Hillicon Valley — Twitter charts uncertain path forward

Elon Musk’s chaotic start as CEO of Twitter is bringing up doubts about the platform’s future.  

Meanwhile, as Americans headed to the polls Tuesday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it would remain vigilant in monitoring threats but had not identified any “specific or credible” threats that would disrupt the election system.  

This is Hillicon Valley, detailing all you need to know about tech and cyber news from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley. Send tips to The Hill’s Rebecca Klar and Ines Kagubare. Someone forward you this newsletter?

A platform in chaos

Elon Musk’s Twitter is engulfed in chaos amid widespread layoffs and an exodus of major advertisers.  

Just one week in as Twitter’s owner, Musk reported a “massive drop in revenue” due to companies pausing their advertising on the platform. Twitter is also struggling to roll out a new paid verification feature that has drawn ridicule from popular users. 

Musk tweeted that he had “no choice” but to lay off around half of Twitter’s staff because it was losing $4 million per day, which translates to nearly $1.5 billion annually.  

Users, meanwhile, have been left with a lot of questions and few answers about what this means for them and what Twitter will look like when Musk’s transformation of the platform is complete.  

• The company’s struggles are also raising the question of whether Musk can turn Twitter’s fortunes around and make enough money to pay off his newfound debts. 
  
• Twitter wasn’t profitable before Musk agreed to pay $44 billion to buy the platform by taking on nearly $13 billion in debt. Those loans will saddle Twitter with around $1.2 billion in interest payments over the next 12 months, and the company only generated around $630 million in cash flow last year.  
  
• “The debt situation is definitely concerning as this was a fairly unorthodox investment to have taken on so much debt given the cash flow situation of the business even prior to the acquisition,” Harvard Business School professor Andy Wu said. 

Read more here.  

CISA finds no ‘credible threats’ to election

As polls opened on Election Day, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it had not identified any “specific or credible threats” that would disrupt the election system. 

During a background call to reporters on Tuesday, a senior CISA official said the agency is confident that the election is as secure as it can be because of the steps the agency has taken, including closely working with state and local election officials to ensure that they have the resources in place to protect the election infrastructure. 

However, the official said the agency remains vigilant, as election threats may arise at any time, including low-level cyber activities such as denial-of-service attacks, website defacement and website outages. 

“It’s important to remember that such incidents will not affect a person’s ability to cast a ballot or know that their ballot was counted accurately, and that the election is secure,” the official emphasized. 

Read more here. 

TECH JOBS FUEL CHANGES

The shift to high-tech jobs, migration to the West and South, and the recovery of leisure and hospitality sectors following the COVID-19 pandemic are all behind economic growth seen in the United States’ largest metropolitan areas in 2022, according to new research from the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. 

The findings are part of the Institute’s American Growth Project, an initiative aimed at amassing economic data and analyses on the country’s towns, cities and counties. As part of the project, researchers ranked the country’s top 50 extended metropolitan areas (EMAs) based on the speed of their economic growth in 2022.  

The San Francisco Bay Area ranked first, as the area’s GDP grew by 4.8 percent in 2022. It was followed by Austin, Texas; Seattle; Raleigh and Durham, N.C.; and Dallas.  

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to Silicon Valley, one of the most popular locations for tech start-ups — a fact that likely fueled the growth seen in the region throughout 2022. 

Read more here. 

BITS & PIECES

An op-ed to chew on: Misinformation is bad, but ‘solutions’ to stop it are even worse 

Notable links from around the web:

Twitch streamers want to be the political pundits for the next generation (NBC News / Morgan Sung) 

Twitter’s case study of how not to lay people off (Vox / Raniu Molla) 

Elon Musk Puts His Own Politics on Display on Election Day (The New York Times / Adam Satariano, Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu)

💰 Lighter click: The monetization of democracy?

One more thing: What about the Jan. 6 panel?

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is set to dissolve no matter who wins Tuesday’s midterm elections — but a GOP takeover of the House leaves a near zero chance it will be revived.  

The panel, like all other select committees established this Congress, will sunset with the start of the next Congress in January.   

Republican leaders such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) have given no sign they intend to keep the committee that has been a thorn in their side and prompted former President Trump to criticize the GOP’s decision to boycott it. 

Read more here.  

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Technology and Cybersecurity pages for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.