Hasta La Gadget!

Omid Kordestani, who was Twitter’s executive chairman from 2015 to 2020 and served on the board until Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, is suing X over $20 million worth of shares he says the company is refusing to pay. Kordestani filed the lawsuit on Friday with a California superior court.

Per the lawsuit, Kordestani left a high paying job at Google to join Twitter, which offered him a “significantly lower” salary of just $50,000 but sweetened the deal with stock options, performance-based restricted stock units and restricted stock units. These — amounting to $20,112,000 — were supposed to have been paid out when Musk acquired Twitter and replaced the board, but X has failed to do so, according to the lawsuit. “X Corp. seeks to reap the benefits of Mr. Kordestani’s seven years of service to Twitter without paying him for it, despite clear contractual language requiring X Corp. to do so,” it says.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed in the wake of Musk’s Twitter acquisition from employees alleging they were not paid properly after they were laid off or fired. Former Twitter executives sued Musk and X earlier this year, claiming they were fired “without reason” and are owed millions of dollars in unpaid severance. The latest lawsuit says that “Mr. Kordestani is one of many former Twitter employees whose compensation has been wrongfully withheld by X Corp. following Elon Musk’s purchase of the Company in October 2022.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/former-twitter-chairman-is-suing-x-for-20-million-over-pay-he-says-was-wrongfully-withheld-155407305.html?src=rss

If you want to find a specific tweet by Donald Trump, you may have to go through his timeline and look for it yourself. According to Mediaite, X has switched off the ability to search for Trump’s tweets. As the publication explains, you can do a search for specific posts by typing “from:[username without the @ symbol]” followed by the term or phrase you’re looking for. 

So if you want to see the former president’s tweet wherein he said that the COVID cases and deaths are “far exaggerated in the United States” due to the CDC’s “ridiculous method of determination,” you could do a search for “from:realDonaldTrump COVID.” That’s supposed to bring up all his tweets with the term “COVID,” except… it doesn’t. What does show up is a selection of his tweets that don’t even appear in chronological order. We were able to replicate the results Mediaite has reported, as you can see below.

Twitter

The former president’s Twitter account was suspended in 2021 after the company determined that some of his tweets violated its policies. His was kicked out of the website after the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. Trump sued Twitter in an attempt to get his account back, but it wasn’t until Elon Musk took over that he was reinstated. His first and only post since then was his mug shot, which was taken when he was booked on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of 2020 Presidential election. 

As Mediaite notes, it’s not quite clear why this happening. Other accounts that had been suspended in the past and then reinstated, such as Alex Jones’, remain searchable. The accounts of other high-profile political personalities, such as Kamala Harris, remain searchable, as well. A software engineer that the publication talked to claimed that it was a deliberate move on X’s part, seeing as the issue doesn’t seem to affect other previously suspended users. We reached out to X for a statement and will update this post if we hear back. It’s worth noting, however, that there’s a free resource called “Trump Twitter Archive” that contains a searchable database of Trump’s tweets, and it still works perfectly. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-appears-to-be-suppressing-trump-related-searches-140026507.html?src=rss

Susan Wojcicki, who served as YouTube’s CEO for almost a decade until she stepped down last year, has died. She was 56 years old. Her husband Dennis Troper has shared the news on Facebook, revealing that Wojcicki lived two years with non-small cell lung cancer. “Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” he wrote in his post. “Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable.”

Google operated out of Wojcicki’s garage when the company was just starting out, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin using it as their office. She became the company’s first marketing manager, co-created Google Image Search and was the first product manager of AdSense. Wojcicki also headed Google’s video efforts and was the one who encouraged the company to purchase YouTube in 2006, a year after the video-sharing platform debuted. 

In 2014, she was appointed as the CEO of YouTube, which became a key part of Google under her leadership. For the fiscal year of 2022, the year before she stepped down, YouTube ads brought in $29.24 billion in revenue, which made up over 10 percent of the company’s total earnings. Outside of her work with Google, Wojcicki brought attention to the gender gap issue in tech and to the plight of refugees. She was also a proponent of lengthy parental leaves and talked about they’re actually good for business. In a post on X, Alphabet’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, said Wojcicki was “as core to the history of Google as anyone” and described her someone who’s “had a tremendous impact on the world.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/former-youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-has-died-110020190.html?src=rss

Susan Wojcicki, who served as YouTube’s CEO for almost a decade until she stepped down last year, has died. She was 56 years old. Her husband Dennis Troper has shared the news on Facebook, revealing that Wojcicki lived two years with non-small cell lung cancer. “Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” he wrote in his post. “Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable.”

Google operated out of Wojcicki’s garage when the company was just starting out, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin using it as their office. She became the company’s first marketing manager, co-created Google Image Search and was the first product manager of AdSense. Wojcicki also headed Google’s video efforts and was the one who encouraged the company to purchase YouTube in 2006, a year after the video-sharing platform debuted. 

In 2014, she was appointed as the CEO of YouTube, which became a key part of Google under her leadership. For the fiscal year of 2022, the year before she stepped down, YouTube ads brought in $29.24 billion in revenue, which made up over 10 percent of the company’s total earnings. Outside of her work with Google, Wojcicki brought attention to the gender gap issue in tech and to the plight of refugees. She was also a proponent of lengthy parental leaves and talked about they’re actually good for business. In a post on X, Alphabet’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, said Wojcicki was “as core to the history of Google as anyone” and described her someone who’s “had a tremendous impact on the world.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/former-youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-has-died-110020190.html?src=rss

Google is officially a monopoly, according to a US court. But what does that really mean? This week, Devindra and Senior Editor Karissa Bell dive into the landmark Google antitrust case to explore how it could affect the future of search. Google claims it’s simply delivering the best product, but clearly the court thinks otherwise. Also, we chat about X/Twitter’s desperate lawsuit against advertisers who boycotted the social network.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

• A U.S. court declared Google a monopoly, now what? – 1:22

• X (formerly Twitter) sues advertisers for “illegal boycott” of their platform – 19:15

• Meet Chromecast’s successor, the Google TV Streamer – 33:49

• Less than a year after SAG strike, Meta is offering actors millions to use their voice in AI – 41:01

• Where does all the Facebook AI slop come from? 404Media found out – 44:30

• People are returning Humane’s AI Pin faster than they can sell them – 50:23

• Working on – 53:43

• Pop culture picks – 53:58

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Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Ben Ellman
Guest: Karissa Bell
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/engadget-podcast-the-google-search-monopoly–industry-creator-interview-113028361.html?src=rss