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.
Bloomberg has a big report on X’s efforts to let you make payments through the app, including that it has made agreements with payment processors like Stripe.
Bloomberg also found not-great financials from 2023:
[Documents] show that X generated $1.48 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2023, down almost 40% from the same period in 2022, before Musk bought the company.
If you want the TL;DR, read Kurt Wagner’s Threads thread.
Dorsey donated 14 Bitcoins to Nostr’s anonymous founder in 2022. That founder is Giovanni Torres Parra, according to Business Insider. Parra is a devotee of “far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho,” who “claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses.”
Proof once again that it’s easier to make money when you already have it, especially at the peak of the AI hype cycle.
Four months ago Musk posted the following after the Financial Times said xAI was seeking investments up to $6 billion:
xAI is not raising capital and I have had no conversations with anyone in this regard
Update 5:08AM ET: Added Musk quote.
[x.ai]
It’s been five years since “threadnought,” a giant Twitter thread in which lawyers battled trolls who were trying to silence critics of an anime voice actor accused of sexual misconduct.
Now, with a law firm drafted from the thread’s funniest people, lawyer Akiva Cohen represents many former Twitter employees who are suing Elon Musk over how he fired them after buying the company.
The application to extend an injunction for X to remove posts depicting an attack on a church bishop was refused on Monday, for yet undisclosed reasons. A final hearing is expected in mid-June.
X blocked the video for Australian users but refused to remove it globally, despite the Australian eSafety Commission finding that geoblocking wasn’t enough to comply with its online safety laws.
A judge tossed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X against web scraper Bright Data that alleged it illegally circumvented X’s anti-scraping technology. It comes after Musk lost a similar suit against an anti-hate group in March.
Just like PlayStation a few months ago and the Xbox platform last spring, Nintendo’s Twitter sharing features are disappearing as the X API lockdown tightens. (The send friend requests to social media from your Switch feature is also going away.)
The X Gaming account claims “Our partnership with Nintendo remains strong,” so we’ll see which integrations end up on the “Switch 2.”
I mean, what could go wrong? A new video conferencing feature in the style of Zoom, Meet and Microsoft Teams is coming soon to X, according to X user/Elon whisperer DogeDesigner and X Daily News.
X Conferences will be hosted on the the platform’s existing live audio platform X Spaces (which added video earlier this year), according to a screenshot of the beta version.
Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired article about Black Twitter detailed quite a bit about what made the community such an enriching space for Black people. But Hulu’s new docuseries based on the piece looks like going to be focused on detailing how Black Twitter became a broader cultural phenomenon. The series premieres on May 9th.
The app now has 150 million monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday during Meta’s earnings call. There were almost 100 million monthly Threads users in October.
The metric I’d really like to see, however, is daily users. Meta is juicing the visibility of Threads posts in the Instagram feed, and I’ve heard that a lot of user growth has been coming from that drive-by traffic. If it really wants to kill X, Meta still needs to build a sticky experience that more people come to daily.
Tesla paid X $280,000 for advertising and other services, according to the company’s proxy statement. X paid Tesla $1.02 million for unspecified work. SpaceX paid Tesla $2.9 million for “certain commercial, licensing and support agreements.” Tesla paid SpaceX $800,000 for use of its corporate jet. And Tesla paid the Boring Company $1.2 million.
No one paid Neuralink anything.
After experimenting with its $1-ish annual “Not A Bot” subscriptions in New Zealand and the Philippines, Elon Musk suggests that a broader rollout is coming to the service built upon freely contributed content. Only question is when?
While the fee might curtail bot creation, it will definitely curtail new user signups.
Elon Musk’s lawyers have reportedly undercut his free-speech theatrics related to ye old Twitter’s refusal to block accounts as ordered by the country’s highest court. According to Reuters, X’s lawyers said the following in a letter addressed to Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Monday:
“As already communicated to the federal police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp.”
US District Court Judge Amit Mehta granted a preliminary injunction (PDF) against Texas AG Ken Paxton’s investigation of left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters, writing that there was “evidence of retaliatory intent” in Paxton’s actions.
Media Matters had sued Paxton for his investigation, which launched the same day Elon Musk’s X sued the nonprofit over its report that X displayed ads on pro-Nazi content.
[Media Matters for America]
While the platform’s influence has waned, your dormant Twitter account could still have embarrassing or dire consequences if hijacked. So it’s probably worthwhile to setup a more secure passwordless passkey on your iPhone just in case.
How much MacBook is enough MacBook?
On The Vergecast: MacBook RAM, TikTok ban, and the only printer you’ll ever need.
The company said Grok 1.5, the first release since open-sourcing the model, performed significantly better in coding and math-related reasoning than its previous version. xAI’s testing showed Grok 1.5 outdid models like Claude 2, Gemini Pro 1.5, and GPT-4 in some problem-solving benchmarks.
Grok 1.5 will be available to early users of the model on X soon.
Elon's X Premium package pitches have included forcing them on celebrities, bundling access to an AI bot of uncertain value, and a chance at a slice of ad revenue generated by other paying customers, in addition to an edit button, blog posts, and fewer ads.
Now he's offering Premium or Premium Plus (normally $8 or $16 per month) as a free sweetener for accounts with at least 2,500 "Verified subscriber" followers (5,000 for Plus) that presumably also pay for access.