Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now he’s rebranding it as X. Signs have gone up (and back down), icons are changing, and an old plan is new.
How’d we get here?
On April 4th, 2022, we learned that Musk had purchased enough shares of Twitter to become its largest individual shareholder. Eventually, he followed up with an unsolicited offer to buy 100 percent of Twitter’s shares for $54.20 each, or about $44 billion. Twitter accepted Musk’s offer, but then things got weird because he tried to cancel the deal.
There was a lot of back-and-forth about bots and text messages, but in the end, Musk settled on buying the company rather than facing a deposition or Chancery Court trial and eventually strode into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.
Since then, there have been layoffs, more layoffs, and even more layoffs — plus drama over Substack, unpaid bills, and blue checkmarks. With ad revenue still down from previous years, Elon finally abdicated the role of CEO in May 2023, installing longtime NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino.
Read on for the latest updates about what’s going on inside Twitter right now.
Highlights
- X will start charging new users in two countries $1 per year
- Is your X ad revenue sharing payment smaller than you expected?
- Elon Musk wants a second chance to fail at X
- Elon Musk’s extravagant ‘X’ sign atop the former Twitter HQ has been dismantled
- For Elon Musk, X equals everything
- Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse
- Why Instagram is taking on Twitter with Threads
Apr 26
X now wants to compete with Google Meet.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.
Apr 16
X reverses course on Brazil.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.”
Apr 4
X’s ‘complimentary’ Premium push gives people blue checks they didn’t ask for
Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium Plus memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers.
Read Article >Multiple X users on Wednesday reported seeing the familiar blue “Verified” checkmark next to their handles despite not paying for either paid X subscription tier. Musk last week announced that X accounts with over 2,500 “verified subscriber followers” would receive a free Premium membership; while accounts with over 5,000 would receive a free Premium Plus membership.
Apr 3
Elon Musk’s reputation is falling — and it’s taking Tesla with it
Elon Musk’s controversial behavior in recent years is “very likely” to be a contributing factor in Tesla’s declining sales, according to corporate reputation tracking firm Caliber.
Read Article >Survey data reported by Reuters found that Tesla’s “consideration score” — a metric used by Caliber to track consumer interest in brands, based on how they respond to the prompt “I would buy, or continue buying, products and services from Tesla, if given the chance” — has fallen to 31 percent from its 70 percent high in November 2021, tumbling by 8 percent alone this January. Caliber’s consideration scores for rival EV-producing manufacturers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes, meanwhile, increased slightly during the same period, reaching between 44–47 percent.
Mar 29
xAI claims Grok’s first update will make it much better at doing math.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.
Mar 28
Elon Musk has a new pay-to-play X Premium gambit.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.
Mar 25
Judge tosses Elon Musk’s X lawsuit against anti-hate group
In a decision filed Monday, federal Judge Charles Breyer dismissed a lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), saying the company’s case is “about punishing the Defendants [CCDH] for their speech.”
Read Article >Judge Breyer writes that X’s “motivation in bringing this case is evident,” stating that the company’s goal is to “punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. — and perhaps in order to dissuade others” from criticizing X in the future. “If CCDH’s publications were defamatory, that would be one thing, but X Corp. has carefully avoided saying that they are,” the filing reads.
Mar 23
Is this what X will look like on a smart TV?Earlier this month, a Fortune story reported that one of X’s latest moves since Twitter entered its Musk era involves whipping up a video app for smart TVs, with one source calling it “identical” to YouTube’s own.
Assuming this video posted by app researcher Nima Owji is what Fortune’s source saw... yeah, I’d reckon there’s some resemblance.
Mar 18
Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled
Don Lemon has published the “tense” interview with Elon Musk that got his show canceled on X. During the interview, Lemon touches on various topics related to hate speech on X and Musk’s own views on right-wing conspiracy theories, with the billionaire becoming noticeably irritated by the interview’s end.
Read Article >Things start to take a turn about halfway into the interview. Lemon asks Musk about his comments on illegal immigration and the far-right “great replacement” theory and then turns to the topic of content moderation. Lemon asks whether better content moderation on X would let Musk avoid some of the criticism of his posts about the “great replacement” theory.
Mar 18
xAI open sources Grok
On March 11th, Elon Musk said xAI would open source its AI chatbot Grok, and now an open release is available on GitHub. This will allow researchers and developers to build on the model and impact how xAI updates Grok in the future as it competes with rival tech from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others.
Read Article >A company blog post explains that this open release includes the “base model weights and network architecture” of the “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, Grok-1.” It goes on to say the model is from a checkpoint last October and hasn’t undergone fine-tuning “for any specific application, such as dialogue.”
Mar 13
Elon Musk cancels Don Lemon’s show on X after a ‘tense’ interview
Elon Musk canceled Don Lemon’s show on X over some interview questions Musk didn’t like. Lemon says that Musk terminated their partnership just hours after a “tense” interview between him and the platform’s owner.
Read Article >Lemon doesn’t say what exactly transpired during his interview, but he does say that Musk “is mad” at him. “Throughout our conversation, I kept reiterating to him that although it was tense at times, I thought it was good for people to see and hear our exchange, and that they would learn from our conversation,” Lemon says in a video posted to X.
Mar 8
X adds “Articles.” They’re blog posts, but only for the most Premium posters.If you pay for the platform formerly known as Twitter, then you can post Articles on X. Better known as blog posts, they can feature stylized text, embedded images, and videos.
They’ll show up on the timeline with other tweets, but to publish one, you must belong to a Verified Organization or pay $16 monthly for the Premium Plus package. $8 Premium or $3 Basic subscribers will have to live without it, post regular tweets, or use Tumblr.
Mar 5
Twitter’s music label legal trouble might have legs
The music labels suing Twitter — now X — for copyright infringement can move forward with parts of their lawsuit. In a filing on Tuesday, US District Judge Aleta A. Trauger partially denied X’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it’s still not clear “to what extent X Corp. may be liable for the infringing acts of users on its platform.”
Read Article >Last year, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) sued X for $250 million on behalf of Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, and other major publishers.
Mar 4
Fired Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk for over $128 million
Elon Musk fired a lot of people after he took over Twitter, but the first ones to go were several of its top executives. Now former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett are suing Musk and the company now known as X, saying they’re owed more than $128 million in severance payments, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Read Article >Under Musk’s stewardship, X’s aversion to paying those it owes has practically become a trope (this is referenced in the lawsuit, along with a link to a page that tracks lawsuits against Twitter for non-payment and a note that the person who runs the site has been banned by X).
Feb 25
The latest ‘Woj bomb’ was just a scam NFT tweet from a hacked account
People who still use NBA Top Shot were the primary targets of a scam tweet posted to ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski’s account on X Saturday evening at about 6:30PM ET. The tweet referred to NBA Top Shot as a “popular” NFT platform, despite the fact that current activity levels are a tiny fraction of what we saw during its peak, and falsely claimed a “free NFT pack is available to all customers.”
Read Article >The tweet linked visitors to a scam version of the NBA Top Shot website (the link went to a .org address instead of the official site’s .com URL) that could attempt to drain assets from people who give it access to their crypto wallets. About a half hour later, the official Top Shot account posted, saying, “There is NO Free Airdrop happening on NBA Top Shot at this time, Please be careful and always double check links.”
Feb 20
X restores Yulia Navalnaya’s account after briefly suspending it.Yulia accused Vladimir Putin of killing her husband, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and vowed to continue her husband’s fight against Putin’s “crazy regime.” Then, on Tuesday morning, her X account was abruptly suspended for a short time.
A message from the @Support account followed up saying, “Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules. We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”
@Support[X]
Feb 15
One of the last ways to access Twitter without an account is dead.Nitter, the open-source, tracker-free Twitter front end, joins the other great third-party apps in the API afterlife.
Activist IT collective NoLog, which ran one of the largest Nitter instances, has shut it down, three weeks after Nitter’s developer said the project was dead.
Feb 12
X will allow advertisers to only run ads on selected profiles.Elon Musk’s revamped X ad business has included a “revenue sharing” program that requires payment to have the potential of getting paid and shown ads alongside white nationalist profiles.
X, as it attempts to become a YouTube alternative, says it has over 80,000 creators monetizing their posts and is trying to address brand safety issues with Creator Targeting:
This means giving advertisers more control to be able to use the self-serve X Ads Manager to run pre-roll video ads against the video content of their chosen creator(s) in both the home timeline and profile.
Soon we’ll add the ability to serve ads only on an individual creator’s profile – completely eliminating the unlikely event of unwanted adjacencies while aligning your brand to creators you love most.
It didn’t say how big of a cut creators will get if their profile is targeted or if they can choose which advertisers are shown.
Feb 9
As the Super Bowl rolls into Las Vegas, X cuts a deal to advertise gambling odds.Besides its arrangement for weekly 5-minute WWE matches, X is partnering with BetMGM to slap gambling odds at the top of event pages for sporting events, starting with the Super Bowl.
The platform formerly known as Twitter is far from the only one suddenly flooded with odds and gambling promos (see ESPN Bet). A recent 60 Minutes report dug into how the services use data to target when someone’s most likely to place a bet.
Jan 28
X plans to create a content moderation ‘headquarters’ in Austin
X says it will hire 100 full-time employees for a new trust and safety office in Austin, Texas, according to a Saturday report by Bloomberg. The plan comes, as the article notes, just a few days before CEO Linda Yaccarino’s scheduled January 31st hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding X’s handling of child sexual exploitation moderation.
Read Article >The team would reportedly focus mainly on CSE and would be the first proper trust and safety team since Elon Musk gutted it shortly after purchasing the platform formerly known as Twitter. X updated a blog post about its CSE moderation approach to mention the new office yesterday, as well, though it doesn’t reveal what the new team will be doing, nor when the office will open.
Jan 24
The X iPhone app added passwordless logins with passkeys
X is now supporting passkey log-ins on iPhones and iPads, granting members access to the security feature regardless of their “Premium” status. Generating a passkey for X allows users to completely skip entering a password when they log in to their accounts and instead rely on the device’s security (with Face ID, Touch ID, or your device’s passcode).
Read Article >For now, passkeys are only available in the US, and X hasn’t revealed when it’s rolling out the login technology on Android, for desktop operating systems, or in other countries. Also, X’s rollout of passkeys doesn’t seem to be complete yet (some users reported still not having access as of Tuesday night on the East Coast), so don’t fret if the feature hasn’t popped up yet.
Jan 22
Why Elon Musk needs MrBeast
Exactly how much money can you make by uploading a video to X? The going assumption has been that X — like Twitter before it — is a poor platform for video creators that can’t compete with YouTube and TikTok in terms of monetization and reach. So there’s been a lot riding on the results of a recent test by MrBeast, who aimed to see whether he could actually make money on Elon Musk’s platform.
Read Article >Last week, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, posted a video to Musk’s platform with the explicit goal of seeing “how much ad revenue a video on X would make.” Musk had previously encouraged MrBeast to post to X, and he sent out an excited message shortly after the test went up. “First MrBeast video posted directly on 𝕏!” Musk wrote. Now, a week later, Donaldson has shared data on how his first video performed: it made around $260,000 across more than 150 million views.
Jan 15
Elon Musk is uncomfortable with the amount of control Elon Musk has over Tesla.The Tesla CEO and X CTO / owner writes that “I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control,” and proposed building products (like Grok?) outside of Tesla instead.
Musk’s stake in the company reportedly dropped to 13.4 percent in 2022 as he sold shares and acquired X, then known as Twitter. Now there’s this statement, a recent WSJ report citing concerns about drug use, and... Tesla’s Q4 earnings report coming up on January 24th.
Jan 10
X says charges were dropped against a student who posted about free food.X’s news account claimed responsibility for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne having “rescinded its disciplinary action against Juan David Campolargo,” a student who had gotten in trouble for an account that pointed to events on campus that had free food available.
The low-stakes case was the first apparent instance of the site defending a user in trouble for their posts. The Verge has reached out to the university for confirmation.
Jan 10
Even X is giving up on NFTs.The Elon Musk-owned platform quietly removed the option for Premium subscribers to use NFTs as their profile pictures, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. X also scrubbed all mention of NFT profile pictures from its support page.
This comes a little less than one year after Meta ended tests that let users share NFTs on Instagram and Facebook.