven't connected all the dots here. But what's really, I think, unfair about this is that as you've seen, it's not like your feed was all of a sudden filled with racist things. These were spam accounts or bot accounts that were posting to zero followers. They generally have zero followers or if they do have followers, it's other bot accounts, right? So they're posting racist tweets into the ether, so to speak. It's not degrading anyone's experience. It was shut down promptly. But then what happens is these activist groups, they're monitoring the fire hose, right? And so they publish a report saying that racist tweets have gone up 500% since Elon took over Twitter. The truth is Elon hasn't even had a chance to change anything about the content moderation policies. He's posted that like, guys, I haven't even changed anything about content moderation.
Whatever the rules are, they're the same rules that existed prior to him taking over.
And this is just an organized operation by people who want to create that report. So then these activist groups basically publish this report, they feed it to news outlets, and then somebody then takes those reports and then feeds them to advertisers and you get a boycott.