Twitter was never the largest social network, but it remained one of the most influential as a home to celebrities, journalists, and influencers of all sorts and the go-to network for breaking news. Since Elon Musk purchased it, Twitter’s employee count has dropped by more than half, advertisers have tightened budgets, and it’s charging money for access to verified checkmarks and Tweetdeck. Oh, and now it’s called X instead of Twitter.
X (formerly Twitter) has been steadily improving its features for live streams and broadcasts. Based on this screenshot, chat looks a lot like it does on Twitch.
X is also going to let you add timestamps to posts containing video.
From Kara Swisher’s interview with Ben Mezrich, author of Breaking Twitter:
In the book, there’s a scene when Musk signs the papers to take over Twitter, the first thing he screams out is, “Fuck Zuck! Fuck Zuck!” — which I haven’t seen reported anywhere else.
Not reported, but easily imagined.
[Intelligencer]
He says users will need a $16-a-month X Premium Plus subscription to access “Grok,” and that it will get real-time information from posts on X.
Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but left in 2018 over the company’s for-profit shift, and has called ChatGPT “WokeGPT.” He launched xAI earlier this year. Musk’s posts come a few days ahead of OpenAI’s first developer conference on Monday.
Forbes obtained emails that indicate that X, formerly Twitter, has started to work on a marketplace to buy handles that are no longer in use. Also, “in at least some cases, X/Twitter has emailed solicitations to potential buyers requesting a flat fee of $50,000 to initiate a purchase,” Forbes reports.
That’s one way to make more money, I guess.
During an employee all-hands, Musk said that Twitter became X to replace YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and even your bank.
The boys are back in town, baby. Musk appeared on a special episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the first two hours of which are available on X (usually, the interview would be exclusive to Spotify, aside from clips). It’s mostly just bros being bros, but if you thought we were going to get out of this unscathed, Musk does throw in a little Soros conspiracy theorizing.
Fidelity, which put $300 million into Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter a year ago, thinks the company is about 65 percent less valuable now, according to Axios. That implies a valuation of between $15 and $16 billion, or the incineration of over $28 billion in enterprise value.
Musk didn’t acknowledge X’s financial state during a rare all-hands meeting with employees last week, though he did brag about some other numbers: he said that X is seeing roughly half a billion posts and over 100 billion impressions per day.
Elon Musk says the change is meant to “maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.”
A study earlier this month found X Premium verified users were getting heavy engagement as “superspreaders of misinformation” about the Israel-Hamas war.
We have some pretty good costume ideas for Apple’s Scary Fast event on Monday. We also have big ideas about the future of Threads, Mastodon, and year two of Elon Musk’s Twitter. And during one of the ad breaks, we watched the entire Blade: Trinity trailer. For some reason. It’s The Vergecast!
This was his advice to employees during his first companywide meeting since renaming Twitter to X: “In any given meeting, make sure there is at least one piece of bad news. You can have more than one piece of bad news. If you’re in a meeting with me, always bring up at least one bit of bad news or more than that.”
I have more from inside X’s first big all hands with Musk and Linda Yaccarino in this week’s Command Line:
It’s been a year of personal grudges, harebrained rebrands, and jolting policy shifts. And those aren’t even the worst parts.
X marks the spot, now located far below where it was last year ever since Elon Musk started meddling. The WSJ maps the decline in terms of active users, app downloads, ad money spent, and perceived value using lots of easy to understand charts.
The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
Tesla Owners Silicon Valley posted a video of an apparently bullet-pocked Cybertruck driving on a highway at night.
Musk replied to a repost of it, claiming that the dents were from “the entire drum magazine of a Tommy gun” and “no bullets penetrated into the passenger compartment.”
I’m going back to sleep.
The DOJ was granted (PDF) a stay of an injunction barring DHS, CISA, FBI, and other federal officials from contact with social media platforms about content moderation. The judge who wrote the injunction this summer claimed their requests about posts containing covid misinformation amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.
An appeals court limited the terms of the ban last month but paused the process to see if the Supreme Court would weigh in. Now it will hear the DOJ’s appeal, over dissent from three justices (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch).
Bloomberg had the story a few weeks ago after listening in on a call between X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Twitter debt holders. Premium plans currently start at $8/mth ($84/yr) and show about 50 percent fewer ads. X is also testing charging every new user $1/year just to post because you gotta make up for a plummet in ad revenue somehow.
X is now filled with contextless links to articles after Elon Musk removed headlines from link preview cards earlier this month. But some Substack links now include the headline right in the image (spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra).
I was able to replicate it below with a newsletter I follow — it’s a good idea! So far it seems limited to Substack blogs with a custom domain, and the headline doesn’t appear in the image on other platforms like Facebook.
The money to protect Europeans from the spread of harmful content comes from the 19 companies identified as very large online platforms, divvied up based upon the number of users they have but not more than 0.05 percent of profits.
This methodology results in X, formerly known as Twitter, and Amazon not contributing a penny, while Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. together would pay about €31 million — almost three-quarters of the total.
Or so say Bloomberg sources. Official numbers will be announced in November.
It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk took over Twitter and, well, a lot of things have happened since then. Now, after previously diving into the backstories of dating apps, Meta, and Tesla, the Vox Media podcast Land of the Giants launches a new season about Twitter, its richest user, and “why Twitter’s cultural and political influence far exceeds its size,” hosted by Peter Kafka.
New episodes will arrive weekly starting on October 25th, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or other podcast apps.
The New York Times reported today that Australia’s government is charging Elon Musk’s platform $610,500 AUD (about $384,000 USD) for not answering all of its questions about how it handles child abuse imagery.
The regulator reportedly didn’t get enough detail from Google either, but while it only got a warning, “X’s lack of a response was more extensive.”
You can now ask people who want to join your X community to answer that question, and moderators can use your response to decide if you should be let in. (I’m not a huge fan of X’s “gatekeeping allowed” marketing language announcing the feature, though.)
Nieman Reports has the story and more details about the memo.
NPR left Twitter (now X) in April after the platform labeled NPR as “US state-affiliated media.” (X got rid of those labels entirely shortly after, apparently at the suggestion of Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson.)
