Jane Austin in Cannes: why Twitter isn’t doing the hard sell at Cannes this year

The big tech players storming Cannes want us to forget all about the mass layoffs they made this year and focus on the future. And by ‘future’ they mean that period of time coming up that tech companies are going to oversee.

Apple, for one, is planning its biggest ever presence on the Croisette and has made the Carlton its HQ, while Spotify is trying to singlehandedly win Cannes by dropping hints that it might be able to get Rhianna to show up.

Even Yahoo! has dusted itself off for the week.

But one tech company that is notable by its rather lacklustre presence is Twitter. Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s new CEO – and living proof that women only get the top job at a company after it’s been messed up beyond recognition – will not be attending Cannes.

Yaccarino clearly decided that the social-media-platform-turned-right-wing-misinformation-hellscape just sells itself.

Naturally, advertisers are a bit put out by Twitter’s continued lack of transparency and the fact that it’s not giving them the love bombing they’re used to. But that doesn’t seem to stop them investing in the platform. I don’t know about you, but it makes my heart sink – faster than Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini budget – that Musk can still pretty much do and say whatever he likes and get away with it.

Musk is not expected to come to Cannes either. But that could all change as the Musk, once described by Guardian columnist Marina Hyde as “an intergalatically successful Dominic Cummings” happens to be in France this week meeting Macron about building a Tesla factory. One has to wonder how he would cope with France’s ‘Right to disconnect’ initiative and its 35-hour week. and pity the paparazzi forced to keep their eyes peeled for a blindingly pasty, amorphous torso on the beach.