Tiger Beat on the Potomac (thanks Charlie) morning email thing begins thusly (Imma bad blogger and I am including the entire thing without comment until the end; all formatting is TBotP, btw.):

THE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW: SEN. ED MARKEY — On Thursday, as the 5 p.m. deadline approached for employees to decide whether they were “hardcore” enough to stick it out at ELON MUSK’s Twitter, we sat down with Musk’s chief Washington tormentor: Sen. ED MARKEY (D-Mass.).

By the end of our conversation, there were two big developments.

1. On the West Coast, reports started to trickle out that Musk’s ultimatum had backfired spectacularly.

Fortune Magazine’s Kylie Robison said up to 75% of Musk’s employees had decided to abandon the company.

The Verge reported that “given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon,” adding: “[T]he team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is gone after Thursday. ‘You cannot run Twitter without this team,’ the employee said.”

Twitter’s offices were closed until Monday, and reports suggested Musk was paranoid that departing employees might try to sabotage the company.

Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer said the people behind Musk’s signature verification project, which was scheduled to relaunch on Nov. 29, were also out. “This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow,” she reported.

Insider’s Kali Hays reported “that the entirety of Twitter’s payroll department has resigned/not elected to sign up for Elon’s Twitter 2.0.”

The Times reported that Musk frantically tried to retain top talent in hastily arranged Zooms. “As the 5 p.m. deadline passed, some who had called in began hanging up, seemingly having decided to leave, even as Mr. Musk continued speaking,” according to NYT’s Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac and David McCabe.

The Twitter story eclipsed House Speaker NANCY PELOSI’s retirement from Democratic leadership as the top story on the Times and the Washington Post websites.

A former Twitter employee told the Post: “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers. There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

That shocking quote kicked off a wave of users declaring the site dead.Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. “The best people are staying,” Musk insisted late Thursday, “so I’m not super worried.” Assuming the site survives, it will be facing a new level of scrutiny from Congress and regulators.

2. The second big development was that Markey and six Democratic colleagues wrote to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to crack down on Twitter under Musk.

“We write regarding Twitter’s serious, willful disregard for the safety and security of its users, and encourage the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate any breach of Twitter’s consent decree or other violations of our consumer protection laws,” the senators wrote.

They accused Musk of taking “alarming steps that have undermined the integrity and safety of the platform” and pursuing a “growth-at-all-costs strategy” that has left users exposed to “fraud, scams, and dangerous impersonation.”

Markey has emerged as the most public antagonist of Musk in Washington. When Musk briefly sold blue checkmarks, Twitter’s symbol for verified users, Markey teamed up with the Washington Post to test the system. A Post columnist easily set up a fake Markey account that impersonated the senator without any internal controls. Other users spoofed Eli Lilly, GEORGE W. BUSH, Tesla, and Musk himself before Musk pulled the plug on the program.

Markey sent Musk a letter demanding answers about the episode. How, he wanted to know, was it so easy to impersonate the senator?

“Perhaps,” Musk mischievously tweeted in reply, “it is because your real account sounds like a parody?”

Markey was not amused.

“One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree,” he responded a few hours later. “Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online.”

Then he added this warning: “Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”

The full interview with Markey can be found here on this week’s episode of the Playbook Deep Dive podcast. Here are some key excerpts …

— Markey on his initial concerns about the Musk takeover:

“I wasn’t sure that he understood the role that Twitter plays in our society and the relationship that it has with the American people. I wasn’t sure that he understood that compared to rocket science, democracy is much more complicated, and that this tool — this global town square that is Twitter — is essential to our society operating in terms of people’s ability to communicate, especially their political views. And I don’t think he understood that there’s a reason why Twitter had content moderation personnel … to make sure that the technology was not abused. I wasn’t sure that he understood that there’s a Dickensian quality to this technology that it can enable; it can ennoble, but it can also degrade and debase.”

— Markey on why he cooperated with the Washington Post piece:

“We agreed that it was an excellent idea in order to show that if a United States senator could be impersonated, then anybody could be impersonated. And there were no guardrails, there were no checks, there was no system in place in order to make sure that the public could not be deceived. So I thought that it was an important way to say to the public — but say back to Elon Musk — that this system is broken, it’s easily compromised, people are going to get hurt and you have to pull it down and you have to understand what went wrong and that you should not put it back up again until you can explain what the safeguards are going to be.”

— Markey on criticisms of his tweet threatening Twitter:

“A private sector company is not free to engage in any activity it wants to that enhances its profits even if it harms individuals within our society. No company is free to do that. And so to the extent to which Tesla wants to put autonomous vehicles on the street that can harm people, it is the job of Congress to make sure that if they put those vehicles on the street that they are safe. We have to ask the questions on behalf of innocent Americans, so that the profit-making goals of the company do not result in harm to the general public, the innocent general public. The same thing is true for Twitter.”

— Markey on free speech concerns about regulating Twitter:

“If Joe Blow says ‘Don’t wear a mask. You don’t need one. Don’t worry about Covid,’ then people can see it’s Joe Blow saying, ‘Don’t wear a mask.’ If Joe Blow for $8 is able to say it’s the CDC, and Twitter certifies that it’s the CDC, and Joe Blow then says ‘Don’t wear a mask,’ but it says CDC on the tweet, that’s dangerous. That’s Twitter-enabled. So that’s different from speech. Joe Blow can say whatever Joe Blow wants to say within certain boundaries … but you can’t say it if it’s coming as a representation that it’s Eli Lilly or the CDC or other entities that some people trust. That’s different. And if Twitter enables that misrepresentation, then that can be harmful.”

— On whether he wants Musk to come testify before Congress: 

“Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ll see what his response to my letter is. We’ll see what his announcement is on Nov. 29. We’ll see what the guardrails are, what the safeguards are, whether or not he has heard the American public in terms of what their expectations are for Twitter moving forward. And at that point, we’ll be able to determine whether or not we’re going to need actual public hearings. So much will [depend] on what happens by the end of this month.”

I sort of said my goodbye on Twitter last night, but links to my posts here at MPS will still automatically go out (and on to Mastodon).