More from The entire story of Twitter / X under Elon Musk
This Wall Street Journal reports that beyond suing an ad group for an “illegal” boycott, X lawyers and executives have indicated that brands need to spend more on the Elon Musk-owned platform “or else.”
Ruben Schreurs, the CEO of an ad consulting firm, Ebiquity, is quoted saying the reason brands are choosing the route of spending a minimum viable amount on X is “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”
That’s just one line in this Wall Street Journal article detailing money flowing to the presidential family via crypto or other means. Another section highlights Melania Trump’s documentary pitch to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez during their December visit preceding Amazon’s $40 million deal that reportedly nearly tripled the next-closest offer.
But if you wondered how that January 6th Twitter lawsuit got settled, we have an answer:
The settlement talks with X began after the election and were more informal, with both Trump and Musk personally involved in hammering out the $10 million number, people familiar with the matter said.
Lawyers representing President Trump, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and what is now X moved to dismiss Trump’s pending case before the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, reports Bloomberg.
He was appealing the dismissal of a lawsuit that accused Twitter, which is now owned by DOGE head Elon Musk, of violating the First Amendment when it banned his account in 2021.
Musk posted last night that the platform’s algorithm will soon “promote more informational/entertaining content” in order to “maximize unregretted user-seconds.”
He added in a separate post that X is working on ways to “adjust the content feed dynamically.”
The “Grok 2 + Aurora” option has vanished from Grok’s model selector menu only a day after it appeared, Engadget reports, replaced by “Grok 2 + FLUX beta” instead. The model still makes photorealistic images, but it was less willing to reproduce celebrities when I asked.
X owner Elon Musk wrote yesterday that the photorealistic and largely unrestricted model is a beta “internal image generator.”
Update: Added testing detail.
As 404 Media and others note, Elon Musk’s X has inserted itself into The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars, arguing that neither Alex Jones nor the estate handling his bankruptcy owns the associated social media accounts.
Since X simply grants a license for their use, the lawyers say that can’t be transferred without permission.
A federal judge said Friday that sanctioning Musk was unnecessary “because he already agreed to reimburse the SEC $2,923 to cover airfare for the trio of agency lawyers he stood up in Los Angeles in September,” Bloomberg writes.
The agency sought to sanction him after he ditched a testimony over his Twitter acquisition to watch a SpaceX launch.
Lemon cited, among other things, the site’s new terms of service that require disputes to be brought in Texas courts, where a Tesla stock-owning judge recently recused himself from an advertiser lawsuit against X.
Lemon, who recently sued Elon Musk and X for canceling his talk show, pointed to his other accounts, like on the fast-growing Bluesky, where he posted for the first time today.
The news outlet says it will no longer post on any official Guardian accounts:
This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.
[The Guardian]
We’ve been sounding the alarm about Elon’s great replacement posts for a while, and Bloomberg just ran the numbers. Musk posts about the supposed link between immigration and voter fraud more than any other topic.
To be clear, Noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent, despite Musk’s claims to the contrary. Even a Heritage Foundation analysis shows just 68 instances of noncitizen voting in elections since 1980.
