Elon drops Twitter 🐤- What is your favorite sports game? ⚽️- TikTok's data problem 🚨- Thinking fast & slow💡
When we’re in a good mood, we become more intuitive and creative
Episode #71. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼
This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again to help you! You are more than 2000 happy (and free) subscribers reading us every week. Why not join them? You will get your weekly insights from the articles, books or podcasts you may have missed in tech, future of work, or philosophy applied to your daily life.
#1. Elon drops Twitter 🐤
TL;DR From this article 👉 Elon bails on Twitter written by Casey Newton on July 8, 2022. Published in the newsletter called Platformer.
This has been the most controversial series of Spring 22 in the tech community: will Elon Musk eventually buy Twitter or not? Well, from the title of this section, you know that he did not. But what happened exactly?
On April 25th, after acquiring a bunch of stocks, Elon Musk announced he wanted to buy Twitter for a price that the board immediately accepted. A few weeks later, tech stocks crashed and made Elon’s offer (at $44bn) look like a massive overpayment for Twitter. Elon Musk was already looking at borrowing money against his Tesla stocks but the stocks crash also hit miserably the Tesla stock.
This put Musk in a situation where he looked at every possible reason to decrease the price of the company (notably claiming that the social thread was full of bots). Eventually, Elon wanted to get out of a deal before it was closed. But it is not so easy to escape from a binding offer.
Now, claiming he does not want to complete the deal, and sending a now famous ‘poo tweet’ 👆 to its CEO Parag Agrawal, Elon Musk is giving up on this deal. This matter has a massive negative impact on Twitter as a company with its stock trading -50% the value it was a year before… and employees massively leaving the company with such an uncertain future.
#2. What is your favorite sports game?
TL;DR From this article 👉 The best selling sports video game franchises in history written by Joseph Pompliano on July 8, 2022. Published in the newsletter called Huddle Up.
⚽️Video games has been the #1 entertainment category for some time now. The sports franchises have become super best sellers in the industry. And obviously, everybody knows about FIFA: the most successful video sports game of all times with 325 million copies sold in 38 editions of the game. But 2023 will be a turning point for EA Sports as the partnership with FIFA is ending after FIFA 23.
🏈Second best seller is another football (but not soccer) game by EA Sports: the famous Madden NFL. The games sold 130 million copies in 44 editions (it started on Commodore computers in 1988!).
🏀Third is NBA2K produced by 2KSports. Basketball makes it to the podium with 123 million copies sold in 27 editions. Worth noting, 2.3 million people play NBA2K daily with is a huge number certainly due to the fact that basketball has potentially a (bigger) global reach than football.
Wanna know the other video games coming just close to NBA2K, you should read the full article 👆 (link in the subtitle on this section).
#3. TikTok’s data problem 🚨
TL;DR From this article 👉 TikTok’s data dilemma written by Casey Newton on July 6, 2022. Published in the newsletter called Platformer.
It is interesting to see how a problem initially known as a data privacy concern at TikTok (owned by the chinese company ByteDance) during the US campaign, develops further today. Indeed, the fear that the US Senate entertains is that TikTok could be accessing user profile information of US citizens from China.
Some US senators are now pressing the FTC (Federal and Trade Commission) to investigate the data access issue at TikTok. The blunt reality is that TikTok cannot break any American data law… because there is still none. TikTok is expected to separate clearly its Chinese operations from American user data.
Data security is still a blank page when you look at certain practical (unresolved) questions that pop up: “Is the data “American” whenever an American citizen uses TikTok, or only when they’re in the country? When foreign tourists use the app while visiting, is that US data? If an American and European user are sending messages back and forth in the app, which country owns the conversation?”.
Maybe you read questions like that and think: I cannot possibly imagine a more boring subject of discussion. But these are the details you have to work out if you want to make data truly secure. Casey Newton
#4. Thinking fast & slow, the fast lane 💡
TL;DR From this Twitter thread 👉 Thinking Fast & Slow is a book everyone should read written by Joshua Bonhotal on July 9, 2022. Published on Twitter.
I could not agree more with the read recommendations for this book written by Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman.
I gave this book to some of my friends who were interested in understanding the fundamentals behind behavioral economy; and this is true that most readers find the book enlightening but quite difficult to read. Here is my selection of the top takeaways Joshua summarized (in 21 short messages) on Twitter:
💡If you care about being thought credible and intelligent … don’t use complex language where simpler language will do.
💡Law of Least Effort If there are several ways of achieving the same goal; ..people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. Laziness is built deep into our nature.
💡 When we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. When we’re in a good mood, we become more intuitive and creative; ..but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
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