Tech has been long overdue for a correction, and it certainly hit this week, with a vengeance and on all fronts, and especially in the stock market, where Jeff Bezos lost $13B in just a few hours. He’s still one of the wealthiest people on the planet but, hey, a billion here, a billion there, before you know it, it adds up to real money

Elon Musk had been battling for Twitter for weeks. The board scoffed at his initial offer. Twitter workers freaked out over Elon Musk in internal Slack messages (“Physically cringy watching Elon talk about free speech,” wrote one site reliability engineer, and for fook’s sake, doesn’t the South African-born billionaire realize that he’s in America now!!!). Now that Musk has more or less been handed the keys, the tech press is up in arms, too, that yet another billionaire owns a media company. Or so it was reported by MSN (backed by billionaire Bill Gates), in a Bloomberg opinion piece (owned by billionaire Michael Bloomberg) published in the Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos).

With all of those forces against him, makes you wonder what a guy has to do to acquire a media company in this day and age?

Answer: Simply wait for the earnings call!

It seems that Twitter’s Earnings Report Shows Missed Revenue Projections, Overstated Users New report reveals missed goals, lower than expected user growth and an error in previous reporting on active daily users. If you’re wondering why the deal was rushed through so quickly, “Some analysts speculated that Twitter might have wanted to finalize the agreement before reporting earnings. The analysts had anticipated a disappointing quarter.”

Speaking of losing users – or deplatforming them, in bot-riddled Twitter’s case – what happens when you lose users data? In case you missed it, Facebook Doesn’t Know What It Does With Your Data, Or Where It Goes: Leaked Document “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data,” Facebook engineers say in leaked document. Oops. Which is why we always love it when we sound the privacy alarm and the response is more often than not, What’s the difference? They know everything there is to know about me, anyway! Considering how, shall we say, porous Facebook seems to be, you have to now ask yourself, who exactly is they? Or, as one source who chose to remain anonymous told Motherboard, “Facebook has a general idea of how many bits of data are stored in its data centers…The where [the data] goes part is, broadly speaking, a complete shitshow.”

Hockey Stick Growth: The Short End of the Stick

Investors love hockey stick growth. Makes them want to write those outsized checks and many of the now unicorns complied, by any means necessary, it seems, considering that a lot of so-called Netflix subscribers weren’t exactly paying for the service, so they kicked them off, and lo and behold, Netflix shares crater 25% after company reports it lost subscribers for the first time in more than 10 years.

Speaking of which, remember how Twitter’s board balked at the $54.2B offer? At the end of the day, Musk acquired the platform for the bargain basement price of $44B and as we said, a billion here, a billion there…

Hockey stick growth, at this point, may well be a legacy idea and achieving it at all costs has gone far in leading us to where we are now: to The great VC pullback of 2022, as First Mark’s Matt Turck reported.

Oh, and Twitter employees who are upset about the new boss, not to worry: Musk’s Twitter Pitch Featured Job Cuts as well as ways to make money from the platform. Pay attention, founders: meet the new boss. Not the same as the old boss, it seems in what will surely be the next wave of tech and investing.

Hockey stick growth has long been the holy grail and the order of the day in the tech world – and a race with the devil. But, speaking of correction, as we’re witnessing now: it seems the devil is always in the details. Onward and forward.