Fans of Taylor Swift ― singer/songwriter, pop megastar and Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year ― are reminding Elon Musk that there are a few key differences between Swift and himself.
Last week, Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, congratulated Swift on being named Person of the Year, before offering a word of caution.
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“Some risk of popularity decline after this award,” Musk posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “I speak from experience lol.”
Some risk of popularity decline after this award. I speak from experience lol.
Musk’s proposition followed a crass jab he tweeted hours earlier, “Zuck is a cuck” ― short for “cuckold”, which has become a go-to insult for the right-wing set.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference in Paris on June 16.
Chesnot via Getty Images
The embattled tech CEO has already threatened to sue Meta over Threads, which TechCrunch reports hit 100 million users by Monday morning, just five days after its launch.
Twitter currently has around 250 million active users, but data from internet services company Cloudflare seems to show traffic has been steadily declining since the start of 2023, following Musk’s purchase of the app for $44 billion last fall.
Musk’s feud with Zuckerberg took a decidedly personal turn last month after he challenged the Facebook founder to a cage match. In a surprising twist, the usually mild Zuckerberg tweeted back at Musk, writing, “Send me location.”
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the Paley Center in New York on Oct. 25, 2019.
via Associated Press
Zuckerberg has pitched Threads as a more welcoming alternative to Twitter and its quarrelsome culture.
“The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands,” he wrote on Threads last week. “I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success. That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
Facilitate alleges in a lawsuit filed last week in US District Court for the Northern District of California that the social media firm owes over $700,000 for work in four Twitter offices outside the U.S. since last year. Twitter, owned by the world’s richest person, owes $40,777 for decommissioning and storing the contents of Twitter’s Sydney office, $257,444 for installing sensors in the London and Dublin offices, and $404,224 for outfitting the Singapore offices, according to the suit, first reported by NCA Newswire.
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Facilitate alleges it signed a master services agreement with Twitter in March 2021 after Twitter had used the Sydney-based company since 2015 without issue. The agreement, according to Facilitate, mandates that Twitter must pay within 60 days of receiving an invoice.
“Following the acquisition, Facilitate corresponded about its outstanding invoices with its remaining contacts at the company,” the lawsuit says. “They gave no indication that Twitter disputed it owed the amounts on the invoices and offered no justification for not paying.”
Bloomberg reported in May that at least 10 other vendors, including small businesses, have sued Twitter over unpaid bills since December.
Facilitate also detailed Musk’s chaotic tenure at the social media network, pointing out that the company’s content moderation decisions under his leadership, including the reinstatement of former President Donald Trump’s account, damaged its relationship with advertisers, thus prompting a financial crisis for the company.
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“On information and belief, Twitter responded with a campaign of extreme belt-tightening that amounted to requiring nearly everyone to whom it owes money to sue,” the complaint alleges.
HuffPost reached out to Twitter for comment on the lawsuit. Twitter, as is now customary, responded with a poop emoji.
Musk announced over the weekend that Twitter was placing a limit on the posts users can see based on their account status. Those who exceed those “temporary limits” could have their accounts locked for the day, The Associated Press reported.
Twitter in recent weeks started repaying Google Cloud for its services, following a period when Musk reportedly refused to pay. The companies mended their relationship after new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino intervened, according to Bloomberg.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday sat down for a spontaneous interview with the BBC at the social media network’s San Francisco headquarters, speaking about some of his regrets and offering a glimpse into how he envisions the future of the company about six months after he bought it.
Musk conceded he can sometimes be impulsive when it comes to posting on the platform. He has come under fire for several controversial tweets, including one in which he shared a conspiracy theory around the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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“Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times? Yes,” Musk told the BBC’s James Clayton.
“I think I should not tweet after 3 am,” he continued.
The self-professed “free speech absolutist” purchased Twitter in October ― despite trying to get out of a $44 billion agreement to do so ― and quickly set about reshaping the company. He decimated its staff and publicly attacked his own employees. He welcomed back banned users including former US president Donald Trump, who was kicked off the platform for instigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, as well as right-wing figures and other accounts blocked for misinformation. He criticised the media and spread misinformation himself.
Asked about how the first six months have gone, Musk replied: “It’s not been boring.”
He said managing the company has been “quite a rollercoaster”, but that overall usage was up and the site was performing well despite some outages and glitches. He claimed the company will be cash flow positive by the next quarter.
Musk said the hardest moment he faced in the past six months was closing down a server centre at the end of last year, thinking it was redundant — a move that he described as “catastrophic” and which had to quickly be reversed.
“The pain level of Twitter has been extremely high,” he said. “This hasn’t been some sort of party. It’s really been quite a stressful situation.”
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The CEO told the BBC the current headcount is at around 1,500, down from the roughly 8,000 people the company employed before he took over.
Musk reportedly agreed to the wide-ranging interview just a few hours before its start.
I said BBC could come Twitter, then, to my surprise, a reporter shows up
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO defended his company over the latest controversy around requiring Twitter users to pay for verification. Prior to his takeover, the social media platform applied the badges to the accounts of notable individuals and businesses to deter impostors.
Musk vowed to remove all legacy blue checks by April 20, after missing an earlier deadline he had set for the action for April 1.
“I must confess there’s some delight in removing the verified badge from The New York Times,” he told the BBC. “That was great.”
He claimed that the goal of his verification strategy is not to necessarily create another revenue stream, but more so to “massively raise the cost of disinformation and bots in general”.
“My prediction is that any social media company that does not insist on paid verification will simply be overwhelmed by advanced AI bots,” he added.
Musk had attempted to get out of the sale agreement with Twitter, saying there was “material breach of multiple provisions” and that the company did not disclose information on spam bot accounts. But Musk told the BBC he moved forward in the end because he expected a judge would have forced him to complete the sale anyway after Twitter sued to enforce the agreement.
While he originally told the BBC he wouldn’t sell the company for the $44 billion he bought it for, he quickly switched his answer: “If I was confident that they would rigorously pursue the truth, then I guess I would be glad to hand it over to someone else.”
Elon Musk being trolled as “space Karen” has spawned potentially the last great moment on Twitter – that’s if the dire predictions are to be believed.
On the day hundreds of Twitter employees were estimated to have quit the beleaguered company following a Thursday deadline from Musk that staffers sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave, someone across the street from the firm’s San Francisco headquarters projected a news-ticker style message on the building.
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It included descriptions of the self-styled Chief Twit as “bankruptcy baby”, “mediocre manchild” and “petulant pimple” among others.
It was “space Karen” – a reference to Musk’s inter-galactic ambitions and the archetypal woman with a fondness for asking to see the manager – that stood out.
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Regardless of who was behind the prank, Twitter users were delighted.
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If the doomsayers are right, it could be one the last hurrahs on the site.
Given the strife brought on by Musk’s arrival, Twitter users have been bidding farewell to the platform by way of comedy and memes following the mass resignations.
The trends #RIPTwitter, #GoodByeTwitter and #TwitterDown were among a number of hashtags and posts that users made to pay homage to the platform late Thursday and Friday morning.
And in a sign things really aren’t going well, Musk emailed Twitter staff on Friday asking that any employees who write software code report to the 10th floor of the office in San Francisco, Reuters reported.
The billionaire said in a follow-up email, “If possible, I would appreciate it if you could fly to SF to be present in person”, adding he would be at the company’s headquarters until midnight and would return Saturday morning.
It comes after the company had told employees it would close its offices and cut badge access until Monday, according to Reuters.
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Musk’s first three weeks as Twitter’s owner have been marked by rapid change and chaos. He quickly fired Twitter’s previous CEO and other senior leaders and then laid off half its staff earlier this month.
Musk wrote on Twitter late on Thursday that he was not worried about resignations as “the best people are staying”.
The newest departures mean the platform is losing workers just at it gears up for the FIFA World Cup, which begins on Sunday. It’s one of Twitter’s busiest events, when tweet surges heavily stress its systems.
Mass layoffs have begun at Twitter, where reports suggest upward of 50% of the social media site’s jobs ― roughly 3,700 ― could be eliminated.
Employees received a message on Thursday evening notifying them that layoffs were beginning, according to The New York Times. They were told not to come to the office on Friday.
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Twitter employees began tweeting about their experiences as some said their access had already been cut off, probably as a precursor to being fired.
The drastic cuts coincide with other HR-focused directives, including plans to scrap the company’s work-from-anywhere policy, which affects some 1,500 employees. Those unwilling or unable to relocate to a physical office will likely contribute to the job loss totals.
There’s already been a lawsuit filed over the job cuts. In a suit seeking class-action status filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court, workers say Twitter is conducting the layoffs in violation of federal and California law by not giving enough notice, Bloomberg reported.
Friday marks the end of Elon Musk’s turbulent first week running Twitter, where the world’s richest man has embarked on a frantic mission to cut costs and find new revenue streams to keep the company afloat.
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Soon after he took over, Twitter cut off access to some content moderation and policy enforcement tools, curtailing employees’ ability to moderate hate speech and misinformation, Bloomberg reports.
The early chaos has unsettled advertisers, with major brands pulling ads from the site while they await a more coherent vision for what, exactly, Musk envisions ― and how he intends to moderate the platform.
In a tweet on Friday amid the mass firings, Musk blamed “activist groups” for the mayhem and the corresponding “massive drop” in advertising, and attempted to portray advertisers as enemies of free speech.
Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.
Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.
Musk’s acquisition deal saddled Twitter with $13 billion in debt (and made Saudi Arabia the company’s second-largest investor). As a result, the company, which has never regularly turned a profit, will now have to pay about $1 billion a year in interest expenses alone.
It’s unclear how much money either approach might actually generate. Indeed, if poorly executed, the latter option could prove quite costly.
And many users who are already verified have balked at being asked to pay for the blue check mark. While verification has come to be viewed as a status symbol on the platform, its original (and far more important) purpose was to cut down on rampant misinformation.
Author Stephen King summed it up succinctly in an exchange with Musk himself this week.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check?” King tweeted Monday to his 6.9 million followers. “Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
“We need to pay the bills somehow!” Musk responded. “Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”
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Remarkably, Twitter employees told The Washington Post they haven’t heard from Musk or received any form of official communication from Twitter leadership since the deal closed on October 27 ― even after Musk fired many of Twitter’s top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal and the rest of the C-suite.
Somewhere amid the madness of the week, Musk also found time to spread a false conspiracy theory on Twitter about the assassination attempt on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that left her husband with severe injuries. He quietly deleted the tweet hours later.
A previous version of this story said that Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, regained control of his Twitter account Friday after it was suspended following antisemitic remarks he made on several social media accounts.
However, it remains unclear if the rapper has access to post on the platform, or if the account was ever listed as “suspended” (meaning the tweets were not visible).
As of Friday afternoon, there had been no new posts on the account since Oct. 8.
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Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, regained control of his Twitter account Friday after it was suspended following antisemitic remarks he made on several social media accounts.
Earlier this month, Ye threatened on Twitter to “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
Ye later told Piers Morgan he was “absolutely not” sorry for his comments. His lifted suspension from Twitter comes within a day of billionaire Elon Musk taking control of the website.
Following Ye’s remarks on Twitter, the rapper and fashion designer was dropped by several sponsors including Balenciaga,JPMorgan, Gap and Vogue. And just days after claiming he “can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me,” the shoe company ended its partnership with Ye, resulting in a $1.5 billion drop in his net worth and his removal from Forbes’ list of billionaires.
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Hours before Ye’s Twitter account was reactivated, Musk tweeted “the bird is free” and “let the good times roll.”
Twitter has confirmed that Elon Musk has offered to buy the company for a second time this year.
The website said in a statement that it plans to agree to the offer at 54.20 dollars (£47.23) per share, the same price Musk previously put forward.
The total value of the deal would be 44 billion dollars (£38.3 billion).
A spokesperson for Twitter said: “We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the company is to close the transaction at 54.20 dollars per share.”
Earlier this year, the SpaceX founder offered to purchase the company but pulled out in July.
Lawyers for Musk said it was due to the platform “not complying with its contractual obligations” surrounding the deal, namely giving him enough information to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform”.
Twitter said in response it was “committed to closing the transaction” and launched legal action.
A month later, in a published court document, Twitter accused Musk of “looking for an excuse” to get out of the deal, with the firm calling Musk’s accusations “factually inaccurate, legally insufficient, and commercially irrelevant”.
The stalled takeover was due to head to trial in the US later this month.
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has offered to buy Twitter for more than 40 billion dollars (£30.5 billion) in a move that prompted the same question across the world: why?
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX boss has proposed buying “100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash”, valuing the company at $41.39 billion.
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The 50-year-old, whose bid comes soon after he bought a 9% stake in Twitter and said he would join the board, believes changes are needed in order to help the site thrive and better support free speech.
In just ten days, Musk has gone from popular Twitter contributor to the company’s largest individual shareholder to a would-be owner of the social platform — a whirlwind of activity that could change the service dramatically given Musk’s self-identification as a “free speech absolutist”.
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Who is Elon Musk?
Musk, 50, has an estimated $273.6 billion (£209.21 billion) fortune that makes him the wealthiest person in the world, worth $92.3 billion (£70.58 billion) more than runner-up Jeff Bezos. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Canadian mother and South African father and later attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1997.
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With a stable of businesses ranging from electric cars to private rocket ships, Musk did not found Tesla, which he has led from 2008. But his insight that the firm’s electric cars should be high-performance machines with sophisticated, smartphone-style software revolutionised the global auto business, prompting established companies to try to catch up while spurring new, all-electric competitors. Wall Street values Tesla at more than $1 trillion – more than all three Detroit car makers, plus Toyota Motor Corp, combined.
At the same time, his company SpaceX, has upended the space launch industry by developing rockets capable of putting satellites into space and returning to Earth for re-use.
Perhaps more than any other person, Musk has helped bring bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies into the mainstream, with Tesla holding about $2 billion in bitcoin on its balance sheet and the company among the few to accept dogecoin as payment.
Musk and Twitter
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Twitter helped Musk become a household name. He has 81 million followers and built a pop culture following large enough to help him earn a spot hosting the venerable US comedy TV show Saturday Night Live in 2021.
Musk has used Twitter to go after investors, and he posts on everything from Dad jokes to polls on what he should do with his gains from Tesla’s surging stock price.
<img class="img-sized__img landscape" loading="lazy" alt="Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing "Cyber Rodeo" grand opening party in Austin, Texas.” width=”720″ height=”480″ src=”https://www.wellnessmaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/why-does-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter-3.jpg”>
Elon Musk speaks at the Tesla Giga Texas manufacturing “Cyber Rodeo” grand opening party in Austin, Texas.
SUZANNE CORDEIRO via Getty Images
While Twitter’s user base remains much smaller than those of rivals such as Facebook and TikTok, the service is popular with celebrities, world leaders, journalists and intellectuals. Musk’s followers rival pop stars such as Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga.
What’s been going on?
Musk began buying Twitter stock in earnest only a few months ago.
Earlier this month, it was announced he had bought a 9% stake and would join the board, only for Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal to confirm that Musk had changed his mind just days later.
Now the billionaire entrepreneur has offered to buy the company outright.
In his offer letter to Bret Taylor, chairman of the Twitter board, Musk said he had invested in the social media platform “as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy”, but added “since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form”.
He said the move was his “best and final offer” and if not accepted the billionaire “would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder”.
Twitter has confirmed it has received the offer and said it will now consider it.
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How could Twitter look?
Much of Musk’s vocal criticism of Twitter over recent weeks has centred around his belief that it falls short on free speech principles. The social media platform has angered followers of Donald Trump and other far-right political figures who’ve had their accounts suspended for violating its content standards on violence, hate or harmful misinformation.
Musk also has a history of his own tweets causing legal problems. He has previously run into problems with US regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over his own tweets, having been accused of breaching trading rules when tweeting about his business interests.
<img class="img-sized__img landscape" loading="lazy" alt="Elon Musk, second from left, on Saturday Night Live.” width=”720″ height=”480″ src=”https://www.wellnessmaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/why-does-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter-4.jpg”>
Elon Musk, second from left, on Saturday Night Live.
NBC via Getty Images
Musk has also been accused of tweeting misinformation about Covid-19 after posting in March 2020 that children were “essentially immune” to the disease.
The entrepreneur outlined some specific potential changes on Thursday — like favouring temporary rather than permanent bans — but has mostly described his aim in broad and abstract terms.
“I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in the filing. “I now realise the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
Some believe a Musk takeover could mean a return to the platform for Trump and others, but reinstating those users would be a highly controversial move and could bring further scrutiny to the company and its approach to moderation, just as major new regulation for the sector is on the horizon.
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