Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now he’s rebranding it as X. Signs have gone up (and back down), icons are changing, and an old plan is new.
How’d we get here?
On April 4th, 2022, we learned that Musk had purchased enough shares of Twitter to become its largest individual shareholder. Eventually, he followed up with an unsolicited offer to buy 100 percent of Twitter’s shares for $54.20 each, or about $44 billion. Twitteraccepted Musk’s offer, but then things got weird because he tried to cancel the deal.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about bots and text messages, but in the end, Musk settled on buying the company rather than facing a deposition or Chancery Court trial and eventually strode into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.
Since then, there have been layoffs, more layoffs, and even more layoffs — plus drama over Substack, unpaid bills, and blue checkmarks. With ad revenue still down from previous years, Elon finally abdicated the role of CEO in May 2023, installing longtime NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino.
Read on for the latest updates about what’s going on inside Twitter right now.
Mar 18
Emma Roth
Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled
Don Lemon has published the “tense” interview with Elon Musk that got his show canceled on X. During the interview, Lemon touches on various topics related to hate speech on X and Musk’s own views on right-wing conspiracy theories, with the billionaire becoming noticeably irritated by the interview’s end.
Things start to take a turn about halfway into the interview. Lemon asks Musk about his comments on illegal immigration and the far-right “great replacement” theory and then turns to the topic of content moderation. Lemon asks whether better content moderation on X would let Musk avoid some of the criticism of his posts about the “great replacement” theory.
Read Article >
Mar 18
Emilia David
xAI open sources Grok
On March 11th, Elon Musk said xAI would open source its AI chatbot Grok, and now an open release is available on GitHub. This will allow researchers and developers to build on the model and impact how xAI updates Grok in the future as it competes with rival tech from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others.
A company blog post explains that this open release includes the “base model weights and network architecture” of the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1.” It goes on to say the model is from a checkpoint last October and hasn’t undergone fine-tuning “for any specific application, such as dialogue.”
Read Article >
Mar 13
Emma Roth
Elon Musk cancels Don Lemon’s show on X after a ‘tense’ interview
Elon Musk canceled Don Lemon’s show on X over some interview questions Musk didn’t like. Lemon says that Musk terminated their partnership just hours after a “tense” interview between him and the platform’s owner.
Lemon doesn’t say what exactly transpired during his interview, but he does say that Musk “is mad” at him. “Throughout our conversation, I kept reiterating to him that although it was tense at times, I thought it was good for people to see and hear our exchange, and that they would learn from our conversation,” Lemon says in a video posted to X.
Read Article >
Mar 8
Richard Lawler
X adds “Articles.” They’re blog posts, but only for the most Premium posters.
If you pay for the platform formerly known as Twitter, then you can post Articles on X. Better known as blog posts, they can feature stylized text, embedded images, and videos.
They’ll show up on the timeline with other tweets, but to publish one, you must belong to a Verified Organization or pay $16 monthly for the Premium Plus package. $8 Premium or $3 Basic subscribers will have to live without it, post regular tweets, or use Tumblr.
Mar 5
Emma Roth
Twitter’s music label legal trouble might have legs
The music labels suing Twitter — now X — for copyright infringement can move forward with parts of their lawsuit. In a filing on Tuesday, US District Judge Aleta A. Trauger partially denied X’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it’s still not clear “to what extent X Corp. may be liable for the infringing acts of users on its platform.”
Last year, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) sued X for $250 million on behalf of Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and other major publishers.
Read Article >
Mar 4
Richard Lawler
Fired Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk for over $128 million
Elon Musk fired a lot of people after he took over Twitter, but the first ones to go were several of its top executives. Now former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett are suing Musk and the company now known as X, saying they’re owed more than $128 million in severance payments, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Under Musk’s stewardship, X’s aversion to paying those it owes has practically become a trope (this is referenced in the lawsuit, along with a link to a page that tracks lawsuits against Twitter for non-payment and a note that the person who runs the site has been banned by X).
Read Article >
Feb 25
Richard Lawler
The latest ‘Woj bomb’ was just a scam NFT tweet from a hacked account
People who still use NBA Top Shot were the primary targets of a scam tweet posted to ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski’s account on X Saturday evening at about 6:30PM ET. The tweet referred to NBA Top Shot as a “popular” NFT platform, despite the fact that current activity levels are a tiny fraction of what we saw during its peak, and falsely claimed a “free NFT pack is available to all customers.”
The tweet linked visitors to a scam version of the NBA Top Shot website (the link went to a .org address instead of the official site’s .com URL) that could attempt to drain assets from people who give it access to their crypto wallets. About a half hour later, the official Top Shot account posted, saying, “There is NO Free Airdrop happening on NBA Top Shot at this time, Please be careful and always double check links.”
Read Article >
Feb 20
Richard Lawler
X restores Yulia Navalnaya’saccount after briefly suspending it.
Yulia accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and vowed to continue her husband’s fight against Putin’s “crazy regime.” Then, on Tuesday morning, her X account was abruptly suspended for a short time.
A message from the @Support account followed up saying, “Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules. We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”
[X]
Feb 15
Joanna Nelius
One of the last ways to access Twitter without an account is dead.
Nitter, the open-source, tracker-free Twitter front end, joins the other great third-party apps in the API afterlife.
Activist IT collective NoLog, which ran one of the largest Nitter instances, has shut it down, three weeks after Nitter’s developer said the project was dead.
Feb 12
Richard Lawler
X will allow advertisers to only run ads on selected profiles.
Elon Musk’s revamped X ad business has included a “revenue sharing” program that requires payment to have the potential of getting paid and shown ads alongside white nationalist profiles.
X, as it attempts to become a YouTube alternative, says it has over 80,000 creators monetizing their posts and is trying to address brand safety issues with Creator Targeting:
This means giving advertisers more control to be able to use the self-serve X Ads Manager to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.
Soon we’ll add the ability to serve ads only on an individual creator’s profile – completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most.
It didn’t say how big of a cut creators will get if their profile is targeted or if they can choose which advertisers are shown.
Feb 9
Richard Lawler
As the Super Bowl rolls into Las Vegas, X cuts a deal to advertise gambling odds.
Besides its arrangement for weekly 5-minute WWE matches, X is partnering with BetMGM to slap gambling odds at the top of event pages for sporting events, starting with the Super Bowl.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is far from the only one suddenly flooded with odds and gambling promos (see ESPN Bet). A recent 60 Minutes report dug into how the services use data to target when someone’s most likely to place a bet.
Image: Screenshot by Richard Lawler
Jan 28
Wes Davis
X plans to create a content moderation ‘headquarters’ in Austin
X says it will hire 100 full-time employees for a new trust and safety office in Austin, Texas, according to a Saturday report by Bloomberg. The plan comes, as the article notes, just a few days before CEO Linda Yaccarino’s scheduled January 31st hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding X’s handling of child sexual exploitation moderation.
The team would reportedly focus mainly on CSE and would be the first proper trust and safety team since Elon Musk gutted it shortly after purchasing the platform formerly known as Twitter. X updated a blog post about its CSE moderation approach to mention the new office yesterday, as well, though it doesn’t reveal what the new team will be doing, nor when the office will open.
Read Article >
Jan 24
Amrita Khalid
The X iPhone app added passwordless logins with passkeys
X is now supporting passkey log-ins oniPhones and iPads, granting members access to the security feature regardless of their “Premium” status. Generating a passkey for X allows users to completely skip entering a password when they log in to their accounts and instead rely on the device’s security (with Face ID, Touch ID, or your device’s passcode).
For now, passkeys are only available in the US, and X hasn’t revealed when it’s rolling out the login technology on Android, for desktop operating systems, or in other countries. Also, X’s rollout of passkeys doesn’t seem to be complete yet (some users reported still not having access as of Tuesday night on the East Coast), so don’t fret if the feature hasn’t popped up yet.
Read Article >
Jan 22
Jacob Kastrenakes
Why Elon Musk needs MrBeast
Exactly how much money can you make by uploading a video to X? The going assumption has been that X —like Twitter before it —is a poor platform for video creators that can’t compete with YouTube and TikTok in terms of monetization and reach. So there’s been a lot riding on the results of a recent test by MrBeast, who aimed to see whether he could actually make money on Elon Musk’s platform.
Last week, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, posted a video to Musk’s platform with the explicit goal of seeing “how much ad revenue a video on X would make.” Musk had previously encouraged MrBeast to post to X, and he sent out an excited message shortly after the test went up. “First MrBeast video posted directly on 𝕏!” Musk wrote. Now, a week later, Donaldson has shared data on how his first video performed: it made around $260,000 across more than 150 million views.
Read Article >
Jan 15
Richard Lawler
Elon Musk is uncomfortable with the amount of control Elon Musk has over Tesla.
The Tesla CEO and X CTO / owner writes that “I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” and proposed building products (like Grok?) outside of Tesla instead.
Musk’s stake in the company reportedly dropped to 13.4 percent in 2022 as he sold shares and acquired X, then known as Twitter. Now there’s this statement, a recent WSJ report citing concerns about drug use, and... Tesla’s Q4 earnings report coming up on January 24th.
Image: @elonmusk (X)
Jan 10
Wes Davis
X says charges were dropped against a student who posted about free food.
X’s news account claimed responsibility for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne having “rescinded its disciplinary action against Juan David Campolargo,” a student who had gotten in trouble for an account that pointed to events on campus that had free food available.
The low-stakes case was the first apparent instance of the site defending a user in trouble for their posts. The Verge has reached out to the university for confirmation.
Jan 10
Emma Roth
Even X is giving up on NFTs.
The Elon Musk-owned platform quietly removed the option for Premium subscribers to use NFTs as their profile pictures, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. X also scrubbed all mention of NFT profile pictures from its support page.
This comes a little less than one year after Meta ended tests that let users share NFTs on Instagram and Facebook.
Jan 9
Richard Lawler
X is still promising peer to peer payments in 2024.
X CEO and former award-winning DEI executive Linda Yaccarino is promoting the company’s 2024 plans for AI and Grok, as well as the “video first” experience that included so many unauthorized Super Mario Bros. Movie streams.
Upcoming features mentioned include a “see dissimilar posts” option, as well as payments. The latter is something Elon mentioned when he took over the company, and, as Liz Lopatto explains, has been a pursuit of his for much longer than that.
Elon Muskwants a second chance to fail at X
Elizabeth Lopatto
Jan 3
Jay Peters
X once again removes headlines from article links.
That sentence may look familiar! Headlines were added back on the web yesterday, but this morning, I noticed they were gone.
X owner Elon Musk said in November that titles would appear over URL cards “in an upcoming release;” hopefully they officially roll out soon.
X once again adds headlines to article links — but with tiny text
Jay Peters
Jan 2
Jay Peters
Maybe $1,000 per month was too expensive.
X (formerly Twitter) now has a “basic” tier for Verified Organizations, which gets you a gold checkmark badge (and a few other benefits) for $200 per month instead of $1,000 per month for “full access.”
While X claims this new tier is “designed for smaller businesses,” the more affordable plan is perhaps an admission that not enough businesses are paying for the more expensive plan.
Jan 2
Jay Peters
X once again adds headlines to article links — but with tiny text
Update January 3rd, 12:35PM ET: X has reverted this change on the web, so it seems the full headlines aren’t rolling out widely just yet. Our original article follows.
After removing headlines from URL cards on X (formerly Twitter), the platform is adding them back — but they don’t work quite the same as before. Some of us at The Verge are seeing on the web that headlines and website title pages are now appearing over the images that link to those pages, which makes it a lot easier to know what you’re clicking on.
Read Article >
Jan 2
Jon Porter
X said to be worth less than 29 percent of what Musk paid.
Fidelity, an investor that put over $300 million into Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now believes the company is worth 71.5 percent less than the $44 billion paid for it, Axios reports. That implies a total valuation of between $12 and $13 billion and includes a drop of 10.7 percent in the month of November alone when Musk told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves.
Dec 23, 2023
Richard Lawler
Elon Musk’s X can’t shake off a lawsuit over millions of dollars in unpaid Twitter bonuses.
In this entry into the list of lawsuits over unpaid Twitter bills, Courthouse News reports Mark Schobinger’s class action lawsuit is over unpaid 2022 annual bonuses. Schobinger, notably, is Twitter’s former senior director of compensation.
He says execs’ promises of a 50 percent payout for those who remained through Q1 of 2023 kept employees around during Elon’s “hardcore” takeover, but now the company argues its oral promise wasn’t enforceable. The judge didn’t buy that, writing that “Twitter’s contrary arguments all fail,” so the case will proceed.
Schobinger v. Twitter (Order re: Motion to Dismiss)
[DocumentCloud]
Dec 21, 2023
Richard Lawler
X was down
Elon Musk’s X platform, previously known as Twitter, mostly stopped working for more than an hour. In mobile apps, the timelines wouldn’t refresh, and on the web, a placeholder message proclaimed, “Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.” The global internet trackers at Netblocks noted a “significant international outage” that wasn’t linked to any country-level blocks or filtering.
At about 1:35AM ET, shortly after this article was published, access to timelines was restored, although we haven’t heard what caused the problem.
Read Article >
Dec 13, 2023
Richard Lawler
An X outage broke all outgoing links, again
As if publishers and users didn’t have enough reasons to reconsider their connections to the platform formerly known as Twitter, all outgoing links from X stopped working Wednesday afternoon. A problem with the URL redirect that captures activity before sending users on their way sent people to a simple error page saying, “This page is down. I scream. You scream. We all scream... for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things up and running soon.”
After about an hour or so of that happening, the problem was fixed, although we haven’t seen any public acknowledgment of the issue from the @Support account, CEO Linda Yaccarino, or X owner / CTO Elon Musk.
Read Article >