Browsing Twitter without an account doesn’t work right now, but for a while, we had no idea if it was another bug or an intentional change.
Now Elon Musk has confirmed the change was on purpose, claiming Twitter was “getting data pillaged,” which sounds like an issue that could’ve been addressed by some of the people Musk laid off since taking over Twitter.
Twitter made headlines earlier this year when it changed up its API pricing, with new tiers costing as much as $42,000 a month. But even once they pay, developers are telling Mashable that they’re suffering with poor customer support and features being abruptly discontinued or changed, seemingly without warning.
Seems like a way to prepare for the fight he agreed to do with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has also trained with Fridman, who is a black belt in jiu jitsu.
Do you want to party like a tech executive?
From the Wall Street Journal:
When [Elon] Musk in 2018 smoked marijuana on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he and employees of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, were subjected to drug tests for months after, Musk has said, without offering further details.
The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.
That’s SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk’s assessment of the potential success of its next Starship flight, according to Ars Technica. The last flight ended explosively.
In a Twitter Spaces session with Bloomberg reporter Ashlee Vance, at the 6:20 mark of the recording, Musk, who was at a friend’s birthday party, was asked about his proposed cage match with Zuckerberg (via Insider). Here’s an abridged transcript of the Spaces conversation:
Vance: I would be remiss if I did not ask you about this cage match and how your training is going for that.
Musk: Well, I haven’t started training yet, so... if it does happen, I will train.
Vance: [Zuck] takes this stuff pretty seriously. This could go, this could go badly.
Musk: Yeah that’s possible.
Vance: Alright, we’ll go to space, unless you have other thoughts on the cage match.
Musk: I mean I think it might actually happen.
The roughly minute-long exchange preceded a discussion that touched on topics like SpaceX, Russia, and Starlink.
A write-up in The Washington Post says the Zuck’s latest attempt at image rehabilitation (remember the “only eating meat from animals he’d personally killed” phase?) is, in part, a bid to win over Musk stans.
Zuckerberg has appeared on podcasts hosted by provocateur Joe Rogan and AI researcher Lex Fridman, both popular among fans of Twitter owner Musk. He has posted sweaty action shots on Instagram displaying his jujitsu skills. And this week, he accepted Musk’s challenge to a cage fight after news reports on Meta creating a Twitter competitor.
But Zuckerberg has really ramped it up over the past year, one of the people said, courting the same “tech bros” who have been captivated by Musk — who is suddenly Zuckerberg’s competition in more ways than one.
The cage match between him and Musk may just be the most recent part of his new pitch, even before Instagram’s “sane” Twitter alternative arrives.
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk really are going to fight in a cage match, aren’t they?
A fun update on how badly the Twitter deal is going:
Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors — as Twitter does — then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.
