Chief of the Year
Billionaire Elon Musk has not left the pages of the press in recent years. The outgoing year was no exception. On April 14, 2022, the businessman decided to buy Twitter. Soon after, the company’s board of directors unanimously accepted Elon Musk’s offer, but in July refused to buy it due to violations of various provisions of the agreement. But on October 26, 2022, Elon Musk still approved the deal and bought Twitter for $44 billion.
After purchasing the popular social network, Musk promised an “amnesty” and “return of freedom of expression” for blocked users. After that, by the decision of the billionaire, the accounts of Donald Trump and Kanye West were restored.
After Musk became the owner of the social network, he laid off half of the 7.5 thousand employees. The layoffs included ordinary employees and even entire teams, such as the department responsible for combating disinformation. This move almost led to Twitter being removed from the App Store and Google Play stores. The businessman explained the mass layoffs, with the company losing more than $4 million a day due to caring for “extra” employees.
In mid-November, Elon Musk also gave Twitter employees an ultimatum: work in the new “hard” mode or quit.
This format refers to high-intensity long-term work. Those who did not accept such a regime or did not respond within 24 hours were dismissed with three months’ salary. For those who agree, Elon Musk order equip the office with sleeping places. Thus, conference rooms and office spaces on Twitter began to look like hotel rooms.
Also in early December, there was a cleaning strike on Twitter about the contractor change. Under San Francisco law, when a contractor changes, the new company must hire the previous contractor’s employees within 90 days. But that didn’t happen: Musk fired the cleaners without even paying severance. The cleaners were told that the robots would soon take their place.
App of the Year
Since the beginning of 2022, an unprecedented growth in the popularity of Telegram began, helped by global updates and blocking on the territory of Russia Instagram (owner of Meta is considered extremist and banned in Russia), Facebook (owner of Meta Recognition and ban as extremist in Russia), disabling monetization on YouTube as well as Twitter. According to research media coverageTelegram’s average daily reach in Russia increased from 18% to 38% during the year.
The messenger has become one of the main sources of information for users and has also established itself as a communication channel with the government. Among the 10 most popular Telegram channels are nine news channels and Gosuslugi.
Also, innovations such as the paid Telegram Premium subscription, which Pavel Durov launched in the summer of 2022, helped popularize the messenger. Since then, custom emojis, statuses have been made available to users, and the connection speed has also been improved.
In addition, paid usernames and anonymous virtual numbers have appeared in Telegram, allowing users not only to spend their own money, but also to earn money by publishing pre-registered nicknames on the Fragment platform.
Deal of the Year
At the beginning of 2022, the entire gaming community was shocked by the news – Microsoft announced that it was acquiring Activision Blizzard for a record $68.7 billion. As a result, Microsoft will own franchises such as Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Warcraft. StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch and Candy Crush. However, the deal has yet to be approved by regulators.
Microsoft’s plans were foiled by Sony, who pointed out that the acquisition of Blizzard would interfere with the rivalry between the two gaming giants. The US Federal Trade Commission also opposed the deal. If Microsoft still manages to “push” the regulator, the acquisition of Activision Blizzard will be completed in spring 2023.
Russia Deal of the Year
At the end of summer 2022, VK Group and Yandex announced an agreement, in which VK owns the content platforms Zen and News, and Yandex acquires the Delivery Club food delivery service. The deal was closed on September 12.
Already on November 25, Yandex announced that it plans to split the assets of the group. According to the company’s statement, the main part of the business of the Dutch Yandex NV, taking into account a number of foreign aspects, can be divided into a separate group of companies that will retain the Yandex brand. Experts believe that leaving will help Yandex cope with a number of problems that arose due to sanctions.
On December 5, Head of Accounts Room Alexei Kudrin confirmed that he had resigned and moved to Yandex as a corporate development consultant and started working at Yandex on December 9. It is assumed that in the future Alexei Kudrin may head the board of directors of the new holding, which will combine the main assets of Yandex.
failure of the year
Shortly after blocking Instagram in Russia in March 2022, marketer Alexander Zobov, who introduced himself as Pavel Durov’s classmate, announced the emergence of a domestic alternative, Rossgram. The authors boasted that their site had traffic in excess of 400,000 users. However, at that time it was possible to leave only a request for pre-registration on the site.
The concept of the social network shown during the presentation almost “one-to-one” echoed the design and essence of Instagram, and Zobov promised to launch the web version and apps for Android and iOS on March 28. However, by this time, users have only received a video that shows the “co-publishing” of the social network.
Then the developers began to share information about the first public users of Rossgram – KHL player Nikita Feoktistov, singer Alexander Malinin and Olga Buzova took part in the action.
Soon, the authors launched the function of separating nicknames from 10 to 50 thousand rubles. Premium names auction for businesses starting at 50,000 rubles has also been launched. It is unknown how much the authors of the project earned from this story.
As a result, nothing is heard about the launch of Rossgram even at the end of 2022. Instead of progress reports on Rossgram’s official pages in Telegram and VKontakte, you can find a video from Nikita Dzhigurda with congratulations and words of support for the social network and stories about bloggers who joined the non-existent social network.
Scandal of the Year
From summer to the end of 2022, Foxconn’s iPhone factories in China have been on the agenda due to coronavirus restrictions and unruly workers. So, in July, in the middle of the iPhone 14 production cycle, a COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Shenzhen, when the factory was forced to close for quarantine. The business of the enterprise did not stop at the same time, and the workers were forced to live on the factory grounds for a week to avoid contact with people outside of production.
A similar story happened at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou in the fall. However, as the journalists learned, workers started to leave the company en masse due to inhumane working conditions and hunger. It turned out that many employees of the factory who remained locked were not given food – only those who worked on the assembly line, while the rest were forced to buy food on their own.
Those who did not flee from Zhengzhou could not stand the hardship for long – as a result, hundreds of workers at the main Apple factory in China fought with security guards to leave their workplaces. It is known that the November protests in Zhengzhou started due to non-payment of wages in connection with the exit ban and fears of the spread of the coronavirus. Things calmed down in late autumn – Foxconn representatives apologized to the protesters and promised to pay them $1.4k in monetary compensation to end the riots.
The events caused more than 20,000 employees to leave the factory in Zhengzhou and Apple suffered serious losses. decrease in production From 30% to 80% in November.
record of the year
In November, popular American blogger James Steven, also known as MrBeast, surpassed previous leader PewDiePie in terms of subscriber count and became the most popular blogger in YouTube video hosting.
His channel was registered on February 20, 2012 and has over 119 million subscribers and nearly 20 billion views by the end of December 2022. This is an absolute record for a blogger.
Steven is best known for his challenges, in which he draws large sums of money. So in 2021, MrBeast filmed the “real” Squid Game, inspired by the Netflix series of the same name.