Elon Musk buys a big chunk of Twitter
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https://futurism.com/mistake-elon-musk-begged-twitter-staff-turn-off-new-feature
In late 2022, long before multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, rumors swirled that he was getting ready to shake up the platform's verification system.
His proposal: charge each subscriber for the privilege of being verified without ever doing the homework of actually verifying their identity — a short-sighted and ultimately disastrous decision that Musk reportedly regretted almost immediately.
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The 2022 US midterm elections took place on November 8, a day before Musk started charging users for a blue checkmark.
When the switch was made, all hell broke loose, with countless newly verified accounts masquerading as politicians, celebrities, and companies. One account parading as Nintendo shared a viral image of Super Mario giving the finger.
Advertisers, who had gotten wind of the mayhem, started reaching out to Twitter's sales teams, threatening to pull their ads. According to Mac and Conger's sources, Nike executives threatened to never advertise on the platform again.
And Musk was terrified of the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
"Turn it off," he reportedly told an engineer. "Turn it off!"
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Good thing nothing really important happens on Twitter; it’s not like he was messing with the nation’s critical infrastructures like, banking, utilities, or transportation.
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https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-more-advertisers-pull-back-in-2025
As Elon Musk struggled to rebuild X's ability to generate revenue, the site suffered a mass advertiser exodus late last year, and at least some of those departures were evidently due to pro-nazi content. A few months later, Musk told advertisers "go fuck yourself."
And this was all right before Musk shared that the former Twitter's revenue was already down by 60 percent from before his acquisition.
It looks like 2025 isn't going to be any better for X. A new report from UK market research firm Kantar found that 26 percent of marketers are planning to reduce their ad spend on Musk's platform next year.
According to Kantar's research, this was the "biggest recorded pullback" from any of the major global advertising platforms. -
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-more-advertisers-pull-back-in-2025
As Elon Musk struggled to rebuild X's ability to generate revenue, the site suffered a mass advertiser exodus late last year, and at least some of those departures were evidently due to pro-nazi content. A few months later, Musk told advertisers "go fuck yourself."
And this was all right before Musk shared that the former Twitter's revenue was already down by 60 percent from before his acquisition.
It looks like 2025 isn't going to be any better for X. A new report from UK market research firm Kantar found that 26 percent of marketers are planning to reduce their ad spend on Musk's platform next year.
According to Kantar's research, this was the "biggest recorded pullback" from any of the major global advertising platforms.@taiwan_girl said in Elon Musk buys a big chunk of Twitter:
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-x-more-advertisers-pull-back-in-2025
As Elon Musk struggled to rebuild X's ability to generate revenue, the site suffered a mass advertiser exodus late last year, and at least some of those departures were evidently due to pro-nazi content. A few months later, Musk told advertisers "go fuck yourself."
And this was all right before Musk shared that the former Twitter's revenue was already down by 60 percent from before his acquisition.
It looks like 2025 isn't going to be any better for X. A new report from UK market research firm Kantar found that 26 percent of marketers are planning to reduce their ad spend on Musk's platform next year.
According to Kantar's research, this was the "biggest recorded pullback" from any of the major global advertising platforms.Didn't he sue some companies a while back for not advertising on X?
Because obviously that's going to bring them running back!
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That data doesn't necessarily mean anything.
It doesn't include people using the X app.
It doesn't account for potential bot purges.
SimilarWeb does not have access to the actual data. They need to estimate it from various other data points, and that estimation can easily be off by a factor of 2.
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Fidelity has written 80% of the value off of its investment in X.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-by-79-since-musk-purchase/
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https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-new
Elon Musk's X broadened an existing lawsuit on Saturday to include several major brands — accusing more companies of illegally boycotting the social media platform in 2022 following Musk's acquisition.
The suit, which was filed last year in a federal court in Texas, initially targeted the boycott organizer, the World Federation of Advertisers, along with companies including CVS and video-streaming platform Twitch.
But early on Saturday, Musk's lawyers filed an amended complaint, adding several new defendants, including Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest and Shell International.
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A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-openai-bid-chatgpt-sam-altman-b1ad37fe4fe70e3b5d283940bd3b8215
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Morgan Stanley and other lenders to Elon Musk's Twitter takeover yesterday reportedly sold around $4.7 billion of X debt at face value.
This blows away expectations for the deal, in terms of both volume and pricing, and leaves creditors with only around $1.3 billion of their $12.5 billion outlay.
Original plans were to sell $3 billion of debt at a 10%-20% discount.
One explanation is that X has improved its finances, although that's still fuzzy. For example, WSJ recently reported that X's 2024 revenue includes "hundreds of millions of dollars" transferred from xAI, leaving unclear if there's been any organic top-line growth.
Better rationales are Musk's newfound proximity to power and the social media company's equity stake in xAI.
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/14/lenders-elon-musk-twitter-x-takeover
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Elon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowdsourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X.
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Although other independent polling recently documented a similar increase in Zelenskyy's approval rating, NBC News reported, the specific poll cited in X notes contradicted Donald Trump's claim that Zelenskyy is unpopular, and Musk seemed to expect X notes should instead be providing context to defend Trump's viewpoint. Musk even suggested that by pointing to the supposedly government-linked poll in Community Notes, X users were spreading misinformation.
"It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky[y]-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!" Musk wrote on X.
Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."
