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X is going to let Grok curate your timeline

2026-04-22T16:51:58-04:00

X is putting its AI chatbot, Grok, in charge of your timeline. In an announcement on Wednesday, X product head Nikita Bier says Premium subscribers on iOS can get early access to a feature that allows users to pin specific topics to their home tab, which Grok will then use to curate the posts you see across each feed.

"It's powered by Grok's understanding of every post with the algorithm's personalization - meaning every timeline is made just for you," Bier writes. "And it works even better when it's a topic you already engage with."

Bier says early access to the Grok-powered timeline is coming to Android users "very soon." Along with this …

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SpaceX cuts a deal to maybe buy Cursor for $60 billion

2026-04-22T05:40:37-04:00

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 too …

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X makes it 1,900 percent more expensive to post links

2026-04-21T14:57:09-04:00

Posting links to X through custom social media software just got a lot more expensive. On Monday, X significantly increased how much it costs to post a URL via the X API, which is what third-party tools use to hook into the platform. It now costs $0.20 when a link is posted, up from $0.01.

Any change to make posting links more expensive will likely make X even less attractive to publishers than it already is, especially given the widely held suspicion that linking news articles can lower a post's reach. The issue came up in a recent spat between Nate Silver and X's head of product, Nikita Bier, who claimed that links are "not deboosted." Bu …

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The EFF is quitting X

2026-04-10T05:33:56-04:00

The digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation will no longer be posting on X as of Thursday, largely due to a sharp decline in views on the platform over the past several years. In a blog post announcing the departure, EFF's social media and video manager Kenyatta Thomas explained that the nonprofit used to get 50 to 100 million impressions per month on X, but that has changed.

"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago."

According to Thursday's blog post, a downward tren …

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Insider trading or random guy? It doesn’t matter to Polymarket

2026-04-02T20:26:05-04:00

In mid-March, conspiracy theories swirled claiming Benjamin Netanyahu had been replaced by an AI clone. Though there was no actual proof that the Israeli Prime Minister had been injured or killed, on X this spurred a flurry of posts promoting prediction markets where people bet on whether he would be out of office by March 31st. One newly created Polymarket account in particular caught the attention of bettors: dududududu22, which had purchased more than $177,000 worth of "Yes" shares at 4.7 cents. Surely, only someone with inside knowledge would take such a risky position?

"This makes him possible to get paid of $3,779,000 in case of win," …

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X tries to limit creator revenue for foreign influencers but Musk intervenes

2026-03-25T13:23:59-04:00

X wants to make money on previously used handles. | Image: The Verge

X's Head of Product, Nikita Bier, announced a change to the platform's creator payouts on Tuesday, but according to Elon Musk, the change isn't going live just yet.

Bier shared a post announcing that in determining payments, X "will be giving more weight to impressions from your home region." The motivation appears to be discouraging engagement farming via political posts, with Bier adding that, "While we appreciate everyone's opinion on American politics, we hope this will disincentivize gaming the attention of US or Japanese accounts."

Starting Thursday, we'll be updating our revenue sharing incentives to better reward the content we …

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Jury finds Elon Musk’s ‘stupid tweets’ caused Twitter investors’ losses

2026-03-25T18:05:42-04:00

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.

While finding that Musk did not engage in a specific scheme to defraud shareholders, the jury cited two of Musk's tweets, f …

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Teens sue Elon Musk’s xAI over Grok’s AI-generated CSAM

2026-03-16T19:27:34-04:00

Three Tennessee teens are suing Elon Musk's xAI over claims that the company's Grok AI chatbot generated sexualized images and videos of themselves as minors, as reported earlier by The Washington Post. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed on Monday, accuses Musk and other xAI leaders of knowing that Grok would produce AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) when launching its "spicy mode" last year.

The plaintiffs include two minors and an adult who was underage when the events in the lawsuit took place. One of the victims, identified as "Jane Doe 1," alleges that last December, she learned that explicit, AI-generated images of …

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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber will step aside

2026-03-09T16:25:34-04:00

Bluesky Social Jay Graber speaks on stage during 2025 Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Summit & Gala at Jacob Javits Center on June 05, 2025 in New York City. () | Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company

Jay Graber became the first CEO of Bluesky in 2021 when the network and its AT Protocol spun out from life as a Twitter research project to go independent, but now she's leaving that role, as reported previously by Wired. While venture capitalist and former Automattic CEO Toni Schneider steps in as interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found, Graber says she will become Bluesky's Chief Innovation Officer, focused on building new things for a platform that has gone from 30 million users about a year ago, to 40 million currently.

According to Graber, "Toni believes deeply in the Bluesky mission, and has been an advisor to the company a …

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X says you can block Grok from editing your photos

2026-03-09T13:19:26-04:00

Pay attention to that small print about tagging @Grok, this new toggle has disappointing limitations. | Image by The Verge / xAI

X has introduced a new feature that makes it slightly harder for other users to manipulate your uploaded images with the Grok chatbot. As reported by Social Media Today and verified by The Verge, a new toggle within the image upload settings on the X iOS app says it can "block modifications by Grok" when enabled. But it doesn't actually prevent Grok from editing your photos.

The small print underneath the feature's name reveals a significant limitation: users can only "prevent @Grok from modifying this content." In our testing, the toggle only blocks the mechanism of tagging the xAI chatbot in replies to an image on X, alongside editing ins …

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