The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk

With an IPO looming for Elon Musk’s SpaceX / xAI / X combo platter of companies, SpaceX has announced an odd arrangement to either acquire the automated programming platform Cursor for $60 billion or pay a fee of $10 billion. Buying this startup that’s focused on AI coding could help xAI’s tools compete with market leader Anthropic, as well as the other competitors. A report by The Information this week said Sergey Brin has directed Google’s “strike team” to help its agentic AI tools catch up, while Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at OpenAI last year before shutting down Sora to focus on the ChatGPT superapp and its own Codex tool.

The New York Times first reported a possible deal Tuesday evening, and SpaceX confirmed it in a tweet.

A California jury determined that Elon Musk misled Twitter investors before making a $44 billion deal to buy the company in 2022, reports CNBC. The New York Times reports that Musk had testified this month that he didn’t believe his posts would spook markets, but he did say that “If this was a trial about whether I made stupid tweets, I would say I’m guilty.”

CNBC reports Musk’s attorneys are expected to file an appeal, as damages could reach as high as $2.6 billion, according to attorneys representing the plaintiffs.

On Friday morning, X and Grok went offline for users around the world on both the websites and apps. Outage reports began spiking on DownDetector around 10:00AM ET, while Cisco’s ThousandEyes outage map noted over 600 X servers around the world that were having problems.

Attempts to load the site with either the Twitter.com or X.com addresses were showing a Cloudflare connection error or failing to show any posts or feeds initially. It’s currently unclear what caused the outage, and while the site is back up for many users, it’s still not working normally yet, frequently displaying “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”

X is preparing to put Twitter.com out to pasture, and the official @Safety account posted on Friday warning anyone using physical security keys or passkeys for 2FA that they will need to re-enroll them. According to X, if the login methods aren’t updated by November 10th, the associated accounts will be locked until the update process is completed, and abandoned accounts could possibly be sold.

Active users with keys attached to their accounts have been getting notifications about the impending change for a while, and the X Safety team explained the process in a clarification post: “This change is not related to any security concern, and only impacts Yubikeys and passkeys - not other 2FA methods (such as authenticator apps). Security keys enrolled as a 2FA method are currently tied to the twitter[.]com domain. Re-enrolling your security key will associate them with x[.]com, allowing us to retire the Twitter domain.”

Elon Musk is suing Apple and OpenAI over claims that their deal to build ChatGPT into the iPhone is stifling competition in the AI industry. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, the Musk-owned X Corp. and xAI also accuse Apple’s Apple Store of “deprioritizing” rival chatbots and “super” apps, including Grok and X.

Musk’s companies claim that iPhone users “have no reason” to download third-party AI apps because the company “force[s]” users to use ChatGPT as their default chatbot app when enabling Apple Intelligence. “Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing,” the companies allege.

Linda Yaccarino is stepping down as X’s CEO — and leaving the platform once known as Twitter in a worse place than when she started.

A day after X users circulated viral screenshots of the company’s Grok chatbot denigrating Jews and declaring itself “MechaHitler,” Yaccarino thanked Elon Musk for “entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.” She said that the platform started “the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users—especially children” and that the X Money payment platform would be arriving “soon.”

Linda Yaccarino is stepping down as CEO of X after two years running the company, she announced today. She was appointed its CEO in the year after Elon Musk bought and renamed the company previously known as Twitter — so far, there is no word on who will replace her.

“When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company,” Yaccarino said. “I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”

Grok, the AI model from Elon Musk’s xAI, was sending strange responses to people on X earlier on Wednesday. In responses to a number of people, Grok focused on debunking claims of white genocide in South Africa – even when tagged into a post about totally unrelated topics.

Check out this thread to get an idea of what was going on. One person posted a video of a cat in a sink reacting to droplets from a faucet. New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac tagged Grok and asked “is this true.” Here is Grok’s reply:

Some parts of the notification for X, formerly known as Twitter, have been down since Thursday afternoon, preventing users from getting an alert when certain accounts they follow have posted something new. User reports can be seen across Reddit, Downdetector, and X, and my colleagues at The Verge have noticed zero new notifications even with alerts enabled on accounts that have posted multiple times since yesterday.

We haven’t seen a public response or comment from X, but at around 11AM ET, the notifications appear to have resumed, based on our observations and reports across social media.

A few years after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, including $12 billion in debt it had as part of his takeover. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach,” writes Musk.

In response to a deal cementing about $11 billion in lost value since the 2022 sale, X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted, “The future could not be brighter.”

X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has suddenly left the company, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

Wang first joined Elon Musk’s X in July 2021 and has been an integral part of the company’s leadership, often serving as a conduit between Musk and the rest of the company’s engineers. More recently, he was seen internally as X’s defacto head of engineering and product, especially with Musk recently focusing more of his time on xAI and DOGE. It’s unclear why Wang is departing now. Neither he nor a company spokesperson responded to a request for comment in time for publication.

The X social media platform has been up and down all morning, with brief but repeated outages preventing posts from loading across both mobile and desktop. The first widespread issue started at around 5:40AM ET this morning, according to Downdetector, leaving timelines consistently unable to refresh on mobile apps and some X users stuck in an endless loading loop.

We have reached out to X and will update this story if we hear back. There has not been any response, however Elon Musk tweeted at about 1:30PM ET blaming a “massive cyberattack,” which is a claim we’ve heard before from Elon.