Search the Community

Dogecoin Foundation strikes deals to mainstream the popular memecoin. At a time when many analysts are declaring memecoins dead, the most popular memecoin of all time, Dogecoin, not only perseveres but appears likely to become more mainstream than ever in 2025. Most memecoins—cryptocurrencies inspired by Internet memes—remain controversial. Their prices can suddenly skyrocket before abruptly crashing, causing extreme gains and losses at a moment's notice, often triggered by a celebrity mention that tenuously amplifies short-term interest. Donald Trump's memecoin is a recent example. Within two days of its launch, it peaked at above $70 before falling to $17 shortly after, Reuters reported. Seeing that politically backed token take off apparently inspired Argentine President Javier Milei to endorse another memecoin called Libra, which seemed to set off a brief price surge before a devastating crash that caused most traders to endure losses. Only about 34 investors in total reportedly profited $124.6 million from Milei's endorsement, which a federal judge is now investigating as an alleged "rug pull" scheme, Reuters reported. Overall, memecoins are viewed as highly volatile cryptocurrency assets vulnerable to fraud, insider trading, pump-and-dump schemes, and other market manipulation. And Dogecoin, like all memecoins, has also experienced wild swings in its value, which seems especially volatile before and after Elon Musk promotes the token on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter). Although Dogecoin started out as a joke cryptocurrency, investors started taking it more seriously after its value jumped by 36,000 percent after Musk tweets promised to send it "to the moon" in 2021, sociologist Dominik Zelinsky wrote in a 2024 article exploring Musk's influence on the Dogecoin market. And more recently, Dogecoin's price spiked after Donald Trump formally announced the creation of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, a reference to the token). Musk's X posts about Dogecoin are viewed as so dependable to move the market that hundreds have used a bot to instantly buy and sell the token on Binance based on what they say, Tradoge creator Guillaume Schurck told Ars (while also noting that he never offers any financial advice). In the past, Musk has said that "the most entertaining outcome"—and "the most ironic outcome"—of his efforts to popularize Dogecoin "would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth of the future." His seeming influence on Dogecoin's price has prompted at least one attempted class-action lawsuit raised by angry Dogecoin investors who accused Musk of running a "crypto pyramid scheme" that collectively caused $258 billion in losses by seemingly pumping up Dogecoin's price at his whim, Zelinsky noted. Musk successfully defeated those claims, partly by insisting that his forward-looking statements about Dogecoin were purely "aspirational." But while the judge in that case said Musk's Dogecoin praise was obviously "puffery" that "no reasonable investor could rely upon," Zelinsky analyzed two years of Musk's social media posts trying to understand "why did people follow Musk" and spend "their money on an object that was never intended to be a sound investment?" He found that years of Musk tweets branding Dogecoin as "the people's crypto" and envisioning the token as someday becoming "the standard for the global financial system" actually created a segment of true believers among his followers who, to this day, fully expect Musk to be a cryptocurrency kingmaker who will crown Dogecoin as the default "currency of Earth." (It possibly helps that Musk has repeatedly referred to his supporters as the "people of Earth.") Those true believers recently got a big boost of confidence that "someday" may be coming soon. Last week, Dogecoin Foundation Director Timothy Stebbing announced on X that deals have been struck with big brands to "rapidly" accelerate Dogecoin's adoption and utility. "We believe 2025 will see the largest growth in utility and adoption to date," Stebbing predicted in a 2024 Dogecoin ecosystem report. But Dogecoin's plan hinges on stabilizing the memecoin's value, which is what Zelinsky found the segment of Musk believers also want. And that has seemingly introduced some tension in their belief system, should Musk's ongoing endorsements maintain the memecoin's price volatility and potentially obstruct Dogecoin's steady growth. In his report, Stebbing wrote that Dogecoin could see between 200–300 percent growth in value over the next three years by partnering on "projects that see Dogecoin used as a means of payment for goods and services." "The true value of Dogecoin will settle as we move from speculative asset to utility-based means of exchange," Stebbing forecasted, suggesting that by steering the token away from pump-and-dump cycles, "the future looks bright." For Musk fans who expect him to make or break the memecoin, it may be hard to swallow that the best thing for Dogecoin could be for Musk to stop talking about it. Stebbing told Ars that Musk "definitely got Dogecoin noticed," but "long before any celebrity endorsements, Dogecoin had a very active community" who used the coin to complete small transactions between individuals. It was initially useful for tipping or paying artists and musicians, he said. And if Musk stepped back from his 2019 fan-appointed role as Dogecoin's fake CEO, that might end up being the move that allows the memecoin to shine. "As far as celebrity endorsements having an effect on the price, I know a lot of us would rather it stay a bit more stable, but since Dogecoin isn't supposed to be speculative, a celebrity 'pump' isn't that vital," Stebbing told Ars. "Acceptance and adoption, however, is." Dogecoin deals may rapidly mainstream the memecoin Apparently, the ball got rolling on a series of deals after a mysterious "close friend of Dogecoin" introduced the foundation to "a group of people with decades of experience at the very top of the American private investment and enterprise world," Stebbing said on X. (As you might expect, some commenters made jokes implying Musk may be the "close friend.") Unlike prior investors who only saw Dogecoin as a flashy brand with social media traction to cash in on, Stebbing claimed that this investor group—members of which will be made public by mid-March—simply "wanted to be involved in helping Dogecoin achieve [its] goals of becoming a real daily-use currency, through adoption for payments across the United States." Springing from that partnership is a new commercial entity called the House of Doge (HOD), Stebbing confirmed. Over the next five years, the HOD will be "tasked with bringing Dogecoin adoption to the world stage," putting Dogecoin in the pockets of "large corporations, globally recognized brands, and millions of new individuals not yet familiar with Dogecoin and our mission," Stebbing wrote. In his post, Stebbing paints a future in which Dogecoin is widely accepted at major sporting events—possibly catching on with millions of baseball, football, hockey, and sports-car racing fans who may never have traded in cryptocurrency before. The token will also be an acceptable form of payment at restaurant chains, Stebbing teased, and even potentially soon in kids' school cafeteria lines. And perhaps representing the strongest endorsement of Dogecoin's legitimacy as a currency, Stebbing said US government officials are also "excited" about adopting Dogecoin to pay for "everything from city parking" to utilities. Previously, the Dogecoin Foundation operated on donations fueling a small development team, limiting the currency's growth, as Stebbing claimed the foundation turned away millions in potential investments deemed unserious about Dogecoin's mission. But now, with money soon coming from the HOD, the foundation is already moving to double its development team. That will allow the foundation to focus on building new technologies, making it even easier to adopt the memecoin in even more settings, Stebbing said. The HOD will also "create a large Dogecoin Reserve & Treasury which will be utilized to provide liquidity to the various organizations and integrations across the US, to help onboard a whole new wave of users to Dogecoin," Stebbing wrote on X. Dogecoin vs. stablecoins Not everyone believes Dogecoin is about to take over the world. At the time of this writing, the token is worth approximately 20 cents after about a week of incremental price drops that—according to live reporting on blockchain transactions by "Whale_Alert" on X—are seemingly spooking some traders. That's not true of certain Dogecoin believers who endure slump after slump, firmly believing in the token's long-term vision and not seeking short-term gains or simply committing to the bit. And at the start of 2025, there was some evidence that their belief was well-founded. In December, Galaxy Research, which focuses on forecasting cryptocurrency trends, predicted that Dogecoin could hit the $1 mark in 2025. Back in 2021 when Musk was helping pump up Dogecoin's price to its furthest extreme, Mark Cuban predicted that when the memecoin reached a $1 valuation, Dogecoin would likely stay above that price and function like a stablecoin. Unlike memecoins, stablecoins' values are pegged to various currencies. In the US, for example, Trump has abandoned the idea of developing a central bank digital currency in favor of legislation promoting the mass adoption of US dollar-backed stablecoins. According to Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith—whose group is currently advising Congress on stablecoin legislation while forming small working groups to build industry consensus on policy shifts—the "whole point" of Trump pushing stablecoins is to strengthen the US dollar by speeding up and increasing access to it worldwide. Smith told Ars that Trump's crypto czar, David Sacks (a longtime Musk ally), appears motivated to advance stablecoin legislation "as soon as possible this year." Currently, there are two bills—the "STABLE" Act in the House and the "GENIUS" Act in the Senate (which, yes, if combined, could be billed as the "STABLE GENIUS" Act, Smith joked)—that provide both bank and non-bank paths to issue dollar-backed stablecoins. The Blockchain Association advocated for non-bank paths for years, making it clear to lawmakers that demand is there. "Globally, there's actually a huge demand for US dollar-denominated stablecoins because many countries are looking for a safe place to store their money, and they want to get access to US dollars, and they can't get it through their banks," Smith said. "And so they're getting it through stablecoins." In the future, Smith wants to see state and federal pathways developed, as well as a market regulator appointed to officially classify tokens. If done "correctly," clearer regulatory guidelines would encourage a wide range of companies to issue tokens from the US, Smith said, while potentially paving the way for the entire industry of blockchain technologies to thrive domestically. Mass adoption of stablecoins could also, she suggested, normalize and spur the adoption of other cryptocurrencies as average US citizens suddenly become used to having crypto wallets. "I think stablecoins have the potential to be the gateway to the crypto world for a lot of Americans," Smith told Ars. Marquette University finance expert David Krause told Ars that he agrees with Smith that "wider stablecoin adoption could pave the way for broader cryptocurrency acceptance, potentially including Dogecoin." "Almost all memecoins are nothing more than a joke or a scam," Krause said. "However, Dogecoin's low fees and fast transaction times actually make it somewhat attractive for payments, like tipping or donating to charities. As Dogecoin's ecosystem expands with real-world applications (small retailer integration is possible), it could move beyond its meme status and become a more practical tool." But Krause does not see a future in which Dogecoin could become a common medium of exchange. "I certainly don't imagine using Dogecoin at the grocery store checkout," Krause told Ars. This month, Krause published an article suggesting that it was unlikely that the Securities and Exchange Commission would approve Dogecoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—a verdict expected this October that could also help mainstream the memecoin or move it closer to the $1 mark. Krause told Ars he believes that even with the Trump administration's rushed attempts to quickly relax crypto regulations, ETF approval would probably be a "long shot" because "Dogecoin's volatility and speculative nature present major hurdles" without "substantial safeguards and structural changes." "Celebrity endorsements and social media hype might give Dogecoin a short-term boost, but this could actually harm its long-term viability," Krause told Ars. "Dogecoin's price volatility, driven by social media trends rather than underlying value, makes it susceptible to market manipulation and raises regulatory concerns. To thrive long-term, Dogecoin needs to shift its focus from hype to fundamental development, real-world applications, and regulatory compliance." For his part, Stebbing told Ars that he doesn't see ETFs playing a long-term role in the Dogecoin landscape, and he isn't fixated on Dogecoin reaching $1. In fact, he's eager to move past the milestone, whether Dogecoin sticks at that vaunted price point or not. "Price stability is more important than price when it comes to using Dogecoin for everyday retail purchases," Stebbing told Ars. "If I had to guess, there are a lot of people who will sell their Dogecoin the moment we hit $1, [and] I look forward to getting that over with so we can find the true, stable value of the currency." “Time will tell” if X enables Dogecoin payments Smith pointed out that stablecoin legislation could motivate companies to become stablecoin issuers, and it seems likely that Musk would entertain such an idea on X, where his attempts to launch X Money have stalled so far. After claiming that X users could manage their entire financial life on the platform by the end of 2024, Musk's platform kicked off 2025 heavily promoting X Money's delayed launch this year. Those announcements came despite the fact that X withdrew a key money transmitter license application in New York that analysts suggested risked delaying its launch indefinitely. It seems possible that stablecoins could provide X with another path to issue dollar-backed currency without needing money transmitter licenses in every state. Musk may have given up on fighting for the licenses, instead teaming up with Trump to potentially eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which monitors the traditional sort of money transmitter activities that currently seem just out of Musk's reach. (Trump killing off the CFPB is viewed as a conflict of interest for Musk, whose DOGE department is overseeing cuts, CBS News reported.) There has long been speculation that X Money will enable cryptocurrency payments, including Dogecoin. After Musk took over Twitter, he briefly changed the logo to a shiba inu, the symbol of Dogecoin. And while X has never officially confirmed the rumors, it's not a stretch to think that Musk may be interested in promoting Dogecoin through X, perhaps even striving to make it easier to convert Dogecoin into stablecoins on the same platform where Musk's posts, many followers believe, move markets. If X embraces Dogecoin, it could make bots like Tradoge less attractive. Schurck told Ars that changes Musk made removing free access to X's API had already briefly disrupted the bot, but he "managed to find a workaround." Stebbing told Ars that he has no "special insight" into Musk's plans for X Money, but he thinks "it would be unusual, considering their predilections as an organization that once had the Dogecoin mascot as their logo for a week, not to adopt the currency." "Time will tell," Stebbing said. X did not respond to Ars' request to comment. Loyal Musk fans have faith in Dogecoin’s future Schurck told Ars he's not really involved in trading any cryptocurrencies other than Dogecoin, confirming that, like many others Zelinsky tracked online, he primarily became attracted to the memecoin because of Musk's endorsements. "Musk's X posting is the main reason I buy and sell Doge," Schurck said. Of course, Schurck isn’t alone in only trading Dogecoin due to Musk's influence. Zelinsky started studying Musk's seeming power over Dogecoin markets while filling a gap in research exploring economic impacts of charismatic leaders like Musk and Trump, whose authority is "made, maintained, and unmade through symbolically charged acts of social exchange." He's currently writing a book focused on expanding research into how charismatic leaders in the tech world and other areas are changing over time and considers Musk "a pretty good example" of a charismatic leader whose political influence is currently peaking. "It's hard to go higher than being this kind of a second-in-charge or second-in-popularity to Trump," Zelinsky said. On Reddit and X, Zelinsky analyzed messages from Musk followers who truly believed that Dogecoin price hikes are Musk's "gift" propelling Dogecoin to become not just the "currency of Earth" but the currency of Mars. That's the real fantasy that makes Musk such a charismatic figure, Zelinsky suggested. "If we keep believing in the coin and everything we should make it stand for, we will be chilling on Mars," one Musk follower said. "Forget about the effing moon, Elon Musk is taking Doge to Mars!!!" another posted. Others, whom Zelinsky satirically refers to as pirates, are more pragmatic. In a "non-devotional way," Zelinsky told Ars, they trust that Musk "could create a momentous demand that would drive the price of Dogecoin upward and let them profit from credulous investors who are late to the party." "I used Doge the right way," one Musk follower said. "I’m not gonna hold that shit," it "has no utility. Just have notifications turned on for [Elon's] twits and [make] some easy money." Zelinsky told Ars that historically, followers of charismatic leaders generally hold onto their beliefs until the charisma wanes and figures become viewed as mundane. Since Musk's political influence is arguably greater than ever, it's likely that his followers have only strengthened their belief in his power to fulfill his promises to popularize Dogecoin and take them to Mars. But charismatic authority is "a very volatile kind of phenomenon," Zelinsky said, forecasting that even Musk "cannot stay charismatic forever." He pointed to a field of study into technofeudalism, which theorizes that tech leaders in particular are becoming more traditional and less disruptive over time. One could argue that Dogecoin, too, has charismatic authority over traders, many of whom love that Doge is disruptive and buy Doge just for a laugh. But if Dogecoin becomes more stable, as Stebbing wants, Dogecoin risks becoming "less interesting as an object of belief," Zelinsky suggested. And although there are plenty of believers in Dogecoin today, there also persists a stubborn segment of Dogecoin fans who don't want the joke to end or see the memecoin become as normal as a crumpled-up dollar. Dogecoin could risk losing this joker segment if it becomes too stable and serious. Schurck told Ars that while he could easily see more people using Dogecoin if companies started adopting it as a payment method, for him, "Dogecoin remains a joke first. A funny, expensive joke and a cool meme, sure! But still a joke." Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

OpenAI's board has rejected the $97.4 billion takeover offer by a consortium of investors, led by Elon Musk. Earlier this week, Elon Musk's xAI, Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital, 8VC, and Ari Emanuel, CEO of the Hollywood company Endeavor, submitted a proposal to OpenAI's board of directors to take control of OpenAI's non-profit arm. OpenAI's board sent the following letter in response to the takeover offer: Apart from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI Nonprofit's board currently includes independent directors Bret Taylor (Chair), Adam D’Angelo, Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Zico Kolter, Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, Adebayo Ogunlesi, Nicole Seligman, Fidji Simo, and Larry Summers. OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor gave the following statement in response to Elon Musk's takeover offer: After Elon Musk and his investor group submitted their takeover bid on Monday, Elon Musk made a court filing saying that he would withdraw the bid if OpenAI's board decided to stop the for-profit conversion. This court filing by Musk made it easier for OpenAI's board to reject the takeover offer. It remains to be seen how Musk will respond to this decision. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Altman responds with pithy offer to buy Twitter for $9,74 billion. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly rejected an unsolicited Elon Musk-led attempt to purchase OpenAI for $97.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal reports that the offer was backed by Musk's own company, xAI, in addition to several investors Musk's other businesses. After the Wall Street Journal broke news of the purchase offer Monday afternoon, Altman shifted the offer's decimal point in a joke publicly posted on X, saying, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." Musk—who recently changed his X name to "Harry Bōlz" as a reference to the nickname for a teenage member of his DOGE group that is currently embroiled in what some legal experts consider a constitutional crisis for the US federal government—replied to Altman on X with one word: "Swindler." A screenshot of the recent Altman-Musk exchange. Credit: X Altman clarified his position in several media appearances on Tuesday morning, characterizing Musk's latest salvo as another one of his attempts to throw a wrench in the works at OpenAI. "OpenAI is not for sale," Altman told Ina Fried at Axios. "OpenAI's mission is not for sale—to say nothing of the fact that a competitor who is not able to beat us in the market and instead is just trying to say, 'I'm gonna buy this,' with total disregard for the mission is a likely path there." A brief history of Musk vs. Altman The beef between Musk and Altman goes back to 2015, when the pair partnered (with others) to co-found OpenAI as a nonprofit. Musk cut ties with the company in 2018 but watched from the sidelines as OpenAI became a media darling in 2022 and 2023 following the launch of ChatGPT and then GPT-4. In July 2023, Musk created his own OpenAI competitor, xAI (maker of Grok). Since then, Musk has become a frequent legal thorn in Altman and OpenAI's side, at times suing both OpenAI and Altman personally, claiming that OpenAI has strayed from its original open source mission—especially after reports emerged about Altman's plans to transition portions of OpenAI into a for-profit company, something Musk has fiercely criticized. Musk initially sued the company and Altman in March 2024, claiming that OpenAI’s alliance with Microsoft had broken its agreement to make a major breakthrough in AI "freely available to the public." Musk withdrew the suit in June 2024, then revived it in August 2024 under similar complaints. Musk and Altman have been publicly trading barbs frequently on X and in the press over the past few years, most recently when Musk criticized Altman's $500B "Stargate" AI infrastructure project announced last month. This morning, when asked on Bloomberg Television if Musk’s move comes from personal insecurity about xAI, Altman replied, "Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity." "I don’t think he’s a happy guy. I feel for him," he added. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The Wall Street Journal reports banks are close to selling some of the $13 billion in debt they took on while helping Musk buy Twitter in 2022. Ever since Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter he’s claimed the company, now called X, is in “a very dire situation from a revenue standpoint.” Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that banks are preparing a coordinated move to sell off some of the $13 billion in debt they loaned Musk to finance the deal. It mentions an email sent to employees this month, also confirmed by The Verge, where the Chief Twit said, “...we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes,” but also claimed, “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.” Part of the reason Bank of America, Barclays, and Morgan Stanley are holding so much of the debt is from trying to avoid selling at a loss after economic conditions changed, and Musk had an extended court battle attempting to get out of the deal. While equity investors have reportedly slashed the value of their stakes by as much as 78 percent, the Journal reports, “banks hope to sell senior debt at 90-95 cents on the dollar, while retaining more-junior holdings.” As Musk referenced in his email, the report says the banks hope to use the narrative of Musk’s link to Donald Trump, as some unnamed investors may be interested in buying based on a belief that its financials are on the way up. However, Musk also said that the company could become cash-flow positive “within months” nearly two years ago, and it still faces over $1 billion in annual interest payments on the loans. The platform is increasingly turning into a testing ground for his AI ambitions, as we reported earlier this month, and while X has added some features, like job listings and a new video tab, there’s little sign of the service he’d said would be able to “someone’s entire financial life” by the end of 2024. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

OpenAI is now a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft, says lawsuit. Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for breach of contract, alleging they have compromised the start-up’s original mission of building artificial intelligence systems for the benefit of humanity. In the lawsuit, filed to a San Francisco court on Thursday, Musk’s lawyers wrote that OpenAI’s multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft had broken an agreement to make a major breakthrough in AI “freely available to the public.” Instead, the lawsuit said, OpenAI was working on “proprietary technology to maximize profits for literally the largest company in the world.” The legal fight escalates a long-running dispute between Musk, who has founded his own AI company, known as xAI, and OpenAI, which has received a $13 billion investment from Microsoft. Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI in 2015, said in his legal filing he had donated $44 million to the group and had been “induced” to make contributions by promises, “including in writing,” that it would remain a non-profit organization. He left OpenAI’s board in 2018 following disagreements with Altman on the direction of research. A year later, the group established the for-profit arm that Microsoft has invested into. Microsoft president Brad Smith told the Financial Times this week that while the companies were “very important partners,” “Microsoft does not control OpenAI.” Musk’s lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s latest AI model, GPT4, released in March last year, breached the threshold for artificial general intelligence (AGI), at which computers function at or above the level of human intelligence. The Microsoft deal only gives the tech giant a license to OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology, the lawsuit said, and determining when this threshold is reached is key to Musk’s case. The lawsuit seeks a court judgment over whether GPT4 should already be considered to be AGI, arguing that OpenAI’s board was “ill-equipped” to make such a determination. The filing adds that OpenAI is also building another model, Q*, that will be even more powerful and capable than GPT4. It argues that OpenAI is committed under the terms of its founding agreement to make such technology available publicly. “Mr. Musk has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity—perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today,” the lawsuit says. “To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity,’” it adds. “In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.” OpenAI maintains it has not yet achieved AGI, despite its models’ success in language and reasoning tasks. Large language models like GPT4 still generate errors, fabrications, and so-called hallucinations. The lawsuit also seeks to “compel” OpenAI to adhere to its founding agreement to build technology that does not simply benefit individuals such as Altman and corporations such as Microsoft. Musk’s own xAI company is a direct competitor to OpenAI and launched its first product, a chatbot named Grok, in December. OpenAI declined to comment. Representatives for Musk have been approached for comment. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Microsoft-OpenAI alliance is being reviewed by competition watchdogs in the US, EU, and UK. The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued subpoenas to OpenAI executives in November as part of an investigation into whether Altman had misled its investors, according to people familiar with the move. That investigation came shortly after OpenAI’s board fired Altman as chief executive only to reinstate him days later. A new board has since been instituted including former Salesforce co-chief executive Bret Taylor as chair. There is an ongoing internal review of the former board’s allegations against Altman by independent law firm WilmerHale. Source

Those who regularly follow Neowin or Windows news, in general, are likely aware of the requirements like MSA (Microsoft Account) or an internet connection when setting up a new Windows 11 PC (via the Out of Box Experience or OOBE). However, not everyone may be well versed about these and sometimes it can also be high-profile figures in the tech space itself. Twitter (now X) owner Elon Musk apparently bought a new laptop and was surprised, in a bad way, to find that they could not install Windows 11 on their new PC without an MSA. Needless to say, they did not appear too thrilled about it. Musk expressed their disapproval of this requirement via their official X handle stating that it gives Microsoft's AI (Copilot) access to user data. Responding to one of the replies on the same thread, they labeled this particular requirement as "not cool": If you want a recall of how it all came to be, like many new changes, Microsoft first started test-driving the MSA requirement in a Windows 11 Insider build back in February of 2022, and expanded that to Insiders as well later on in the year. Neowin published a guide on how to bypass the MSA requirement, alongside some other ones like the one that works around the internet check (the previous one we published may no longer work). It is also possible to use third-party software utilities with popular ones like Rufus, or Ventoy, as well as a little less popular ones like WinToUSB. Source

X must do more than tack on new features if it wants WeChat's success. X used to be called Twitter, but soon it will become "the Everything App," and that day is "closer than everyone thinks," X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised in one of her first X posts of 2024. "Nothing can slow us down," Yaccarino said. Turning Twitter into an everything app is arguably the reason that Elon Musk purchased Twitter. He openly craved the success of the Chinese everything app WeChat, telling Twitter staff soon after purchasing the app that "you basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” The Guardian reported. In October 2022, Musk teased that he "could be wrong," but he expected that within three to five years, he could turn Twitter into an everything app (also known as a super app). But more than a year later, X still seems far away from following in WeChat's footsteps. Musk's grand vision has always been to morph the bird app—a mostly unprofitable place where users initially went to tweet "short bursts of inconsequential information"—into something hugely profitable: The only app a user would ever need in daily life. To Musk, this meant that users wouldn't just be opening X to post a joke or confirm an earthquake just hit, giving X a little ad revenue with each login. Instead, the app would become users' exclusive destination to place calls, text, goof off with friends, send payments, bank, and, of course, shop online—giving X seemingly boundless opportunities to profit more from each login. It could even turn X into a trillion-dollar company, Musk has claimed. While many wonder how X could achieve this seemingly impossible dream, Sangeet Paul Choudary, a global expert on platform economics and network effects, told Ars that X is well-positioned to become a super app, although he remains skeptical that it will make all the right moves. If X can avoid some of the missteps that led other wannabe super apps to fail, as Choudary wrote in his Substack last November—such as tacking on features that don't leverage the unique relationship between accounts and followers that made Twitter so popular in the first place—Choudary sees at least one path where X could succeed. X’s potential path to becoming an everything app Right now, when you open the X app, you see a pair of social media feeds that you can toggle between—the "for you" and "following" feeds—as well as options to post, search, and use Grok, X's chatbot. If you click on your profile in the app, you can access a separate menu to jump to other X features, like Spaces or Communities, or, if you're an eligible creator, you can check out how the monetization of your posts is going. X may simply continue adding features one by one to whatever menus currently exist on the app. But it's also possible that X could get a total makeover by the end of 2024—with potentially more options to access payment features coming soon that might expand its creator economy and fuel an as-yet unexplored world of X e-commerce options. By 2030, X might morph so much—and possibly become so consequential to some users' daily lives—that people could finally respect Musk's X rebrand and stop calling his app by its former name, Twitter. Whichever route X takes, the company needs to be strategic at every step, Choudary told Ars, if it wants to be a super app. For example, just adding a Buy button on X's interface—like Twitter already tried to do with Stripe—or attempting "to become the next PayPal embedded in a social network" would likely fail. But "if it gets its ducks in a row, I could see X moving in the direction of a creator monetization network where creators who have built followership on X can now monetize it," Choudary said. Taking that route, X could potentially succeed as a super app by adding features that directly support creators and then widely catch on with other users. "I really believe the opportunity is in creating an all-in destination for creators and influencers where they can build not just a following but also monetize it," Choudary said. Especially if X builds out a creator success team to identify creators' "needs and pain points" and then highlight any "adjacency opportunities there for the super app." Hyping X to creators might be hard, though, if X remains mysterious about the everything app that Yaccarino claims is coming soon. And although WeChat may be the best model for what to expect for X as a super app, X users can't just casually download the app to see what X might become. China-owned WeChat is notoriously hard to access in the US, even for researchers, because the Chinese government tightly controls China's Internet, primarily to censor Chinese government criticism. A research director investigating human rights issues within China for the nonprofit Freedom House, Yaqiu Wang, told Ars that there are many reasons why "it's very, very hard to do research on social media in China," and when it comes to studying WeChat, maintaining access to the app might be the hardest part. To access Chinese social media apps, China typically requires a Chinese phone number that must be verified by the Chinese government. Anyone who downloads WeChat in the US would need to find an existing WeChat user to scan a code just to set up an account, which is cumbersome for anyone without friends already using the app. Because it's so hard to access WeChat, many US users hoping to peer into X's future would have to settle for looking at screenshots of WeChat posted in app stores or shared in media reports or academic journals. These screenshots suggest that one day in the next few years, you might toggle away from posting a meme on X to order an Uber or pay your utility bills directly from your digital wallet's interface within the app. And rather than installing apps that take up space on your phone's home screen, you might scan QR codes to instead launch an array of sub-applications that operate within the X app's user interface. Although that sounds potentially more efficient than navigating a mobile phone operating system, does anyone in the US even want one app to rule them all? While it's obvious that X is racing to build its everything app, what's less clear is who will buy into it. The major selling point appears to be convenience, but any perceived security and privacy risks from loading all your user data into one app may outweigh that benefit for increasingly privacy-conscious consumers. Add to that X's recent history of random account suspensions, which could make consumers even more wary of buying into X as an everything app that users can depend on to manage their daily online lives. X following WeChat’s playbook WeChat is an international app that operates two services: one, known as Weixin, for Chinese users and the other for users located outside of China. The app boasts 1.33 billion monthly active users worldwide, appealing to anyone with a relationship with China, including journalists, activists, diplomats, and people who do business in China, Citizen Lab reported. Musk's projected five-year timeline to turn X into an everything app appears to be ripped straight from WeChat's playbook. After launching WeChat globally in 2012 as a messaging and photo-sharing app, Tencent rolled out voice messaging, then payments services, before launching mini programs—essentially sub-applications accessible within the WeChat app—in 2017. This would arguably become the feature that exploded WeChat's popularity—with Tencent pushing businesses globally to develop mini programs—and cemented its status as an everything app. By 2018, WeChat had attracted over a billion monthly active users globally, with mini programs offering users a path to avoid wasting time installing apps or connecting payments services. Instead, users could seamlessly navigate the web via WeChat while businesses escaped the chore of developing and maintaining apps to complete online orders. Mini programs also helped WeChat establish dominance in offline payments, the Harvard Business Review noted in 2019. In 2020, the Channels feature launched as Tencent's response to TikTok. In addition to entertaining users, WeChat's short video feature also provided another path for brands to market products to users. And while the recent rollout of TikTok Shop has seemed shaky—with some TikTok users loudly complaining about feeds being flooded by videos pushing products—WeChat's users fully entrenched in the app's interface seemed more conditioned to embrace new shopping features. "It's sophisticated and advanced and easy to use," Wang told Ars. X declined multiple requests to comment, but Musk seems to have taken note of all of this. So far, X has emulated WeChat by launching audio and video calls in 2023. Next, Musk plans to launch payment services, expecting that many users will choose to live their “entire financial life” on X by the end of 2024. And Musk has already hinted at more ambitious features that may function like WeChat's mini programs—a step that could help X reach super app status. During his first Twitter staff meeting, Musk pitched a plan for Twitter to go beyond promoting products in ads. Musk envisioned Twitter as becoming a platform, like WeChat, where users could immediately purchase products with one click, directly on the platform, using funds stored on the platform. "If I saw ads for gizmos—I love gizmos, of course—I’d buy them all in a click," Musk told Twitter staff. Choudary told Ars that X payments probably won't take off if Musk just adds a "buy" button, though. "There needs to be a core payments-driven use case that is embedded into the core app usage dynamic," Choudary said, which would mean, for the payments product to catch on, it would need to become a valued part of the everyday X users' engagements with their followers. Choudary pointed to WeChat's success after launching its payments system with a novel payments product called red packets in 2014. These were digital gifts designed to look like red envelopes that are typically used to gift cash to children or elderly people in China and were initially advertised as a way to gift money to individuals or groups of users to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Over time, the functionality of sending red packets shifted, as, particularly for groups, it "became wildly popular through a lottery-style gaming dynamic, where senders could specify the total gift amount, message, and the number of winners, with each prize randomized by the platform," Choudary said. Tencent explained in a blog about how red packets became a "big hit" and that this worked by providing red packets "settings for variable amounts, which depend largely on the luck of the draw. For example, you can send red packets worth RMB100 in total to a group of 10 people and specify that you want the money, in random amounts, to go to the first five people to open the packet. One might receive RMB65, another RMB6.5, while others receive amounts as small as RMB0.01." With a chance to win money, even people who had little or no money were encouraged to use the feature and connect their banks to WeChat. This paved the way for broader adoption by tapping into a gaming dynamic that was initially clearly tied to WeChat's core use: messaging with friends and family. If X finds a way to mimic that strategy and roll out payments connected to its core use case—one user connecting with many followers—its payments product could hook enough users, who might then consider using X as their primary payments product, Choudary suggested. "Payments cannot just be bolted on," he said. "The leading-in use case should be organic and unique to the usage of Twitter, much like the gifting game leveraged WeChat's usage dynamic." X's potential for growth in payments could be great. Jeffrey Towson, a managing partner at TechMoat Consulting and expert at monitoring digital strategies in the US and China, told Ars that WeChat makes a ton of money from in-app purchases. Since 2019, when global in-app purchases generated only $1 million, WeChat's revenue from such payments has surged, soaring above $71 million last year, according to Statista. But Towson agrees with Choudary that it won't be easy for X to replicate that success. "WeChat was a unique China phenomenon," Towson told Ars. "No company anywhere in the world has been able to replicate WeChat's unique development path," which was built on "two powerful utility services, messenger and payments," Towson said. "Those services are both usually oligopolies"—meaning markets dominated by very few suppliers—"with big network effects, which make each difficult to break into," Towson said. "Let alone both." Towson noted that "X is building from a completely different foundation," starting "as an audience builder platform that connects content creators and consumers" and becoming "a source of real-time information [and] news" to "increasingly like-minded users." Now X is innovating at a "frantic pace" to attract and engage more users by adding features on a monthly basis, representing "a sea change from the previous decade of stagnation at Twitter," Towson said. X could make big moves, like emphasizing short video, to "enrich its core features" and "increase user numbers and engagement," Towson said. Especially "on the content creator" side, Towson agreed with Choudary, saying, "the biggest improvements" that X "can make are growing the audience size and increasing the revenue-generation opportunities." But X needing to break into both messaging and payments to reach super-app glory will be major hurdles, Towson expects. "I don’t think X can replicate WeChat easily," Towson told Ars, suggesting that "WhatsApp might be the only app that could copy WeChat. But they've been pretty much a disaster in terms of their ability to innovate." It's possible that X's most loyal users might be rewarded for sticking around long enough to see Musk overcome these hurdles where all other Western companies attempting to launch super apps have failed. "X is currently the most dynamic and also most unpredictable player on the field," Towson said. "That’s generally good for users. But it's a bumpy ride." However, those X users would also need to view the platform as reliable and dependable enough to trust with their entire daily online lives. And while Yaccarino suggests that "nothing" can slow X down, a top concern for WeChat users—censorship-driven account suspensions—seems to demonstrate that a big problem for Musk's everything app plan might be X's automated spam detector, which the company continually blames for causing accounts to be suspended randomly. Suspensions WeChat users’ top concern Because Tencent must adhere to Chinese laws requiring constant surveillance and immediate censorship of users perceived as critical of the Chinese government, the threat of WeChat censorship keeps escalating, a 2023 Freedom House report said. According to Freedom House, WeChat's messaging services became so popular—hosting more than a third of China's data traffic, WalkTheChat estimated in 2018—partly because China's Great Firewall blocks other platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, X, Telegram, and Signal. Blocking popular platforms pushes Chinese users onto WeChat, where they are subject to intensifying censorship, Freedom House reported. In 2023, the censorship seemed to reach a new extreme, with Freedom House finding account closures increasingly used as a first resort, while content removals spiked and started "extending to topics that were previously uncensored." Facing the risk that the Chinese government might not just delete posts but disable their accounts, WeChat users in China are "increasingly self-censoring to preempt the closure of their accounts or other penalties, since WeChat is relied on for a wide variety of services that include messaging, banking, ride-hailing, ordering food, and booking travel," Freedom House reported. Even mundane political talk could get someone booted from WeChat, the South China Morning Post reported. One WeChat user was reportedly "sentenced to nearly four years in prison for sharing a video" about a religious practice on the app, Freedom House noted. While Tencent differentiates between Weixin and WeChat services in terms of where data is stored, researchers at Citizen Lab—whose work focuses on "the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security"—have noted that "the boundary between these two 'services' are not clear." Both services, Citizen Lab observed, "mostly use the same set of servers" and the same features, and users of both services have been subjected to Chinese government censorship, Citizen Lab found. Tencent declined to comment on Freedom House's and Citizen Lab's reports. X users suspended with no explanation On X, censorship remains a testy topic for Musk, who has recently claimed that the "Western World" has a choice to make between embracing "freedom of speech" on X or ceding "control" over their content to other platforms. Some X users criticized the company on Yaccarino's post touting the "everything app," including journalist Dan Nguyen, who wrote that X lacked transparency when suspending users who have accused the platform of censoring them. Earlier this year, multiple journalists critical of X were suspended "with no explanation," Vice reported. More recently, Yulia Navalnaya—the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny—had her account temporarily suspended a day after joining X. "Providing transparency into suspensions and shadow bans was one of Elon’s first promises when he bought Twitter," Nguyen wrote. "That hasn’t happened, but yeah, sure, everyone can’t wait to do their banking on X.” Musk later blamed these suspensions on an error with X's automated spam detector. "We do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them," Musk posted on X. After Navalnaya's suspension, X's Safety account promised the app would "be updating" the "platform's defense mechanism against manipulation and spam," but one of the top comments on that post suggested that some users weren't satisfied. "These errors by X cannot just be brushed aside since for every known account that gets corrected in short order, how many lesser known accounts go unfixed due to lack of reach?" an X user called @DareWeCan posted. And those aren't the only seemingly random suspensions on X. This March, other users were shocked to have their accounts locked or suspended after outing an anonymous neo-Nazi cartoonist. X's head of business operations, Joe Benarroch, released a statement saying that the users were suspended because they violated X's policies against sharing private information. But that policy specifically said that sharing someone's name was not considered a violation, and after users called out X, the platform updated that policy to retroactively justify banning users who identified an anonymous user. Like WeChat's users, X's users were seemingly suspended for conduct that they did not know could result in suspensions. Around the same time, X confirmed that "some users are encountering an error when logging into X or creating a new account. We’re working on it and will share an update when things are back to normal." Days later, there has not been an update as of this writing, so it's unclear if X ever fully resolved the issue. As X tries to evolve into the super app of Musk's dreams, the question remains whether US users with access to a wide array of popular apps would buy into a super app where they might be suddenly suspended or unable to log in without warning and disconnected from their "entire" online life with no explanation. Choudary told Ars that he wouldn't expect X appearing unreliable to some users to be a real "barrier" to its transition to a super app, though, because "there's a large user base for which X is very much a primary interface—suspensions and outages notwithstanding." The failure of Twitter alternatives to capture X's audience seems to back up this idea. "I don't see X having a problem retaining its users like some of these super app wannabes do," Choudary told Ars, agreeing with Towson that "users are loyal to X." If X can strategically hook users on payments products and new features that continue supporting the follower-based social networking use case, the platform may succeed as a super app, where other apps, including Facebook, have failed. That's especially true if payments end up positioning X "for a move into e-commerce via mini programs," Towson said, "just like WeChat." But just because X becomes a super app doesn't guarantee it will become the next WeChat, Choudary said. WeChat is "relatively unique" among super apps, he said, "because of scale in a closed market with limited competition" in China, where other popular apps are blocked. And because "Chinese and Japanese digital interfaces thrive in clutter"—delivering an information overload—whereas "in general, apps in the West (and most non-Asian markets) tend to be sliver-thin, unbundled, focused on a single use case." "Western super-app efforts lack both these advantages," Choudary said. So while it's possible that X and other wannabe super apps can "increase customer retention and lifetime value by expanding to adjacencies and becoming super apps," Choudary said, X actually achieving WeChat-level success will likely remain out of reach. "Can they be as successful as WeChat?" Choudary said. "I'm very confident that they won't." Source

Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots.” “Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease,” Musk said, referring to tools like CAPTCHA. While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee. As is the case with a lot of announcements related to the social platform, there are no details at the moment about when this policy will be applicable and what fees new users might have to pay. Last October, X started charging new unverified users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines. New free users signing up for the platform from these regions could read the posts but couldn’t interact with them. To post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark and quote posts, they had to pay a fee. Musk might apply a fee similar to other regions. Earlier this month, X said that the platform was starting a major purge of spam accounts, warning users that their follower count might be affected. However, with a plan to charge new users, the social media company seemingly aims to tackle the bot problem better. While Musk has talked about battling AI bots, last year, X updated its policy to include a clause that public posts could be used to train machine learning algorithms or artificial intelligence models. Separately, in July 2023, Musk said that his AI company xAI would use public posts to train models. Earlier this month, xAI made its Grok chatbot available to Premium users of X, who pay $8 per month. The chatbot was previously available to users paying $16 per month for the Premium+ tier. Last week, Fortune reported that X plans to make Grok available to users to compose posts. Source : https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/15/elon-musk-plans-to-charge-new-x-users-to-enable-posting/

US says FTC probe uncovered privacy risks caused by Musk's drastic changes. US government lawyers criticized Elon Musk's leadership at the company formerly named Twitter yesterday, telling a judge that Musk's attempt to terminate a privacy settlement and Federal Trade Commission investigation should be rejected. "After agreeing last year to settle charges that it once again misled consumers about the privacy and security of their information, X Corp. (formerly Twitter, Inc.) now seeks to jettison that agreement and limit further scrutiny of its data practices. X Corp.'s motion is meritless and should be denied," Department of Justice lawyers representing the US government wrote in the filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California. In July, Musk's X Corp. asked the court to terminate or modify a privacy settlement that Twitter and the FTC agreed to in May 2022 before Musk bought the company. X claimed that the FTC's ongoing investigation into whether it is complying with the settlement "has spiraled out of control and become tainted by bias." X's motion also sought "a protective order staying the notice of deposition of Elon Musk." The US response yesterday said the investigation is warranted by the dramatic changes that Musk brought to the social media firm. It also said that Musk should be deposed in the FTC investigation because he "has unique, first-hand knowledge about the current state and direction of the company's data practices and efforts to comply with the 2022 Administrative Order." The US said the FTC found troubling information when it used its discovery rights under the settlement to request "records and other information to determine whether X Corp. was properly protecting user data during this transformation," and when it deposed five former executives and employees who held roles in privacy and security. The FTC depositions so far have targeted "former employees because nearly every employee who has been identified as a point person for privacy or data security either resigned or was terminated before the FTC could talk to them," the government said. “Chaotic environment” "The information obtained revealed a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring X Corp.'s compliance with the 2022 Administrative Order," the US wrote in the partially redacted filing. Musk conducted "at least five rounds of terminations, layoffs, or other reductions" in the weeks after his October 2022 purchase of Twitter, eliminating over half of the workforce, the US noted. "Within days of the initial layoffs, three key data privacy and security executives all resigned: Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran, Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner, and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty," the filing said. "These three had been the sole remaining members of the company's Data Governance Committee, which was tasked with interpreting and modifying data policies and practices to ensure X Corp. complied with the 2022 Administrative Order." The US filing said that during a deposition, "Kissner testified that decisions by Musk and others—including layoffs and other 'cost-cutting pressure and decisions'—impaired X Corp.'s ability to 'put technical restrictions and controls in place... around the company's use of contact data to make sure that it was being used... for the purpose that the particular contact data was collected.'" Kissner further testified that after the mass employee exodus, "about half of the controls in X Corp.'s information security program did not have a designated 'owner' responsible for their operation. Similarly, at his deposition, Kieran testified that the firings and layoffs meant no one was responsible for about 37 percent of X Corp.'s privacy program controls," the US wrote. “Musk’s conduct” The next section of the US government filing is titled "Musk's Conduct." After buying the social network and taking over as CEO and sole director, "Musk also personally assumed supervisory authority over X Corp.'s privacy and information security program under the 2022 Administrative Order," the US said. "Former X Corp. employees testified about several concerning incidents involving Musk," the US wrote. "For example, in early December 2022, Musk reportedly directed staff to grant an outside third-party journalist 'full access to everything at Twitter... No limits at all.' Consistent with Musk's direction, the journalist was initially assigned a company laptop and internal account, with the intent that they be given 'elevated privileges beyond just what a[n] average employee might have.'" The journalist who received that access was reportedly Bari Weiss. According to the US court filing, longtime security employees at Twitter were "concerned such an arrangement could expose nonpublic user information in potential violation of the 2022 Administrative Order" and thus "intervened and implemented safeguards to mitigate the risks." Instead of receiving direct access to company systems, the journalist was said to be "working with some other individuals within [the company] who were potentially accessing such services on [their] behalf." In another incident, Musk sent a text message "directing that an executive assistant was to receive access to certain systems 'immediately, and anybody standing in the way [was] to be fired,'" the US said. Twitter's then-Director of Threat Management and Operations Seth Wilson later testified that he thought the access was inconsistent with the assistant's position. "To him, this 'raised some concerns' that employees would 'get pressure from an access standpoint to do things' and 'be given access' to systems that 'weren't commensurate with their job responsibility,'" according to the US filing. "Former Director of Security Engineering Andrew Sayler similarly testified he had 'ongoing questions about Elon's commitment to the overall security and privacy of the organization' because 'the manner in which Elon was requesting us to grant access to third parties that had not undergone our regular vetting process struck' Sayler as 'having some degree of disregard for the overall sensitivity and security at that level of access.'" Abrupt move of servers with sensitive data The filing then described a December 2022 incident in which Musk directed that Twitter servers be moved from one data center to another. "X Corp. policy was that 'data cannot leave the data center unless it's been wiped.' But because employees only had 'a matter of days and weeks, not, like months or quarters' to conduct the move, they did not have 'enough time to put together a process that [] would be in compliance with [their] own policies,'" the brief said. The hurried server move was also described in the new biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson. The US government brief said the relocated servers were not wiped before being moved to a new data center. The type of data on the relocated servers was apparently so sensitive that it could not be described in the US court filing, which redacts the sentence that describes what the servers contained. The "Musk's Conduct" section ends with a description of the rushed launch of the Twitter Blue revamp that gave "verification" checkmarks to paying users: According to Kissner, Musk insisted the service "ha[d] to launch right now," even though X Corp. was "so reduced in size that [teams were] struggling to keep the service up." Kieran recalled Twitter Blue was implemented so quickly that, "to ensure the speed that the product and engineering team was trying to work at," the security and privacy review was not conducted in accordance with the company's process for software development. Sayler described how some of the security team's recommendations went unheeded, including measures for mitigating the risk that people would purchase verification to impersonate other accounts. These concerns were well-founded: Twitter Blue was suspended the day after it was launched, after reports of fake accounts and impersonations. X “complains the FTC asked too many questions” The US brief also responded to X's claim that the FTC "attempted to bully" audit firm Ernst & Young (EY) "into acting as an arm of its enforcement staff digging up dirt on X Corp., rather than an objective, independent, third-party auditor." "X Corp. fails to mention that EY chose to terminate its engagement in February 2023 due to the extensive departures within, and a lack of support from, X Corp. Nor does X Corp. acknowledge that it has since retained a new independent assessor, which renders immaterial the company's allegations regarding EY, since EY never produced a report of X Corp.'s program or submitted one to the FTC," the US told the court. When Twitter agreed to the privacy settlement last year, there was a stipulated order issued by the court and an administrative order issued by the FTC. The obligations that X complains about "flow from the FTC's administrative order and not the court's stipulated order," the US said. The US argued that the court lacks authority to terminate the FTC's 2022 administrative order "because X Corp. did not first seek that relief from the Commission itself." But even if the compliance obligations were part of the stipulated order, X "has not identified a change in circumstances that renders the order's safeguards unworkable or contrary to the public interest," the US said. "In seeking 'relief' from these obligations, X Corp. does not argue that the safeguards to which it consented have become unnecessary or unworkable. Rather, it complains the FTC asked too many questions after Elon Musk acquired the company," the US said. "But the FTC asked questions because of sudden, radical changes at the company: within weeks of the acquisition, half of X Corp.'s employees were terminated or resigned, including key executives in privacy, data security, and compliance roles." The US said that X's "motion rests on hyperbolic allegations of 'witness tampering' and an investigation 'tainted by bias.'" The reality, according to the government, is that Musk's hasty revamp of Twitter Blue, along with "alarming site outages, product malfunctions, and issues with data access controls," gave the FTC "every reason to seek information about whether these developments signaled a lapse in X Corp.'s compliance." Source

Tech giants and billionaires often make headlines for their audacious and sometimes quirky ideas, Elon Musk has once again captured our attention. CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is known for his innovative spirit and a penchant for stirring the pot. Recently, Musk made a staggering offer. In Elon Musk Wikipedia tweet that wen viral on X, the businessman offered one billion dollars to Wikipedia, one of the internet's most venerable and valuable sources of information, if they change their name to... Well, ''D*ckipedia''. See the Elon Musk Wikipedia tweet/xeet below. Elon Musk Wikipedia tweet's unconventional offer Elon Musk's offer is a testament to his unique style. He has offered this billion-dollar donation to Wikipedia on one condition: they must change their name to "D*ckipedia". These staggering numbers reflect the substantial operating costs required to maintain the vast database of free information. Furthermore, the foundation maintains transparency by employing third-party financial auditors, whose reports are accessible to the public, ensuring accountability in their financial practices. Elon Musk Wikipedia tweet came after a pop-up message in which the Wikimedia Foundation asked for financial support from their readers Isn't the first time Musk's interaction with Wikipedia goes beyond this recent donation offer. In the past, he clashed with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales over content restrictions on the social media platform X in the lead-up to Turkey's presidential election. Musk's decisions were criticized for potentially limiting free expression. Additionally, under Musk's leadership, the social media platform was accused of becoming more compliant with government requests for censorship and surveillance. In 2018, Musk further demonstrated his interest in journalism and information credibility by announcing his intention to create a website called "Pravda". The platform aimed to allow the public to rate the "core truth" of articles and track the credibility of journalists, editors, and their publications, emphasizing the importance of transparency and trustworthiness in the world of information but he decided to rebrand Twitter instead. Source

"It is not a profit driver," X says. X has confirmed a Fortune report revealing that the platform formerly known as Twitter has begun charging a $1 annual fee to new users in New Zealand and the Philippines. Unless new users in these locations cough up the dollar, they'll be blocked from accessing basic platform features, including posting, replying, or quoting posts. The new fee kicked in yesterday, X Support posted on X. "Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not-a-Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines," X Support said. "New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post and interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected." Earlier this year, outlets speculated that X-owner Elon Musk might implement a small fee to access the platform, and Fortune's report seemed to confirm that change could be coming soon globally, assuming that X's "test" goes well. X Support directly stated that the move was not intended to drive X profits despite the urgent situation of the company being $13 billion in debt. According to X, this "test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver." Musk has been concerned about bot activity on the platform since before he purchased Twitter, even attempting to cancel or renegotiate the deal over suspicions about high numbers of bots. Since his purchase, he has rebranded the platform into X and repeatedly claimed that charging subscription fees could be the only meaningful way to reduce bot activity on the platform. Musk seems particularly motivated to move to a subscription model to get ahead of what could become a crushing new wave of bot activity supercharged by AI. Yesterday, Musk again posted on X that subscriptions are "the only way to fight bots without blocking real users." He admitted that "this won’t stop bots completely" but claimed that charging the $1 annual fee means that "it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform." X Support's post unsurprisingly supports Musk's statements about subscriptions successfully reducing bot activity on X, writing, "So far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale." Fans of games like World of Warcraft—which have historically been overrun by bots—have complained that subscription fees have not limited bot activity. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that "fake and spam accounts remain plentiful," according to researchers who claimed that, despite the platform implementing the Twitter Blue subscription service, bots remained pervasive. Twitter Blue may have even made it harder to detect bots, experts told WSJ, by changing the verification process. Worse, experts told WSJ that Musk may have incentivized some spammers to purchase subscriptions because, "while the cost of signing up might be an obstacle for some, well-funded scammers might be willing to pay because a perk for subscribers is that their tweets get more exposure, which is often the ultimate goal anyway." X Support's post linked to a blog that provided more details about Musk's test, which has been dubbed the "Not-a-Bot" test. According to the blog, new users in the Philippines and New Zealand will be prompted to verify their phone number and then charged a $1 annual fee at sign-up. Any users who opt out of payment will have access to X for reading purposes only, limiting features to seeing tweets, watching videos, and following accounts. It's unclear how long X will run the test, but it's possible it may end abruptly at any point. X's Not-a-Bot terms and conditions say that "X may modify, pause, or discontinue the Program at any time with no refund to you." Source

Links on Musk-led platform now display article images without headlines. Elon Musk doesn't want any news headlines on the social network formerly named Twitter. A change that started rolling out yesterday strips headlines out of news links, which Musk claims will make links look better on the social network that he renamed X. "This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics," Musk wrote in a twitter.com post on August 22 after the change was reported to be in the works. The change is now live on the mobile app and web version but hasn't made its way to all of the company's apps. News link headlines continue to be displayed today on the Mac app, which is still called Twitter and hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Previously, posting a news link on X/Twitter would create a box with the article's lead image, headline, and the domain of the news site. Now, a news link on X is just the article image with the site domain (e.g., arstechnica.com) superimposed on the bottom left. Clicking the image will take you to the news site's article. A tweeter (or Xer, as Musk prefers) can still post the headline and/or a description of the article in the main text field. If the user doesn't do that, the post won't have any text describing what the article is about. Here's what links look like before and after the change: Before After Fortune reported in August that the change was in the works. "It's something Elon wants. They were running it by advertisers, who didn't like it, but it's happening," Fortune quoted a source as saying. The article said Musk's intent "is that individuals sharing this type of content will be forced to write a more engaging post." Referrals to news sites were already plunging While the change is potentially confusing for users, it might not make a big difference for news organizations that already weren't getting much traffic from the site. Referrals to news sites from Twitter/X and Facebook have been plunging since August 2020, according to Similarweb data cited in an Axios report this week. Musk indicated that he wants news organizations to "post content in long form" directly on the social platform. Responding to a twitter.com post yesterday about the declining referrals from social networks to news sites, Musk wrote, "Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don't get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform." Musk has fought with news organizations numerous times, for example, by calling The New York Times "propaganda" and labeling NPR as "state-affiliated media." Yesterday, he wrote, "I almost never read legacy news anymore." Some news organizations, such as NPR and PBS, have stopped tweeting from their main accounts. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022, a purchase that saddled the firm with large debt payments. In May, Fidelity estimated the company value at $15 billion. X's daily active users have reportedly fallen 3.7 percent, to 245 million, since Musk bought the company then called Twitter. The Musk-led social network's US ad revenue "has declined at least 55 percent year-over-year each month" since the Musk takeover, according to third-party data described in a Reuters article yesterday. Source

"I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite." The Internet is aflame this morning with the prospect of a cage match between two of the tech industry's most prominent and controversial leaders. Ready to rumble in the red corner is Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. And in the blue corner, we have the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. As the BBC and multiple other outlets have confirmed, Zuckerberg was entirely serious when he accepted Musk's offer of a cage match by saying "send me location." On Wednesday evening, Musk then replied with "Vegas Octagon." This was a reference to the fenced-in area used for Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Las Vegas. Given the humorous nature of Musk's other responses to the proposed fight, such as "I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus', where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing," it seems probable that he is not overly serious. While Musk has the definite advantage in size, he is 12 years older than Zuckerberg, and the Facebook founder frequently trains in mixed-martial arts. Nonetheless, the feud between the two tech billionaires is absolutely legitimate. And what most of the coverage of this "cage match" exchange has missed is the origin of the dispute. It came nearly seven years ago when Facebook leased part of the bandwidth on an Israeli-built satellite, Amos-6. Zuckerberg intended for this bandwidth to provide some areas of Africa with Internet access to Facebook. Starts with a rocket This $200 million satellite was due to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket in early September, 2016. On the morning of September 1, to save a single day in the pre-launch preparation process, SpaceX had already affixed the satellite atop a Falcon 9 rocket ahead of its static fire test. And the countdown was going smoothly, until it wasn't. Completely out of the blue, the rocket exploded violently, showering pieces of the vehicle into the swamplands for miles around. The satellite swan-dived to the ground, a total, fiery loss. The Amos-6 accident—known internally at SpaceX as "Flight 29"—was a wrenching failure for a launch company. With the destruction of the Space Launch Complex-40 pad, SpaceX had no other pads in service at the time, and it had no rockets to launch. Additionally, it was the company's second Falcon 9 failure in 15 months. Musk was sleeping at his home in Los Angeles at the time of the accident. He awoke to the news of the failure and arrived at the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California, about the same time that Zuckerberg took to Facebook to vent his frustrations. "As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent," Zuckerberg wrote. This was not well received at SpaceX, where employees were distraught and pulling themselves together to begin their second failure investigation in a little more than a year. The sentiment shared by Musk, the company's president, Gwynne Shotwell, and others was essentially that Zuckerberg was an "asshole" for what he had written, and when he had done so. Delete Facebook The emerging feud took another step forward a couple of years later when Musk deleted the Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla amid the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal. This was in March 2018, when it was revealed that a British data firm that contracted with the Donald Trump presidential campaign had retained private data from 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it. Essentially, Musk piled onto the "Delete Facebook" movement, saying he "didn’t realize" that SpaceX even had a Facebook page and that Tesla’s "looked lame anyway." The two pages were promptly taken down. The tensions between the two billionaires have ratcheted up over the last year as Musk began his adventures in Twitterland as a social media overlord. This brought him into direct competition with Facebook. Zuckerberg has responded by saying Facebook is working on its own version of a service like Twitter. Source

Thousands of Twitter users across several countries were unable to access the social media site, or faced difficulty and delays, Saturday. “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” are the two top trending topics on the app in the US, for those who have use of it. The former had over 40,000 tweets as of Saturday noon. Reports of outages began around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and shot up through the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector showed more than 7,400 outage reports across the website. Users, including CNN journalists, flagged that their feeds weren’t loading and that they were met with an error message saying, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” Others reported errors saying the site cannot retrieve tweets. Musk changes policy Hours after users began reporting the problems, billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted that the site had applied temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, he tweeted, while unverified accounts are limited to just 600. New unverified accounts are at 300 posts a day. Musk began offering a blue verification check mark for users who sign up for its Twitter Blue subscription service to grow revenue. Later, Musk posted he will increase the limit “soon” to 8,000 tweets a day for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts. Many expressed their frustration ith the connection problems. Other trending topics in the US included: “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.” Just yesterday, Twitter appeared to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account. It was not clear whether the change was an intentional policy update or a glitch. Most of the reported problems Saturday were on the website, at 44%, followed by 39% of problems reported on the app. CNN has reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji. Twitter users faced similar wide-ranging service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Elon Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions in that instance. Musk is trying to turn around the platform, which faced an exodus of advertisers, with the onboarding of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. Source

FDA reportedly listed dozens of "deficiencies," including serious safety concerns. The Food and Drug Administration denied a human-trials application from Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, in early 2022, citing dozens of concerns about the company's device that employees are still working to address, according to a report by Reuters. The report is based on interviews with seven current and former Neuralink employees. The revelation of the FDA rejection tracks with the thin public progress reports from the company, which place Neuralink behind rivals as well as Musk's ambitious timelines. Musk, who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, said in 2019 that the company aimed to start human trials by the end of 2020 and held lofty goals of curing spinal cord injuries and dementia. In a November 2022 presentation, which showed little technological progress, Musk said the company was still about six months away from human trials. According to a company document from last fall, Neuralink expected to get FDA authorization for trials by March 7—next week. But employees who spoke with Reuters said they are not confident they'll get it, with one calling it a "gamble." The FDA's rejection last year reportedly listed dozens of "deficiencies" that Neuralink needs to address before its device can move to human brains. Some concerns were deemed relatively minor by employees who read the FDA's document and spoke with Reuters. But others were significant. The FDA was particularly concerned about the safety of the rechargeable lithium batteries Neuralink proposed for its device. The regulator said the company needed to do animal testing to show the battery was very unlikely to malfunction, which could damage brain tissue. Another reportedly serious concern from the FDA was that the implant's tiny wires—which are thinner than individual human hairs—could migrate into the brain, potentially causing inflammation, rupturing blood vessels, and impairing brain function. The FDA was also concerned about the device overheating and questioned whether it could be removed from people's brains without causing damage. While Neuralink may be able to address and overcome all of the FDA's concerns, the company will need to do more animal testing—which current and former employees say Neuralink has handled irresponsibly in the past. Specifically, some have alleged that the company abused research animals, including euthanizing more animals than necessary and performing "hack job" surgeries to meet Musk's rushed deadlines. The Department of Agriculture has opened an investigation into Neuralink over possible animal welfare violations. Similarly, the Department of Transportation is investigating whether Neuralink violated federal transportation regulations when it allegedly shipped brain implants removed from research monkeys infected with a number of dangerous pathogens. Neuralink did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Ars. Reuters also reported that Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment. Musk’s bid to start Neuralink human trials denied by FDA in 2022, report says

Elon Musk has talked about the potential benefits, and the potential dangers, of AI long before OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in November, followed by the announcements of Google's Bard and Microsoft's new Bing chatbots. This week, Musk continued to state his concerns over the rise of AI at the World Government Summit in Dubai, according to CNBC. Musk said "One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI." He added, "It’s both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability." However, he said that with that promise and capability "comes great danger.” Ironically Musk is one of the original co-founders of OpenAI, the company that launched the ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022. It quickly jump started the current AI trend in the tech industry. Musk left the company in 2018. This week, he said the release of ChatGPT gave the general public a better understanding about the current advancements in AI. He added, "The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people." Musk also repeated what he said about AI several years ago about the need to regulate its use. This week, he stated that while regulation could slow down its development, he believes that might be good in the long run. He added, "It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine.” Elon Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI, thinks AI is a huge risk "to the future of civilization

The drama around Elon Musk's Twitter engagement has just unfolded a new layer. Many Twitter users, followers and non-followers alike, were welcomed by Musk's tweets in the For You tab earlier this week. Now, a report by Platformer reveals that the tweet flood was rather collateral damage than a glitch that was assumed initially. As per the report, a team of around eighty Twitter engineers was assembled and its task was to figure out the reason behind the CEO's decreasing Twitter reach. One possible reason given was that many users might have blocked or muted Musk in recent months. He has been in the limelight ever since the $44 billion takeover became the talk of the town. However, another reason given by the team was that Twitter's system observes how a user's tweets perform in the For You tab for both followers and non-followers. And Musk's tweets appeared around half the time than the engineers thought they should. Some code changes were implemented to artificially boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000. The code changes (internally known as "power user multiplier") also allowed his tweets to dodge Twitter's filters responsible for showing users the best content possible and filters that stopped a single account from flooding the For You feed. It's no doubt that the consequences of the code tweaks attracted criticism on the microblogging site. Musk had to show up for damage control with an acknowledgment and the 'forced to drink milk' pornographic meme. Platformer has learned that the artificial boost is still in place although its factor has been toned down to less than 1,000. A couple of tweets Musk made on Tuesday attracted around 50 million views. An internal estimate shows his tweets appear in front of around 90% of his followers. But still, a significant fluctuation is present for the CEO's account which had close to 129 million followers at the time of writing. The reach could be around 8 million for some tweets and can even shoot up to 135 million or higher for the more "popular" ones. Source: Platformer Elon Musk's tweets invading your Twitter feed wasn't exactly by accident

In a bizarre incident, numerous users and publications have reported on Monday that their Twitter 'For You' feed is flooded with Elon Musk's tweets. This comes days after the business mogul and Twitter CEO complained that his tweets weren't getting enough reach and even fired a Twitter employee in the process. In our own testing, we were surprised to also see Musk's tweets and replies in around twenty posts we scrolled. While the glitch is widespread, The Verge notes that while not every Twitter feed is filled with these 'all-Musk' tweets, the posts are appearing even for some accounts that don't follow him. Musk tweeted over the weekend that he worked with the engineering team and fixed the visibility issue that prevented "up to 95%" of his tweets from "getting delivered at all." As of now, we haven't heard about any fix or an official word from Twitter on what is causing people's feeds to get 'Musked.' Just recently, the company announced a bunch of updates, including 4,000-character support for Twitter Blue users, a daily limit on tweets, and a $100 monthly fee for API access. [Update]: Elon Musk addressed the issue on Tuesday via his Twitter account and requested users to wait for some time. "Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”," he wrote. Elon Musk has suddenly appeared in everyone's Twitter feed and no one knows why

Board vows to enforce $44 billion agreement despite Musk's waffling and complaints. With Elon Musk waffling on his commitment to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Twitter's board of directors yesterday said it intends to enforce the merger agreement at the original price. "The Board and Mr. Musk agreed to a transaction at $54.20 per share. We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement," the Twitter board said in a statement reported by CNN and other media outlets. Twitter on Tuesday also released a preliminary proxy statement laying out reasons shareholders should approve the deal. "Twitter is committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable," the company said in a press release announcing the proxy statement. Exit options The sale agreement lets either Twitter or Musk kill the deal and pay a breakup fee of $1 billion under certain circumstances. For example, Musk would have to pay the termination fee if he "fails to consummate the Merger as required pursuant to, and in the circumstances specified in, the Merger Agreement." However, Musk can't necessarily get out of it based solely on his complaints about the number of spam accounts on the social network. As Bloomberg wrote, the merger agreement also "includes a specific performance provision that allows Twitter to force Musk to consummate the deal, according to the filing. That could mean that, should the deal end up in court, Twitter might secure an order obligating Musk to complete the merger rather than winning monetary compensation for any violations of it." That provision can be found in section 9.9 of the merger deal. If Twitter meets its obligations under the agreement, it "shall be entitled to specific performance or other equitable remedy" to "cause the Equity Investor [Musk] to fund the Equity Financing, or to enforce the Equity Investor's obligation to fund the Equity Financing directly, and to consummate the Closing," the agreement says. Twitter and Musk agreed that if either party fails to take required actions to consummate the agreement, there would be "irreparable damage for which monetary damages, even if available, would not be an adequate remedy." Twitter or Musk would thus "be entitled to an injunction, specific performance and other equitable relief to prevent breaches of this Agreement and to enforce specifically the terms and provisions hereof, in addition to any other remedy to which they are entitled at law or in equity." The deal also has a non-disparagement clause that says Musk can tweet about the merger "so long as such Tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives," but Musk has repeatedly criticized Twitter and its representatives since signing the deal. Musk threatened to kill deal over spam data Musk on Tuesday said the "deal cannot move forward" until Twitter provides data behind its estimate of spam accounts. He also said this week that renegotiating the deal at a lower price is "not out of the question." But Musk's offer to buy Twitter waived "business due diligence," and the Twitter board relied on that commitment when it approved the transaction and recommended that shareholders vote for it. Twitter's proxy statement told shareholders that one reason to approve the agreement is "the likelihood that other potential acquirers would require substantial due diligence, creating a delay and risk to reaching the signing of such a potential transaction." As we've previously written, Musk says he thinks at least 20 percent of Twitter accounts are fake or spam, while Twitter said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that fewer than 5 percent of monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) are spam or fake. Those numbers are not incompatible, as Musk seems to be talking about all accounts, while Twitter's 5 percent stat refers to accounts that are logged in and can see ads each day. Yet Musk has insisted that Twitter's data is wrong and rejected the explanation offered by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk “has produced no evidence at all” Bloomberg Opinion columnist Matt Levine took Musk to task for trying to halt the deal over spam numbers despite no new information about spam becoming available since Twitter accepted his offer to buy the company: He has produced no evidence at all that Twitter's estimates are wrong, and certainly not that they are materially wrong or made in bad faith. (Musk can only get out of the deal if Twitter's filings are wrong in a way that would cause a "material adverse effect" on Twitter, which is vanishingly unlikely.) His own supposed methodology for counting spam bots is laughable. Yesterday, Twitter's chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal, tweeted a thread explaining in general terms how Twitter estimates that fake accounts represent fewer than 5 percent of its count of active users and how this analysis can't be easily replicated by outsiders (because they don't know which accounts are real, and also because they don't know which accounts Twitter counts as daily active users). It seems clear that Agrawal's thoughtful answer is basically correct. Musk responded with a poop emoji. More important, nothing has changed about the bot problem since Musk signed the merger agreement. Twitter has published the same qualified estimate—that fewer than 5 percent of monetizable accounts are fake—for the last eight years. Musk knew those estimates and declined to do any nonpublic due diligence before signing the merger agreement. He knew about the spam bot problem before signing the merger agreement, as we know because he talked about it constantly, including while announcing the merger agreement. If he didn't want to buy Twitter because there are spam bots, he should not have signed a contract to buy Twitter. No new information has come to light about spam bots in the last three weeks. It's more likely that Musk is "angling to reprice the deal for straightforward market reasons" amid a rough stretch for Tesla and other stocks, but "that is very clearly not allowed by the merger agreement that he signed: Public-company merger agreements allocate broad market risk to the buyer, and he can't get out just because stocks went down," Levine wrote. Twitter's stock price was a bit over $37 as of this writing. Twitter board tells Elon Musk: We will not alter the deal

Musk replied to Twitter CEO's spam explanation with criticism and a poop emoji. Elon Musk has cast more doubt on his willingness to buy Twitter, criticizing the company's CEO and saying the "deal cannot move forward" until Twitter provides data behind its estimate of spam accounts. Musk also said this week that renegotiating the deal at a lower price is "not out of the question." Musk says he thinks at least 20 percent of Twitter accounts are fake or spam, while Twitter said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that fewer than 5 percent of monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) are spam or fake. Those numbers are not incompatible, as Musk seems to be talking about all accounts, while Twitter's 5 percent stat refers to accounts that are logged in and can see ads each day. But Musk has insisted that Twitter's data is wrong, and he demanded to see proof and ratcheted up his claims in a tweet on Tuesday: 20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher. My offer was based on Twitter's SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does. Twitter CEO explained 5 percent estimate Musk was referring to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who wrote a thread on Monday describing how Twitter made its estimate. "Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUs*. We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years." Twitter's "actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5 percent—based on the methodology outlined above. The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter," Agrawal wrote. "Unfortunately, we don't believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can't share). Externally, it's not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day." Agrawal also wrote that Twitter "shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you." Musk's ability to get more details from Twitter may be limited because his offer to buy the company waived "business due diligence." Twitter said one of the reasons its board accepted Musk's offer is "the likelihood that other potential acquirers would require substantial due diligence, creating a delay and risk to reaching the signing of such a potential transaction." Musk responds with poop emoji Musk responded to Agrawal with a poop emoji and asked, "So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter." Musk also asked Agrawal if Twitter has tried calling users to verify whether they're real. Musk replied, "absolutely," to a tweet saying, "If Twitter lied about how many actual users they have to the SEC, we're looking at a company that has perpetuated fraud on its shareholders and advertisers. Big trouble for the Twitter commies." Another tweet Musk agreed with claimed, "There's a high possibility that the number of fake/spam/bot accounts could be well over 50 percent." A video showed Musk saying that Twitter is claiming "the number of real, unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95 percent." However, Twitter's definition of monetizable daily active users doesn't require all of them to make comments every day. The metric includes "accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions," which can include users who merely view other people's tweets. Musk previously cast doubt on his willingness to complete the Twitter deal on Friday, when he wrote that the purchase is "temporarily on hold" but added that he remained "committed" to the acquisition. Later on Friday, Musk tweeted that his "team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter" to come up with an estimate of fake accounts. When asked for his methodology, he replied, "Ignore first 1000 followers, then pick every 10th. I'm open to better ideas." Musk says he might try to renegotiate price The sale agreement requires either Twitter or Musk to pay a breakup fee of $1 billion to the other if the deal is terminated under some circumstances, such as if Twitter sells to someone else or if Musk fails to provide the necessary funds to complete the purchase. The deal has a non-disparagement clause that says Musk can tweet about the merger "so long as such Tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives." Musk has nonetheless repeatedly criticized the company, including by saying that banning Donald Trump was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid." Musk discussed the number of fake accounts on Twitter in an appearance at a tech conference on Monday. "Currently what I'm being told is that there's just no way to know the number of bots," Musk said, according to a Bloomberg article. "It's like, as unknowable as the human soul." Musk was asked at the conference if he might renegotiate the deal at a lower price. He replied, "I mean, it's not out of the question... the more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow," according to The Washington Post. Musk's $44 billion deal to buy Twitter amounts to $54.20 per share. After Musk's public criticism of the company's spam-account estimates, the stock price dropped from $45.08 to $40.72 on Friday. Twitter stock was about $37.50 as of this writing. Musk says Twitter must show data behind spam estimate or he’ll kill the deal

Last month, Twitter announced that it has struck a deal with Elon Musk to acquire the micro-blogging platform for $44 billion or $54.20 per share in cash. Now, Musk has confirmed that the deal has been put on hold. According to Musk's latest tweet, the Twitter acquisition has been put on hold as he verifies Twitter's claim that less than 5% of the users are bot/fake accounts. Last week, Twitter disclosed that it estimates fake or spam account count to be less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter. According to the terms of the agreement, Musk will have to pay a billion dollar penalty if he backs out of the Twitter deal. In a subsequent tweet, Musk said he is committed to acquiring Twitter: Furthermore, Musk said he will be taking a random sample of 100 follows of Twitter's official account to verify the company's claim that less than 5% of the users are fake or spam accounts: Meanwhile, Wall Street did not like the news of acquisition being put on hold as share prices of Twitter fell more than 10% during the pre-trade window on Friday. Twitter's share closed at $40.60 on Friday, down from $45.07 on Thursday and roughly 23% down from Musk's buying price of $54.20. Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold because of bots

The richest man on the planet has just shared some controversial takes on copyright and the DMCA. Elon Musk, who might take over Twitter, believes that the current copyright term goes "absurdly far" in protecting creators. In addition, he characterizes the "overzealous" DMCA as a "plague on humanity." Earlier this week, Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill that aims to shorten the copyright term to a maximum 56 years. The controversial proposal is a direct attack on Disney, which previously spoke out against the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida. The chances of this bill passing are rather slim. The Democrats currently have a majority in the Senate and it’s unclear whether the proposal is broadly supported by Hawley’s Republican colleagues. On top of that, a 56-year copyright term is at odds with the Berne Convention. Many people believe that the proposal is mostly a political stunt, one that made headlines all over the world. A few hours ago it also reached the Twitter feed of Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, who doesn’t shy away from controversy himself. Musk’s Copyright & DMCA Critique Responding to a Slashdot headline, Musk backs the general idea of limiting the current protections, which can last up to 120 years after the creation of a work. “Current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator,” Musk notes. This type of critique on the copyright protection term isn’t new and Musk is known for floating bold statements. That said, coming from someone of his stature, it’s worth noting. The same is true for the follow-up tweet. “Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity,” Musk wrote in a follow-up. The DMCA has nothing to do with the copyright term. Instead, it largely dictates how online services should respond to copyright takedown notices. Platforms that stick to these rules will get “safe harbor” protections that shield them from liability. U.S. lawmakers are currently considering updating the DMCA, potentially making the rules more strict. This includes a proposal to make it mandatory for online services to implement standard technical protection measures. It’s not clear at all what Musk means by “overzealous” and how the DMCA is a “plague on humanity.” However, Musk might believe that the current law is already leading to overbroad removals. Twitter & the DMCA Just how serious Musk is about these comments is unknown. That said, now that he considers taking over Twitter as a business, the DMCA is certainly very relevant for him. And with the power and influence he has, copyright holders could get a little concerned. Through DMCA notices, rightsholders have asked Twitter to remove millions of tweets and files from its platform in recent years. The company has to comply with the law and Musk can’t change that. However, he can rally against plans to make the DMCA more strict. For now, this is all speculation and we don’t even know whether Musk is serious about this critique. Just shortly after calling out the DMCA as a plague on humanity, he oved on to condemning paper straws. — Update: Musk’s Twitter takeover plans are not “on hold”. Elon Musk: “Overzealous DMCA Is a Plague On Humanity”

Musk expects 69 million Twitter Blue subscribers by 2025 Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and Twitter’s new owner — expects Twitter to earn almost $10 billion in revenue from subscriptions by 2028, a projection that doubles the $5 billion in total revenue the platform made last year, according to a report from The New York Times. In a pitch deck viewed by the Times, Musk gave investors a taste of what to expect under his ownership. This reportedly includes driving up Twitter Blue subscribers to 69 million by 2025 and more than doubling that number to 159 million by 2028. Launched last year, Twitter Blue is the service’s $2.99 / month subscription that gives users access to an “undo tweet” button, app customization, ad-free articles, and other exclusive features. Musk expects a huge growth in total Twitter users as well, growing from the 217 million users reported last year to 600 million Twitter users in 2025 and, eventually, 931 million in 2028. The pitch deck also outlines plans for an unnamed subscription service outside of Blue, called “X,” which Musk expects to bring in nine million subscribers in 2023 and 104 million by 2028. Earlier this week, Musk hinted at charging governments and corporations a “slight cost” to use Twitter. Whatever subscription “X” may be, revenue from it and Blue combined is supposed to hit the $10 billion mark by 2028, making up a large fraction of the $26.4 billion in total revenue Musk thinks the service will reach that same year. According to the Times, Twitter is supposed to make up the rest of its total projected revenue with ads, something that Musk predicts Twitter will earn about $12 billion through by 2028. Twitter has been reliant on advertising as its primary stream of revenue in the past, but Musk, who said in a now-deleted tweet that Twitter should remove ads for paid subscribers, wants ads to make up just 45 percent of Twitter’s total revenue. Musk’s pitch deck reportedly includes plans to rake in $15 million from some sort of payments business as well, which he expects to grow to $1.3 billion by 2028. Twitter currently lets users tip creators, purchase Super Follows, as well as interact with limited shopping features that link users out to vendors’ websites to make purchases. With Musk being one of PayPal’s co-founders, however, he might see some room to expand. The Times notes that Musk also expects Twitter to earn an unspecified portion of revenue through data licensing, a business that involves selling the millions of daily tweets on its platform to companies and developers that analyze the data for market insights or consumer trends. Last year, Twitter earned $572 million (PDF) in data licensing and “other revenue,” but it’s unclear how or if Musk plans on expanding this business. If Twitter were to resell individual tweets, our editor-in-chief Nilay Patel points out that Elon “would have to radically change the terms of service” of Twitter, not to mention face “huge revshare and fair use issues,” as the copyrights of tweets belong to the users who posted them. Building out Twitter’s services will take some work, a likely factor behind Musk’s plans to hire 3,600 additional employees. The Times notes that Musk aims to have 11,072 employees by 2025, although the pitch deck reportedly shows Twitter’s number of employees increasing in 2022 and then dipping in 2023 prior to trending upwards again. Elon Musk thinks he can double Twitter’s revenue through subscriptions alone

The world’s richest man wrote a check his myth can’t cash It’s on. Elon Musk has officially filed to kill his own Twitter acquisition, and Twitter is calling his bluff. They’ll see Musk in court. And while it’s only going to get messier from here, one important verdict has already been rendered by Elon Musk himself: he doesn’t have what it takes to run Twitter. And that’s a damning blow to his own central mythology. We’ll look at the specifics of Musk’s formal SEC filing in a minute, but first it’s important to remember what he’s said about the deal and why he wanted to do it in the first place. It’s not like the world forced the acquisition of a relatively small social network on the world’s richest man. And Musk’s conduct surrounding the deal has been marked by a lot of obvious troll behavior. A reasonable person would conclude he was never serious about it to begin with, which is already leading to a lot of Musk stans and Twitter haters divining a 4D-chess narrative that makes his blunder seem intentional. But. There are some things Musk said in the frenzy of the Twitter takeover that can’t be ignored. That’s because they strike at the heart of what built his original reputation: as a visionary, a bold industrialist, a futurist, and maybe even the guy who would solve climate change and multi-planetary civilization. Sure, lately he works tirelessly to attract a huge base of social reactionaries and various right-wingers who care more about his trolling than the missions of SpaceX or Tesla. But Musk’s real credibility — if he ever had any — was being the face of genuinely huge and ambitious efforts to change the world and make it better. He probably didn’t need to, but he brought that same world-saving energy to the Twitter deal: Musk said he was motivated by the fact that Twitter had become a “de facto town square” and that it’s “really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely.” (He talked about “free speech” a lot during this time.) Speaking at a TED conference, Musk said the deal is not a way to make money. Some of his exact words: “it’s about the future of civilization, but you don’t care about the economics at all.” Later, speaking internally to employees of Twitter, Musk said “I want Twitter to contribute to a better, long-lasting civilization where we better understand the nature of reality.” Musk: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.” These statements stand out above everything else because (a) things that are important to the future of human life are not things you typically troll people about, and (b) that should be especially true if you are Elon Musk, who has spent his entire modern career since Tesla cultivating the idea that he is on a mission to save the future of humanity and spread civilization across the stars. Does he tweet dumb memes a lot? Yes. Did he send a car into space as a joke? Sure. But the missions of his companies are dead serious. Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Neuralink wants to build devices that help people with paralysis to “regain independence.” And SpaceX? That’s about nothing less than “enabling people to live on other planets.” So: Musk has intentionally spent his career leaning into some of the world’s most difficult-to-solve problems. He gives lots of keynotes, throws big ideas on the board, and makes lots of promises. Incidentally, this campaign to save the world earned him one of the biggest and most active fanbases on Twitter. And let’s be real: the man loves to tweet. The only person in the world who might love tweeting more than Elon Musk has been banned from the platform and impeached twice by the United States Congress. But remember: Musk didn’t say “I want to buy Twitter because I love tweeting and I command an army of users here.” He said Twitter was important to the future of human civilization. And so, spiritually, the deal joined the ranks of the Teslas and the SpaceXs of the world. What kind of problems would prevent this man from unlocking Twitter’s true potential? To help steer it and, along with his other companies, help humanity flourish in the future? He only really makes two assertions in his SEC filing: Twitter won’t give him data necessary for him to figure out how many spam bots are on the platform. Twitter fired some people and lost some executives. This is weak crybaby stuff. Musk has been going on about the alleged bot issue for a while, even getting into public beefs with the CEO of Twitter about it. I’m not going to unpack this whole spat — the Delaware Court of Chancery is about to examine that in some detail — but the TL;DR is that Musk wants to tank a huge deal over a problem known to every social media company on the planet, who have all dedicated vast amounts of resources toward fixing over several decades. It’s just a fundamentally unserious position from a guy who is willing to solve world-shaking problems like climate change But let’s assume just for fun that Musk is right. After he started the deal and looked under the hood and laid out his plans for Twitter’s staff, he discovered Twitter’s bot population is more like 20% than 5%. So what? What’s a spread of 90 million users when TikTok and Facebook are ahead of you by billions? If your position is that Mark Zuckerberg is an unelected tyrant of speech, how is abandoning Twitter going to help you take him on? And why would you argue in your SEC filing that revenue from active users is at stake? That doesn’t sound like “not caring about the economics at all.” That sounds like only caring about the economics. And as for blowing the deal because a few Twitter execs fired staff while continuing to operate normally and roll out new features (hi, co-tweeting!) — get real. You’re buying Twitter for $44 billion. It’s yours now. You can clean house if you want to and correct or reverse all of the ill-advised decisions that brought the platform within your sights originally. Nobody will stop you! The SEC couldn’t even get you to stop tweeting! There are many possible theories for why Musk put himself, Twitter, and the world through this charade. But in the end, Musk wrote a check his myth couldn’t cash. We’re left with two possibilities. Either Musk doesn’t think he can do the job he promised at Twitter, and he’s not the world-changing force he’s been made out to be. Or, he was lying about the kinds of lofty ideals and visions that built his companies and his image. What kind of man trolls the world about a better future? Elon Musk proves he’s the wrong man to save the world

The company says it’s suing Musk for trying to back out Following Elon Musk’s notice to Twitter that he wants out of his $44 billion deal to purchase the company, employees have been instructed to not publicly comment on the deal. An internal memo by Twitter’s general counsel and obtained by The Verge says that staffers should “refrain from Tweeting, Slacking, or sharing any commentary about the merger agreement.” The note, which you can read in full below, cites the fact that the merger is an ongoing legal matter. Musk’s team alleges that the company “failed or refused to provide” information about the number of bots on its platform,” and Twitter’s board has announced that it’s suing Musk to ensure that the deal goes through as originally agreed. After the news broke Friday that Musk wanted out of the deal, Twitter employees quickly made some pretty humorous tweets about the situation. One tweeted they had “unilaterally cancelled my mortgage” and were happy they didn’t have to pay it anymore, referring to the fact that it’s very unclear whether Musk can legally just say “nah” and walk away. Another tweet referred to a staff trip to Disney that was canceled as a cost-cutting measure after the Musk deal was announced. Here’s the memo sent that Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, sent to staff on Friday: Team, Today we received a notice of purported termination from Elon Musk, and the Twitter Board issued the following statement in response (see our Chairman Bret Taylor’s Tweet here): “The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.” Given that this is an ongoing legal matter, you should refrain from Tweeting, Slacking, or sharing any commentary about the merger agreement. We will continue to share information when we are able, but please know we are going to be very limited on what we can share in the meantime. I know this is an uncertain time, and we appreciate your patience and ongoing commitment to the important work we have underway. Twitter tells employees not to tweet about Elon Musk deal