The Twitter logo is seen on a mobile device in ths illustration photo in Warsaw, Poland on 30 October, 2022. Twitter is losing its most active users according to research done by Reuters. Despite the most impactful tweeters making up only 10 percent of the monthly users they are together responsible for 90 percent of all tweets and around half of the company’s revenue.
STR | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Twitter relaunched its updated Twitter Blue subscription service Monday after the company’s new owner Elon Musk pulled and delayed the launch in November.
The service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iOS users who purchase it through Apple‘s App Store. The $3 iOS price difference reflects Musk’s recent gripes about Apple’s 30% cut of all digital sales made through apps.
It appears to be rolling out at the moment, so some users may not see the option to subscribe yet.
Subscribers with a verified phone number will receive a blue checkmark once their account is reviewed and approved, Twitter said in a tweet Saturday. Blue users will also be able to edit tweets and get early access to new features. The company says Blue subscribers will “soon” see fewer ads, have the option to post longer videos and will appear at the top of replies and mentions.
As part of the relaunch, businesses will receive a gold checkmark and governments will receive a grey checkmark to help prevent impersonation. If users want to change their username, display name or profile photo, they can do so, but they will lose their blue check until their account is reviewed again, Twitter said.
In a tweet Saturday, Musk said more features are on the way.
Twitter Blue briefly launched in November, but it was pulled after users abused the new paid option by impersonating celebrities and brands. A user impersonating pharmaceutical giant Eli Lily, for example, tweeted “we are excited to announce insulin is free now.”
Eli Lilly’s stock price dropped sharply after the false message was posted, and so did other pharmaceutical companies like AbbVie, which was also impersonated on Twitter.
Musk said the service would launch again on Nov. 29, but it was further delayed until Monday.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October, has said the new verification system will be “the great leveler” and give “power to the people.” He has been a vocal critic of Twitter’s previous system, which granted verification to notable users like politicians, executives, members of the press and organizations to signal their legitimacy. Other social networks, like Meta‘s Facebook and Instagram, have similar verification systems.
Users who were verified under Twitter’s old policy are being marked as legacy verified accounts that “may not be notable” under the new Twitter Blue service. It is unclear whether or not their checkmarks will ultimately disappear.
As a bullet train speeds by in the background, a liquid hydrogen tank towers over solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells at Panasonic’s Kusatsu plant in Japan. Combined with a Tesla Megapack storage battery, the hydrogen and solar can deliver enough electricity to power the site’s Ene-Farm fuel cell factory.
Tim Hornyak
As bullet trains whiz by at 285 kilometers per hour, Panasonic’s Norihiko Kawamura looks over Japan’s tallest hydrogen storage tank. The 14-meter structure looms over the Tokaido Shinkansen Line tracks outside the ancient capital of Kyoto, as well as a large array of solar panels, hydrogen fuel cells and Tesla Megapack storage batteries. The power sources can generate enough juice to run part of the manufacturing site using renewable energy only.
“This may be the biggest hydrogen consumption site in Japan,” says Kawamura, a manager at the appliance maker’s Smart Energy System Business Division. “We estimate using 120 tons of hydrogen a year. As Japan produces and imports more and more hydrogen in the future, this will be a very suitable kind of plant.”
Sandwiched between a high-speed railway and highway, Panasonic’s factory in Kusastsu, Shiga Prefecture, is a sprawling 52 hectare site. It was originally built in 1969 to manufacture goods including refrigerators, one of the “three treasures” of household appliances, along with TVs and washing machines, that Japanese coveted as the country rebuilt after the devastation of World War II.
Today, one corner of the plant is the H2 Kibou Field, a demonstration sustainable power facility that started operations in April. It consists of a 78,000-liter hydrogen fuel tank, a 495 kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell array made up of 99 5kW fuel cells, 570kW from 1,820 photovoltaic solar panels arranged in an inverted “V” shape to catch the most sunlight, and 1.1 megawatts of lithium-ion battery storage.
On one side of the H2 Kibou Field, a large display indicates the amount of power being produced in real time from fuel cells and solar panels: 259kW. About 80% of the power generated comes from fuel cells, with solar accounting for the rest. Panasonic says the facility produces enough power to meet the needs of the site’s fuel cell factory — it has peak power of about 680kW and annual usage of some 2.7 gigawatts. Panasonic thinks it can be a template for the next generation of new, sustainable manufacturing.
“This is the first manufacturing site of its kind using 100% renewable energy,” says Hiroshi Kinoshita of Panasonic’s Smart Energy System Business Division. “We want to expand this solution towards the creation of a decarbonized society.”
The 495kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell array is made up of 99 5KW fuel cells. Panasonic says it’s the world’s first site of its kind to use hydrogen fuel cells toward creating a manufacturing plant running on 100% renewable energy.
Tim Hornyak
An artificial intelligence-equipped Energy Management System (EMS) automatically controls on-site power generation, switching between solar and hydrogen, to minimize the amount of electricity purchased from the local grid operator. For example, if it’s a sunny summer day and the fuel cell factory needs 600kW, the EMS might prioritize the solar panels, deciding on a mixture of 300kW solar, 200 kW hydrogen fuel cells, and 100kW storage batteries. On a cloudy day, however, it might minimize the solar component, and boost the hydrogen and storage batteries, which are recharged at night by the fuel cells.
“The most important thing to make manufacturing greener is an integrated energy system including renewable energy such as solar and wind, hydrogen, batteries and so on,” says Takamichi Ochi, a senior manager for climate change and energy at Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting. “To do that, the Panasonic example is close to an ideal energy system.”
With grey hydrogen, not totally green yet
The H2 Kibou Field is not totally green. It depends on so-called grey hydrogen, which is generated from natural gas in a process that can release a lot of carbon dioxide. Tankers haul 20,000 liters of hydrogen, chilled in liquid form to minus 250 Celsius, from Osaka to Kusatsu, a distance of some 80 km, about once a week. Japan has relied on countries like Australia, which has greater supplies of renewable energy, for hydrogen production. But local supplier Iwatani Corporation, which partnered with Chevron earlier this year to build 30 hydrogen fueling sites in California by 2026, has opened a technology center near Osaka that is focused on producing green hydrogen, which is created without the use of fossil fuels.
Another issue that is slowing adoption is cost. Even though electricity is relatively expensive in Japan, it currently costs much more to power a plant with hydrogen than using power from the grid, but the company expects Japanese government and industry efforts to improve supply and distribution will make the element significantly cheaper.
“Our hope is that hydrogen cost will go down, so we can achieve something like 20 yen per cubic meter of hydrogen, and then we will be able to achieve cost parity with the electrical grid,” Kawamura said.
Panasonic is also anticipating that Japan’s push to become carbon-neutral by 2050 will boost demand for new energy products. Its fuel cell factory at Kusatsu has churned out over 200,000 Ene-Farm natural gas fuel cell for home use. Commercialized in 2009, the cells extract hydrogen from natural gas, generate power by reacting it with oxygen, heat and store hot water, and deliver up to 500 watts of emergency power for eight days in a disaster. Last year, it began selling a pure hydrogen version targeted at commercial users. It wants to sell the fuel cells in the U.S. and Europe because governments there have more aggressive hydrogen cost-cutting measures than Japan. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy launched a so-called Hydrogen Shot program that aims to slash the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per 1 kilogram over 10 years.
Panasonic doesn’t plan to increase the scale of its H2 Kibou Field for the time being, wanting to see other companies and factories adopt similar energy systems.
It won’t necessarily make economic sense today, Kawamura says, “but we want to start something like this so it will be ready when the cost of hydrogen falls. Our message is: if we want to have 100% renewable energy in 2030, then we must start with something like this now, not in 2030.”
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes recorded their worst day in almost a month on Monday,after a hotter-than-expected U.S. services-sector reading fueled concerns that the Federal Reserve may need to be even more aggressive in its inflation battle.
How stocks traded
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.26%
finished down 482.78 points, or 1.4%, at 33,947.10.
The S&P 500 SPX, -1.79%
ended 72.86 points lower, or 1.8%, at 3,998.84.
The Nasdaq Composite COMP, -11.01% closed down 221.56 points, or 1.9%, at 11,239.94.
Those were the largest declines for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite since Nov. 9, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Strong wage growth numbers released Friday were followed up on Monday by a robust reading for the U.S. services sector — both of which helped to stoke fears that the Fed’s interest-rate hikes, along with the central bank’s modest balance-sheet unwind, haven’t had much of an impact on the tight labor market.
“If nothing else, the ISM services report is being interpreted as very strong, and thus the economy is overheating and that means more Fed tightening,” said Will Compernolle, a senior economist at FHN Financial in New York. “Consumer resilience has proven to be more intense than I would have expected. In the two most interest-rate sensitive sectors — housing and autos — tightening has channeled into markets in meaningful ways.”
But there has been so much pent-up demand, that higher interest rates haven’t been cooling overall spending as much as the Fed would like because companies are still having to fill a backlog of orders, he said via phone.
In other economic data, the final November S&P Global U.S. services PMI edged up to 46.2 from 46.1, but remained in contractionary territory.
November jobs data released on Friday showed average hourly wages grew over the past year by more than 5% as of November, beating economists’ expectations and stoking concerns that robust wage growth would continue to fuel inflation, market strategists said.
Worries about a more-aggressive Fed also helped to drive Treasury yields higher, adding to the pressure on stocks. The yield on the 10-year note rose 9.6 basis points to 3.6% on Monday. Treasury yields move inversely to prices, and yields had fallen sharply over the past month, driven by shifting expectations about the pace of Fed rate hikes.
Monday’s ISM services figure “surprised to the upside, suggesting that the economy is still running above its long-run sustainable path and that the Fed is going to have to slow the economy more than expected in 2023,” Bill Adams, the Dallas-based chief economist for Comerica Inc. CMA, said via phone.
Meanwhile, oil futures ended lower on Monday, a day after Sunday’s decision by OPEC and its allies to keep production quotas unchanged.
Falling equity prices helped drive the CBOE Volatility Index VIX, +8.87%,
also known as the VIX, back above 20 on Monday. The volatility gauge had fallen sharply in recent weeks as stocks rallied, potentially signaling complacency that could ultimately hurt stocks, said Jonathan Krinsky, chief market technician at BTIG, in a note to clients.
GameStop Corp.‘s Class A shares GME, -7.12%
ended down by 7.1% ahead of the company’s third-quarter results, which are set to be released after the market closes on Wednesday. Analysts are looking for a narrowing loss from the videogame retailer.
Shares of U.S. airlines and aircraft makers traded higher on Monday, bucking the broader trend in stocks. Boeing Co. BA, +1.22%
and United Airlines Holdings Inc. UAL, +2.60%
were among the best performers in the S&P 500, finishing up by 1.2% and 2.6%, respectively.
Tim Draper, founder of Draper Associates, onstage at the Web Summit 2022 tech conference.
Ben McShane | Sportsfile via Getty Images
Venture capitalist Tim Draper thinks bitcoin will hit $250,000 a coin by the middle of 2023, even after a bruising year for the cryptocurrency marked by industry failures and sinking prices.
Draper previously predicted that bitcoin would top $250,000 by the end of 2022, but in early November, at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, he said it would take until June 2023 for this to materialize.
He reaffirmed this position Saturday when asked how he felt about his price call following the collapse of FTX.
“I have extended my prediction by six months. $250k is still my number,” Draper told CNBC via email.
Bitcoin would need to rally nearly 1,400% from its current price of around $17,000 for Draper’s prediction to come true. The cryptocurrency has plunged over 60% since the start of the year.
Digital currencies are in the doldrums as tighter monetary policy from the Fed and a chain reaction of bankruptcies at major industry firms including Terra, Celsius and FTX have put intense pressure on prices.
FTX’s demise has also worsened an already severe liquidity crisis in the industry. Crypto exchange Gemini and lender Genesis are among the firms said to be impacted by the fallout from FTX’s insolvency.
Last week, veteran investor Mark Mobius told CNBC that bitcoin could crash to $10,000 next year, a more than 40% plunge from current prices. The co-founder of Mobius Capital Partners correctly called the drop to $20,000 this year.
Nevertheless, Draper is convinced that bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, is set to rise in the new year.
“I expect a flight to quality and decentralized crypto like bitcoin, and for some of the weaker coins to become relics,” he told CNBC.
Draper, the founder of Draper Associates, is one of Silicon Valley’s best-known investors. He made successful bets on tech companies including Tesla, Skype and Baidu.
In 2014, Draper purchased 29,656 bitcoins confiscated by U.S. Marshals from the Silk Road dark web marketplace for $18.7 million. That year, he predicted the price of bitcoin would go to $10,000 in three years. Bitcoin went on to climb close to $20,000 in 2017.
Some of Draper’s other bets have soured, however. He invested in Theranos, a health startup that falsely claimed it was able to detect diseases with a few drops of blood. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos’ founder, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud.
Draper’s rationale for bitcoin’s breakout next year is that there remains a massive untapped demographic for bitcoin: women.
“My assumption is that, since women control 80% of retail spending and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women, the dam is about to break,” Draper said.
Crypto has long had a gender disparity problem. According to a survey conducted for CNBC and Acorns by Momentive, twice as many men as women invest in digital assets (16% of men vs. 7% of women).
“Retailers will save roughly 2% on every purchase made in bitcoin vs dollars,” Draper added. “Once retailers realize that that 2% can double their profits, bitcoin will be ubiquitous.”
Payment middlemen such as Visa and Mastercard currently charge fees as high as 2% each time credit cardholders use their card to pay for something. Bitcoin offers a way for people to bypass the middlemen.
However, using the digital coin for everyday spending is tough, since its price is very volatile and the coin is not widely accepted as currency.
“When people can buy their food, clothing and shelter all in bitcoin, they will have no use for centralized banking fiat dollars,” Draper said.
“Management of fiat is centralized and erratic. When a politician decides to spend $10 trillion, your dollars become worth about 82 cents. Then the Fed needs to raise rates to make up for the spend, and those arbitrary centralized decisions create an inconsistent economy,” he added. Fiat currencies derive their worth from their issuing government, unlike cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile, the next so-called bitcoin halving — which cuts the bitcoin rewards to bitcoin miners — in 2024 will also boost the cryptocurrency, according to Draper, as it chokes the supply over time. The total number of bitcoins that will ever be mined is capped at 21 million.
Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney sat down with CNBC Pro to share the tech names he is looking at going into 2022. He also breaks down what stocks he views in the travel space that could do well, even in a possible recession.
DETROIT — Tesla delivered its first electric semis to PepsiCo Thursday, more than three years after Elon Musk said his company would start making the trucks.
The Austin, Texas, company formally delivered the trucks at a factory near Reno, Nevada. The event was livestreamed on Twitter, which Musk now owns.
Musk drove one of three Tesla Semis in front of a crowd inside the factory. One was white, one was painted with a Pepsi logo, and another with Frito-Lay colors.
PepsiCo, which is based in Purchase, New York, is taking part in a zero-emissions freight project at a Frito-Lay facility in Modesto, California. That project is being funded by a $15.4 million clean-freight technology grant from the California Air Resources Board that includes 15 Tesla battery-electric tractors and other electric- and natural-gas powered trucks.
Electric semis also would be eligible for a federal tax credit of up to $40,000.
At an event in November of 2017 unveiling the Tesla Semi, Musk said production would begin in 2019 and the trucks would be able to follow each other autonomously in a convoy. But during Tesla’s third-quarter earnings conference call in October he said the company’s “Full Self Driving” system is not quite ready to be driverless.
Musk said the truck has a range per charge of 500 miles (800 kilometers) when pulling an 82,000-pound (37,000-kilo) load. The company plans to ramp up Semi production to make 50,000 trucks in 2024 in North America.
Competitors working on hydrogen-powered semis say battery-powered trucks won’t work for long-haul carriers because it will take too long to recharge the huge batteries. Musk said hydrogen isn’t needed for heavy trucking.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk said his Neuralink company is seeking permission to test its brain implant in people soon.
In a “show and tell” presentation livestreamed Wednesday night, Musk said his team is in the process of asking U.S. regulators to allow them to test the device. He said he thinks the company should be able to put the implant in a human brain as part of a clinical trial in about six months, though that timeline is far from certain.
Musk’s Neuralink is one of many groups working on linking brains to computers, efforts aimed at helping treat brain disorders, overcoming brain injuries and other applications.
The field dates back to the 1960s, said Rajesh Rao, co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington. “But it really took off in the 90s. And more recently we’ve seen lots of advances, especially in the area of communication brain computer interfaces.”
Rao, who watched Musk’s presentation online, said he doesn’t think Neuralink is ahead of the pack in terms of brain-computer interface achievements. “But … they are quite ahead in terms of the actual hardware in the devices,” he said.
The Neuralink device is about the size of a large coin and is designed to be implanted in the skull, with ultra-thin wires going directly into the brain. Musk said the first two applications in people would be restoring vision and helping people with little or no ability to operate their muscles rapidly use digital devices.
He said he also envisions that in someone with a broken neck, signals from the brain could be bridged to Neuralink devices in the spinal cord.
“We’re confident there are no physical limitations to enabling full body functionality,” said Musk, who recently took over Twitter and is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
In experiments by other teams, implanted sensors have let paralyzed people use brain signals to operate computers and move robotic arms. In a 2018 study in the journal PLOS ONE, three participants with paralysis below the neck affecting all of their limbs used an experimental brain-computer interface being tested by the consortium BrainGate. The interface records neural activity from a small sensor in the brain to navigate things like email and apps.
A r ecent study in the journal Nature, by scientists at the Swiss research center NeuroRestore, identified a type of neuron activated by electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, allowing nine patients with chronic spinal cord injury to walk again.
Researchers have also been working on brain and machine interfaces for restoring vision. Rao said some companies have developed retinal implants, but Musk’s announcement suggested his team would use signals directly targeting the brain’s visual cortex, an approach that some academic groups are also pursuing, “with limited success.”
Neuralink spokespeople did not immediately respond to an email to the press office. Dr. Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgery professor at Stanford University who is an adviser for Neuralink, said one way Neuralink is different than some other devices is that it has the ability to reach into deeper layers of the brain. But he added: “There are lots of different systems that have lots of different advantages.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The U.S.-listed shares of China-based electric vehicle maker XPeng Inc. skyrocketed Wednesday, as investors cheered changes in China’s COVID policy while shrugging off weak third-quarter results and a downbeat outlook.
The stock XPEV, +45.44%
charged up 45.0% in midday trading, enough to pace all gainers on the New York Stock Exchange. It was also headed for the biggest one-day gain since going public in August 2020, surpassing the previous record advance of 33.9% on Nov. 23, 2020.
The rally comes even after XPeng reported a wider-than-expected loss for the third-straight quarter, missed on revenue for the first time and said it expected fourth-quarter revenue to fall 40% to 44% from a year ago while the FactSet consensus called for just a 4.4 decline.
Instead, investors seemed China appeared to move toward easing its zero-COVID policy, amid growing social unrest and a slowing economy. China’s government said Tuesday that it would renew its push to vaccinate the elderly, and said it would amend COVID control measures.
XPeng’s stock rally also comes at a time when investor sentiment had soured. Earlier this week, Jefferies analyst Johnson Wan downgraded the EV maker, citing recent “missteps” by the company at a time that the “honeymoon stage” for EVs in China was coming to an end.
In addition, short interest, or bearish bets on XPeng’s stock, was 5.7% of the public float, or freely tradable shares, based on the latest available exchange data. That compares with short interest as a percent of float for China-based rivals Nio Inc. NIO, +20.14%
at 4.1% and Li Auto Inc. LI, +18.35%
at 4.7%.
For Tesla Inc. TSLA, +2.12%,
which generated $5.13 billion in revenue from China in its latest quarter, or about 24% of total revenue, short interest as a percent of float was 2.9%.
XPeng’s stock has soared 60.7% in November but has still tumbled 41.7% over the past three months. In comparison, the Invesco Golden Dragon China exchange-traded fund PGJ, +8.98%
has shed 11.7% the past three months while the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.62%
has slipped 1.1%.
A Tesla Model 3 vehicle is on display at the Tesla auto store on September 22, 2022 in Santa Monica, California. Tesla is recalling over 1 million vehicles in the U.S. because the windows can pinch a person’s fingers while being rolled up.
Allison Dinner | Getty Images
Tesla is still the top-selling electric vehicle brand in the U.S., but its dominance is eroding as rivals offer a growing number of more affordable models, according to a report Tuesday by S&P Global Mobility.
The data firm found that Tesla’s market share of new registered electric vehicles in the U.S. stood at 65% through the third quarter, down from 71% last year and 79% in 2020. S&P forecasts Tesla’s EV market share will decline to less than 20% by 2025, with the number of EV models expected to grow from 48 today to 159 by then.
A drop in Tesla’s U.S. market share was expected, but the rate of the decline could be concerning for investors in Elon Musk’s autos and energy company. As Musk focuses attention on fixing his recently acquired social media company, Twitter, Tesla shares closed down by about a point to $180 on Tuesday. Tesla’s stock has declined by almost half year to date.
S&P reported that Tesla is slowly losing its stranglehold on the U.S. EV market to fully electric models that are now available in price ranges below $50,000, where “Tesla does not yet truly compete.” Tesla’s entry-level Model 3 starts at about $48,200 with shipping fees, but the vehicles typically retail for higher prices with options.
“Tesla’s position is changing as new, more affordable options arrive, offering equal or better technology and production build,” S&P said in the report. “Given that consumer choice and consumer interest in EVs are growing, Tesla’s ability to retain a dominant market share will be challenged going forward.”
Read more about electric vehicles from CNBC Pro
The new data follows a Reuters report Monday that Tesla is developing a revamped version of its entry-level Model 3 aimed at cutting production costs and reducing the components and complexity in the interior.
During the company’s third-quarter earnings call in October, Musk said Tesla was finally working on a new, more affordable model that he first teased in 2020.
“We don’t want to talk exact dates, but this is the primary focus of our new vehicle development team, obviously,” he said, adding that Tesla had completed “the engineering for Cybertruck and for Semi.”
He described the future vehicle as something “smaller,” that will “exceed the production of all our other vehicles combined.”
Stephanie Brinley, associate director of AutoIntelligence for S&P Global Mobility, noted that Tesla’s unit sales are expected to increase in coming years despite the decline in its market share.
Tesla’s current leadership in EVs is over a relatively insignificant market. Despite the amount of attention surrounding EVs, sales of all-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles — which include electric motors as well as an internal combustion engine — remain miniscule.
Of the 10.22 million vehicles registered in the U.S. through the third quarter, roughly 525,000, or 5.1%, were all-electric models. That’s up from 334,000, or 2.8%, through the third quarter of 2021, according to S&P.
The majority of the EVs registered through September — or nearly 340,000 — were Teslas, according to S&P. The remaining vehicles were divided, very unevenly, among 46 other nameplates.
But Tesla’s success in the market as well as government incentives have all but forced traditional automakers to make an effort in the growing EV segment.
The Ford Mustang Mach-E, ranked third in EV registrations, is the only non-Tesla vehicle in the top five rankings, S&P said. Those EVs were followed by the Chevrolet Bolt and Bolt EUV, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, Volkswagen ID.4 and Nissan Leaf.
S&P noted that the growth in EVs is largely coming from current owners of Toyota and Honda vehicles. Both of the automakers are well-known for fuel-efficient vehicles but have been slow to transition to all-electric models.
To help curb carbon and other emissions from traditional gas-powered vehicles, several states and the federal government are encouraging the transition to fully electric vehicles with incentives such as tax breaks.
Transportation is responsible for 25% of carbon emissions from human activity globally, according to estimates by the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation.
Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy, yet another sign of how Elon Musk plans to transform the social media company he bought a month ago.
In 2020, Twitter developed an extensive set of rules that sought to prohibit “harmful misinformation” about the virus and its vaccines.
Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules and removed almost 100,000 pieces of content that violated those rules, according to statistics published by Twitter. The policy received acclaim from medical professionals: In an advisory to technology platforms, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited Twitter’s rules as an example of what companies should do to combat misinformation.
Twitter did not appear to formally announce the rule change. Instead, some Twitter users Monday night spotted a note added to the page on Twitter’s website that outlines its Covid policy.
“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” the note read.
Musk has promised to restore many previously banned Twitter accounts as soon as this week. It is possible that among the restored accounts will be some of the 11,000 banned under Twitter’s former Covid misinformation rules.
The Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX CEO tested the limits of Twitter’s previous policy in the early days of the pandemic. In March and April 2020, Musk used the social network to downplay the magnitude of the crisis and express frustration with how the pandemic had been handled. He repeatedly urged the end of the stay-at-home policies, despite public health officials’ insistence at the time that social distancing remained necessary to avoid a wave of infections that could overwhelm hospitals.
On a Tesla earnings call with Wall Street analysts in April 2020, Musk went off script to rail against Covid policies.
“I would call it, ‘forcibly imprisoning people in their homes’ against all their Constitutional rights, in my opinion, and breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why people came to America or built this country,” Musk said on the call. “It’s an outrage.”
Musk says he has twice had Covid. Despite his skepticism of public health policy, he has said he supports vaccination, even if he doesn’t believe the shots should be mandated. Still, he said in a New York Times podcast interview with technology journalist Kara Swisher in September 2020 that he would not get vaccinated because, “I’m not at risk for Covid, nor are my kids.”
When Swisher confronted Musk with the possibility that many people could die if they didn’t follow public health recommendations, he replied bluntly: “Everybody dies.”
Nio is trying to stand out from a wave of Chinese electric vehicle competitors through its technology. The company is hoping its partnership with Tencent can help it boost its tech prowess in areas from mapping to autonomous driving.
Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio and tech giant Tencent agreed to work together on areas including autonomous driving and high-definition mapping.
Tencent — a gaming, social media and cloud computing titan — has signed a cooperation agreement with Nio, one of Tesla’s rivals in China, as the firms look to cash in on Beijing’s focus on so-called new energy cars.
The partnership could allow Tencent to do this, while also giving Nio the technology backing of one of China’s biggest firms. Tencent is already a major investor in Nio, which is striving to differentiate itself from a sea of electric car start-ups.
Nio and Tencent said on Monday they will work together on high-precision mapping systems for drivers. Nio will also be using Tencent’s cloud computing infrastructure for data storage and training for autonomous driving. Driverless cars require huge amounts of real-time data to be processed in order to train algorithms.
Tencent’s partnership with Nio gives the company another opportunity to push into new business areas as its core video gaming business, which has been battered by strict domestic regulation, continues to face headwinds.
Still, the company delivered 31,607 vehicles in the third quarter, marking a quarterly delivery record for the start-up.
However, China’s once high-flying EV start-ups have seen their share prices hammered this year as investors turned away from growth stocks and China’s economy faced a slew of problems.
Twitter searches for the widespread Covid-19-related protests in China are returning a flood of spam, pornography and gibberish that some disinformation researchers say at first glance appear to be a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government or its allies to drown out images of the demonstrations.
Beginning late last week and into Monday, searches in Chinese for major protest hotspots, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Guangzhou, produced a nonstop stream of solicitations, images of scantily clad women in suggestive poses and seemingly random word- and sentence fragments. Many of the tweets reviewed by CNN on Monday came from accounts that had been created months ago, follow virtually no other accounts and have no followers of their own.
The spike in suspected inauthentic behavior followed a deadly fire in China’s Xinjiang province, where at least 10 people were killed amid Covid-19 lockdown restrictions that reportedly hindered first responders from reaching the blaze. The fire, and long simmering frustration over the country’s zero Covid policies, helped spur the rare protests in China.
“It is happening not just around Xinjiang but around any sensitive Chinese issue at the moment,” said Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous co-founder of GreatFire.org, a digital activism group based in China. “Search any city that has seen a rise in Covid cases, or had on-the-street protests on the weekend, and you will see the same thing.”
The apparent suppression campaign by suspected bot accounts represents one of the first major disinformation tests for Twitter since the platform was purchased by Elon Musk. The billionaire has personally vowed to wage war against bots and spammers but has also cut more than half of Twitter’s staff, raising concerns about the company’s ability to combat bad actors in the United States and abroad.
US lawmakers have expressed alarm about Twitter’s alleged vulnerability to foreign exploitation. Moreover, Musk’s ties to China through one of his other companies, electric-vehicle maker Tesla, have raiseddoubts about his willingness to stand up to the Chinese government.
Twitter, which has cut a substantial amount of its public relations team, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
GreatFire.org, which helps Chinese citizens get around the country’s internet censorship, noted a torrent of “dating” spam tweets appearing on Friday tagged with “Urumqi,” the capital of Xinjiang. The flood of spam tweets is still ongoing, Smith told CNN on Monday.
Pornography and sex-related sites were among the first to be censored by China when it began its internet crackdown years ago, Smith added, making it less likely that the spam tweets advertising sex services are the work of random, private individuals.
Twitter is officially blocked in China, but estimates of the number of Twitter users in China have ranged between 3 million and 10 million.
On Sunday evening, Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a disinformation researcher, elevated an independent researcher’s findings that Stamos said “points to this being an intentional attack to throw up informational chaff and reduce external visibility into protests in China.”
The other researcher’s self-described “quick and dirty analysis” of the location-focused searches suggested a “significant uptick” in recent tweets containing ads for escorts, pornography and gambling.
Stamos, who previously worked as the chief security officer at Facebook, later tweeted that the apparent disinformation campaign has convinced him to seriously consider leaving Twitter. “We are rapidly approaching the point where any political discussion will be dominated by organized influence teams and more lighthearted topics by spam,” he said.
Musk has pushed back on suggestions that his ownership of Tesla, which is heavily invested in China, may give the Chinese government “leverage” over Twitter. In June, prior to completing his purchase of the social media company, Musk told Bloomberg News that “as far as I’m aware,” China does not attempt to interfere with the free speech of the US press.
But for years, social media companies including Twitter have highlighted actual and multiple examples of foreign influence operations on social media. The recent layoffs and resignations at Twitter — which have directly affected the teams responding to Chinese influence campaigns, a former employee told The Washington Post — have further reduced the company’s ability to meet those challenges.
It’s also unclear to what extent China may have visibility into Twitter’s service and internal systems. Earlier this year, Twitter’s former head of security told the US government in a whistleblower disclosure that the company is extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign exploitation. The whistleblower’s testimony claimed the FBI had warned the company this year that at least one agent working for the Chinese government was on Twitter’s payroll.
The claim has alarmed US policymakers. Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Musk asking him to review Twitter’s security for insider threats and to brief congressional staff on the matter.
Much of Twitter’s ad sales team has been fired or pushed out. Large companies from General Mills to Macy’s have paused advertising on the platform, with more potentially following suit after new owner Elon Musk’s decision to restore the account of former President Donald Trump and other controversial figures. And any cursory scroll of the platform will likely show you fewer big brand ads.
That would all seem like horrible news for a business that generates the lion’s share of its revenue from advertising. But Musk may not care.
The Tesla CEO has previously said he “hates advertising” and, as Twitter’s owner, professed a desire to make the company more reliant on subscription revenue than advertising dollars. Twitter has always struggled to turn its outsized influence in media, politics, and culture into a highly successful advertising business. And without needing to please advertisers, the billionaire would be freer to implement his “free speech” vision for Twitter.
“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Twitter’s advertising business has long been smaller than that of rivals like Facebook, in part because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting.
To successfully overhaul Twitter into a thriving subscription business would be to buck the trend of many other media properties that have struggled with the model. And Musk’s attempts right out of the gate have faltered. An updated, $8-per-month version of the Twitter Blue subscription service that allowed users to buy a verification checkmark had to be halted after just two days when it was abused to impersonate prominent people (notably Musk himself), businesses, and government agencies. Musk initially said he would relaunch the service on November 29, but on Monday suggested he might further delay it “until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.”
Some industry watchers have also questioned whether, given Twitter’s somewhat niche status as a relatively small platform used largely by members of the media, politicians and academics, such a subscription service could be widely adopted. Even if all 217 million daily users Twitter reported having at the end of 2021 signed up for Musk’s $8 per month subscription, the annual revenue would still be less than a quarter of the size of rival Meta’s.
Still, some industry insiders have reason to think he can pull it off. “Twitter over the last month has been far more entertaining than Netflix and easily worth $8,” Roy Price, the founder of Amazon Studios, said in a tweet Saturday. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a tweet, “don’t underestimate” Musk. And Twitch co-founder Justin Kan tweeted that he thinks Twitter is “likely to survive just fine (and potentially thrive!)” in part because, unlike some high-profile users who have announced their departure from the platform, most regular users likely don’t care about who’s leading the platform and how.
Indeed, Musk’s shift away from advertising and toward a subscription model could work if Twitter can survive having its entire revenue decimated beforehand, keep its systems up and running, avoid violating laws around copyright infringement and hate speech, and also remain in good standing with Apple and Google, which control the app stores on which Twitter depends.
The stakes to pull it off are significant for Musk. After borrowing billions of dollars to finance the Twitter takeover, Musk is up against the clock to turn what was already a struggling business into a company that can generate enough cash flow to pay back his debt. He may also risk his reputation as “a gifted and audacious entrepreneur who made Tesla work against widespread doubts and naysaying,” said Robert Bruner, professor of business administration at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
Whether he likes advertising or not, the business made up 90% of Twitter’s revenue prior to Musk’s takeover and replacing it won’t be an immediate shift.
In the wake of the chaos at Twitter in recent weeks, there has been talk of brands quitting the platform out of concern that their ads could end up next to objectionable content. But that may not be the only or even primary reason advertisers have walked away — or why attracting new ones could be tricky. Advertisers are also likely on edge about Twitter’s stability, as users and former employees raise concerns that the mass exodus of staff could leave the platform vulnerable to glitches and outages.
Brands may also be miffed that many of Twitter’s ad sales employees who managed their campaigns have been fired or pushed out, including after another round of layoffs and exits Monday.
Large digital platforms “have experienced professionals out there who develop relationships with these advertisers,” Vincent said. “When you let go of a staff that was as veteran as Twitter’s and there’s no one there to respond to those [brands], you basically reduce the value of the ad platform.”
By bringing Trump and other controversial figures back to the platform, Twitter may have greater appeal to the right-leaning advertisers that do business on alternative platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.
Musk is also going to have to contend with potential pressure from regulators, as well as the app store operators at Apple and Google, if he wants to succeed in turning Twitter’s business around. A group of US senators has already called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Musk’s Twitter over potential violations of the company’s 2011 consent decree. And Europe’s Digital Services Act may impose limits on just how free Musk’s “free speech” Twitter can be.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last week, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, who left the company earlier this month, said the company’s failure to adhere to Google and Apple’s app store rules could be “catastrophic.” The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. Over the weekend, the head of Apple’s app store, Phil Schiller, deleted his Twitter account.
Most importantly, Twitter will have to keep users invested in the platform if Musk’s subscription strategy is going to work. And it’s not just existing users — Musk will also need to attract new people to the platform, which has long struggled to break out of its niche status and grow its user base, by ensuring it’s filled with must-read content.
In the weeks since Musk took over Twitter — which was immediately followed by an uptick in hateful content — there has been much hand-waving from users about moving to other platforms, and several high-profile accounts have announced their exits, including director Shonda Rimes and model Gigi Hadid. But it’s not clear that there has been a broad drop-off in the user base; instead, Musk has claimed in tweets that platform usage is at an all-time high.
So long as Musk can keep Twitter functioning properly despite having fewer employees, many users will likely stick around, perhaps even more so following the return of controversial accounts that tend to make news with incendiary comments on the platform. Musk himself has pointed out that even as people fret about the demise of Twitter, they’re doing it on the platform itself. And the billionaire has proposed making it easier for creators to earn money on the platform, which could also drive usage.
Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.
“Even as both Musk and Trump are driven by the gravity of the attention economy, it doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to cash in on it,” Serazio said. He said Musk likely made the decision to restore Trump’s account because “it was going to cause headlines, it was going to cause attention,” adding that “the attention won’t save Twitter … but I don’t know that [Musk] has any other strategy other than the attention economy, even if he doesn’t know how to profit from it.”
Pedestrians walk past the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York’s Times Square.
Eric Thayer | Reuters
It seems like an eternity ago, but it’s just been a year.
At this time in 2021, the Nasdaq Composite had just peaked, doubling since the early days of the pandemic. Rivian’s blockbuster IPO was the latest in a record year for new issues. Hiring was booming and tech employees were frolicking in the high value of their stock options.
Twelve months later, the landscape is markedly different.
Not one of the 15 most valuable U.S. tech companies has generated positive returns in 2021. Microsoft has shed roughly $700 billion in market cap. Meta’s market cap has contracted by over 70% from its highs, wiping out over $600 billion in value this year.
In total, investors have lost roughly $7.4 trillion, based on the 12-month drop in the Nasdaq.
Interest rate hikes have choked off access to easy capital, and soaring inflation has made all those companies promising future profit a lot less valuable today. Cloud stocks have cratered alongside crypto.
There’s plenty of pain to go around. Companies across the industry are cutting costs, freezing new hires, and laying off staff. Employees who joined those hyped pre-IPO companies and took much of their compensation in the form of stock options are now deep underwater and can only hope for a future rebound.
IPOs this year slowed to a trickle after banner years in 2020 and 2021, when companies pushed through the pandemic and took advantage of an emerging world of remote work and play and an economy flush with government-backed funds. Private market darlings that raised billions in public offerings, swelling the coffers of investment banks and venture firms, saw their valuations marked down. And then down some more.
Rivian has fallen more than 80% from its peak after reaching a stratospheric market cap of over $150 billion. The Renaissance IPO ETF, a basket of newly listed U.S. companies, is down 57% over the past year.
Tech executives by the handful have come forward to admit that they were wrong.
The Covid-19 bump didn’t, in fact, change forever how we work, play, shop and learn. Hiring and investing as if we’d forever be convening happy hours on video, working out in our living room and avoiding airplanes, malls and indoor dining was — as it turns out — a bad bet.
Add it up and, for the first time in nearly two decades, the Nasdaq is on the cusp of losing to the S&P 500 in consecutive years. The last time it happened the tech-heavy Nasdaq was at the tail end of an extended stretch of underperformance that began with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Between 2000 and 2006, the Nasdaq only beat the S&P 500 once.
Is technology headed for the same reality check today? It would be foolish to count out Silicon Valley or the many attempted replicas that have popped up across the globe in recent years. But are there reasons to question the magnitude of the industry’s misfire?
It was supposed to be the year of Meta. Prior to changing its name in late 2021, Facebook had consistently delivered investors sterling returns, beating estimates and growing profitably with historic speed.
The company had already successfully pivoted once, establishing a dominant presence on mobile platforms and refocusing the user experience away from the desktop. Even against the backdrop of a reopening world and damaging whistleblower allegations about user privacy, the stock gained over 20% last year.
But Zuckerberg doesn’t see the future the way his investors do. His commitment to spend billions of dollars a year on the metaverse has perplexed Wall Street, which just wants the company to get its footing back with online ads.
The big and immediate problem is Apple, which updated its privacy policy in iOS in a way that makes it harder for Facebook and others to target users with ads.
With its stock down by two-thirds and the company on the verge of a third straight quarter of declining revenue, Meta said earlier this month it’s laying off 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 employees, its first large-scale reduction ever.
“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” Zuckerberg said.
Mammoth spending on staff is nothing new for Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg was in good company on that front.
Software engineers had long been able to count on outsized compensation packages from major players, led by Google. In the war for talent and the free flow of capital, tech pay reached new heights.
Recruiters at Amazon could throw more than $700,000 at a qualified engineer or project manager. At gaming company Roblox, a top-level engineer could make $1.2 million, according to Levels.fyi. Productivity software firm Asana, which held its stock market debut in 2020, has never turned a profit but offered engineers starting salaries of up to $198,000, according to H1-B visa data.
Fast forward to the last quarter of 2022, and those halcyon days are a distant memory.
Layoffs at Cisco, Meta, Amazon and Twitter have totaled nearly 29,000 workers, according to data collected by the website Layoffs.fyi. Across the tech industry, the cuts add up to over 130,000 workers. HPannounced this week it’s eliminating 4,000 to 6,000 jobs over the next three years.
For many investors, it was just a matter of time.
“It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people,” Brad Gerstner, a tech investor at Altimeter Capital, wrote last month.
Gerstner’s letter was specifically targeted at Zuckerberg, urging him to slash spending, but he was perfectly willing to apply the criticism more broadly.
“I would take it a step further and argue that these incredible companies would run even better and more efficiently without the layers and lethargy that comes with this extreme rate of employee expansion,” Gerstner wrote.
Activist investor TCI Fund Management echoed that sentiment in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, whose company just recorded its slowest growth rate for any quarter since 2013, other than one period during the pandemic.
“Our conversations with former executives suggest that the business could be operated more effectively with significantly fewer employees,” the letter read. As CNBC reported this week, Google employees are growing worried that layoffs could be coming.
Those special purpose acquisition companies, or blank-check entities, created so they could go find tech startups to buy and turn public were a phenomenon of 2020 and 2021. Investment banks were eager to underwrite them, and investors jumped in with new pools of capital.
SPACs allowed companies that didn’t quite have the profile to satisfy traditional IPO investors to backdoor their way onto the public market. In the U.S. last year, 619 SPACs went public, compared with 496 traditional IPOs.
This year, that market has been a bloodbath.
The CNBC Post SPAC Index, which tracks the performance of SPAC stocks after debut, is down over 70% since inception and by about two-thirds in the past year. Many SPACs never found a target and gave the money back to investors. Chamath Palihapitiya, once dubbed theSPAC king, shut down two deals last month after failing to find suitable merger targets and returned $1.6 billion to investors.
Then there’s the startup world, which for over a half-decade was known for minting unicorns.
Last year, investors plowed $325 billion into venture-backed companies, according to EY’s venture capital team, peaking in the fourth quarter of 2021. The easy money is long gone. Now companies are much more defensive than offensive in their financings, raising capital because they need it and often not on favorable terms.
“You just don’t know what it’s going to be like going forward,” EY venture capital leader Jeff Grabow told CNBC. “VCs are rationalizing their portfolio and supporting those that still clear the hurdle.”
The word profit gets thrown around a lot more these days than in recent years. That’s because companies can’t count on venture investors to subsidize their growth and public markets are no longer paying up for high-growth, high-burn names. The forward revenue multiple for top cloud companies is now just over 10, down from a peak of 40, 50 or even higher for some companies at the height in 2021.
The trickle down has made it impossible for many companies to go public without a massive markdown to their private valuation. A slowing IPO market informs how earlier-stage investors behave, said David Golden, managing partner at Revolution Ventures in San Francisco.
“When the IPO market becomes more constricted, that circumscribes one’s ability to find liquidity through the public market,” said Golden, who previously ran telecom, media and tech banking at JPMorgan. “Most early-stage investors aren’t counting on an IPO exit. The odds against it are so high, particularly compared against an M&A exit.”
There have been just 173 IPOs in the U.S. this year, compared with 961 at the same point in 2021. In the VC world, there haven’t been any deals of note.
“We’re reverting to the mean,” Golden said.
An average year might see 100 to 200 U.S. IPOs, according to FactSet research. Data compiled by Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and finance professor at the University of Florida, shows there were 123 tech IPOs last year, compared with an average of 38 a year between 2010 and 2020.
Buy now, pay never
There’s no better example of the intersection between venture capital and consumer spending than the industry known as buy now, pay later.
Companies such as Affirm, Afterpay (acquired by Block, formerly Square) and Sweden’s Klarna took advantage of low interest rates and pandemic-fueled discretionary incomes to put high-end purchases, such as Peloton exercise bikes, within reach of nearly every consumer.
Affirm went public in January 2021 and peaked at over $168 some 10 months later. Affirm grew rapidly in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as brands and retailers raced to make it easier for consumers to buy online.
By November of last year, buy now, pay later was everywhere, from Amazon to Urban Outfitters‘ Anthropologie. Customers had excess savings in the trillions. Default rates remained low — Affirm was recording a net charge-off rate of around 5%.
Affirm has fallen 92% from its high. Charge-offs peaked over the summer at nearly 12%. Inflation paired with higher interest rates muted formerly buoyant consumers. Klarna, which is privately held, saw its valuation slashed by 85% in a July financing round, from $45.6 billion to $6.7 billion.
The world’s richest person — even after an almost 50% slide in the value of Tesla — is now the owner of Twitter following an on-again, off-again, on-again drama that lasted six months and was about to land in court.
Musk swiftly fired half of Twitter’s workforce and then welcomed former President Donald Trump back onto the platform after running an informal poll. Many advertisers have fled.
And corporate governance is back on the docket after this month’s sudden collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which managed to grow to a $32 billion valuation with no board of directors or finance chief. Top-shelf firms such as Sequoia, BlackRock and Tiger Global saw their investments wiped out overnight.
“We are in the business of taking risk,” Sequoia wrote in a letter to limited partners, informing them that the firm was marking its FTX investment of over $210 million down to zero. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”
Even with the crypto meltdown, mounting layoffs and the overall market turmoil, it’s not all doom and gloom a year after the market peak.
Golden points to optimism out of Washington, D.C., where President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act will lead to investments in key areas in tech in the coming year.
Funds from those bills start flowing in January. Intel, Micron and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company have already announced expansions in the U.S. Additionally, Golden anticipates growth in health care, clean water and energy, and broadband in 2023.
“All of us are a little optimistic about that,” Golden said, “despite the macro headwinds.”
LONDON — Elon Musk said Friday that Twitter plans to relaunch its premium service that will offer different colored check marks to accounts next week, in a fresh move to revamp the service after a previous attempt backfired.
It’s the latest change to the social media platform that the billionaire Tesla CEO bought last month for $44 billion, coming a day after Musk said he would grant “amnesty” for suspended accounts and causing yet more uncertainty for users.
Twitter previously suspended the premium service, which under Musk granted blue-check labels to anyone paying $8 a month, because of a wave of imposter accounts. Originally, the blue check was given to government entities, corporations, celebrities and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonation.
In the latest version, companies will get a gold check, governments will get a gray check, and individuals who pay for the service, whether or not they’re celebrities, will get a blue check, Musk said Friday.
“All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates,” he said, adding it was “Painful, but necessary” and promising a “longer explanation” next week. He said the service was “tentatively launching” Dec. 2.
Twitter had put the revamped premium service on hold days after its launch earlier this month after accounts impersonated companies including pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, and even Musk’s own businesses Tesla and SpaceX, along with various professional sports and political figures.
It was just one change in the past two days. On Thursday, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” for suspended accounts, following the results of an online poll he conducted on whether accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” should be reinstated.
The yes vote was 72%. Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots. Musk also used one before restoring former U.S. President Donald Trump’s account.
“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted Thursday using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
The move is likely to put the company on a crash course with European regulators seeking to clamp down on harmful online content with tough new rules, which helped cement Europe’s reputation as the global leader in efforts to rein in the power of social media companies and other digital platforms.
Zach Meyers, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, said giving blanket amnesty based on an online poll is an “arbitrary approach” that’s “hard to reconcile with the Digital Services Act,” a new EU law that will start applying to the biggest online platforms by mid-2023.
The law is aimed at protecting internet users from illegal content and reducing the spread of harmful but legal content. It requires big social media platforms to be “diligent and objective” in enforcing restrictions, which must be spelled out clearly in the fine print for users when signing up, Meyers said.
Britain also is working on its own online safety law.
“Unless Musk quickly moves from a ‘move fast and break things’ approach to a more sober management style, he will be on a collision course with Brussels and London regulators,” Meyers said.
European Union officials took to social media to highlight their worries. The 27-nation bloc’s executive Commission published a report Thursday that found Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it this year compared with 2021.
The report was based on data collected over the spring — before Musk acquired Twitter — as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the bloc’s voluntary code of conduct on disinformation. It found that Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.
The numbers may yet worsen. Since taking over, Musk has l aid off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce along with an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation. Many others have resigned, including the company’s head of trust and safety.
Recent layoffs at Twitter and results of the EU’s review “are a source of concern,” the bloc’s commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders tweeted Thursday evening after meeting with Twitter executives at the company’s European headquarters in Dublin.
In the meeting, Reynders said he “underlined that we expect Twitter to deliver on their voluntary commitments and comply with EU rules,” including the Digital Services Act and the bloc’s strict privacy regulations known as General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
Vera Jourova, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, tweeted Thursday evening that she was concerned about news reports that a “vast amount” of Twitter’s European staff were fired.
“If you want to effectively detect and take action against #disinformation & propaganda, this requires resources,” Jourova said. “Especially in the context of Russian disinformation warfare.”
LONDON — Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it in 2022 compared with the previous year, according to European Union data released Thursday.
The EU figures were published as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the 27-nation bloc’s code of conduct on disinformation.
Twitter wasn’t alone — most other tech companies signed up to the voluntary code also scored worse. But the figures could foreshadow trouble for Twitter in complying with the EU’s tough new online rules after owner Elon Musk fired many of the platform’s 7,500 full-time workers and an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation and other crucial tasks.
The EU report found Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube also took longer, while TikTok was the only one to improve.
The amount of hate speech Twitter removed after it was flagged up slipped to 45.4% from 49.8% the year before. The removal rate at other platforms also slipped, except at YouTube, which surged.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment. Emails to several staff on the company’s European communications team bounced back as undeliverable.
Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last month fanned widespread concern that purveyors of lies and misinformation would be allowed to flourish on the site. The billionaire Tesla CEO, who has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive, has been reinstating suspended accounts, including former President Donald Trump’s.
Twitter faces more scrutiny in Europe by the middle of next year, when new EU rules aimed at protecting internet users’ online safety will start applying to the biggest online platforms. Violations could result in huge fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue.
France’s online regulator Arcom said it received a reply from Twitter after writing to the company earlier this week to say it was concerned about the effect that staff departures would have on Twitter’s “ability maintain a safe environment for its users.”
Arcom also asked the company to confirm it can meet its “legal obligations” in fighting online hate speech and that it is committed to implementing the new EU online rules. Arcom said it received a response from Twitter and that it will “study their response,” without giving more details.
Tech companies that signed up to the EU’s disinformation code agree to commit to measures aimed at reducing disinformation and file regular reports on whether they’re living up to their promises, though there’s little in the way of punishment.
Tesla Inc. shares on Monday were poised to end at a fresh two-year low, with shares of other electric-vehicle makers also underperforming the broader equity market as worries about China’s COVID-19 lockdowns re-emerged and oil futures prices dropped to their lowest level since January.
Shares of Tesla TSLA, -6.84%
extended their losing streak to a fourth session and were on track for their lowest close since Nov. 20, 2020, when they closed at $163.20. The stock was the 10th worst performer in the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.39%
and fourth worst in the Nasdaq 100 COMP, -1.09%
— and the most active stock on both exchanges.
American depositary shares of several China-based EV makers, including Nio Inc. NIO, -4.30%
and XPeng Inc. XPEV, -5.67%,
also underperformed the broader market. In contrast, shares of General Motors Co. GM, -0.63%
and Ford Motor Co. F, -0.29%
merely edged lower.
Tesla’s underperformance as compared with the broader indexes holds on a monthly and yearly basis as well. The stock is down more than 25% so far in November and 52% this year.
If the trend continues, this would be the worst yearly performance for the stock on record.
The S&P has lost about 17% year to date and has clawed back to a 2% gain so far in November.
Tesla is recalling more than 300,000 vehicles in the U.S. because a software glitch can make taillights go off intermittently, increasing the risk of a collision
LOS ANGELES — Tesla is recalling more than 300,000 vehicles in the U.S. because a software glitch can make taillights go off intermittently, increasing the risk of a collision.
Tesla said in documents posted Saturday by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that the glitch may affect one or both taillights on certain Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. Brake lamps, backup lamps and turn signal lamps are not affected by the software problem, the company said.
The automaker said it is releasing an online software update that will fix the problem.
The recall covers certain 2020 to 2023 Model Y SUVs and 2023 Model 3 sedans. That amounts to potentially 321,628 vehicles.
Tesla became aware of the problem last month after receiving complaints, primarily from customers outside the U.S., that their vehicle taillamps were not illuminating. The company completed an investigation into the problem earlier this month.
Owners will be notified by letter starting Jan. 14. The company says in documents that vehicles in production and those set for delivery got the update starting Nov. 6.
As of Nov. 14, Tesla had received three warranty claims due to the problem, but was not aware of any related crashes or injuries related to the glitch, according to the documents.
Another employee exodus appears to be underway at Twitter as many workers rejected Elon Musk’s terms for staying with the company, choosing instead to depart, according to multiple current and former employees.
As the deadline approached for Twitter employees to respond to Elon Musk’s ultimatum to commit to working in an “extremely hardcore” fashion at the company or leave, some employees appeared to publicly indicate they had chosen the latter option. On Thursday afternoon, Twitter staffers began posting the salute emoji, which has become a signal that someone is exiting the company. One Twitter employee said in a tweet that deciding to join the company was “one of the easiest decisions ever made. Deciding to leave today was 100% the opposite.”
Meanwhile, an internal Slack channel at the company was filled with employees posting the salute emoji after the 5pm ET deadline, indicating they had chosen not to sign Musk’s pledge and depart the company, employees told CNN.
Twitter’s remaining workforce had until 5 p.m. ET on Thursday to decide whether they wanted to be a part of the culture Musk wants to implement at the social media company, or else effectively resign, according to an email he sent to staff Wednesday.
A former Twitter executive who recently exited the company described Thursday’s employee exits as a “mass exodus.”
On Thursday evening following the exits, employees remaining at the company received an email alerting them that the company’s offices will be temporarily closed and badge access will be restricted through Monday, according to a copy of the email obtained by CNN from a current Twitter employee. Musk’s team similarly shuttered offices during the mass layoffs earlier this month out of a concern for safety and an apparent fear that exiting employees could attempt to sabotage the company on their way out.
Two Twitter employees told CNN ahead of the deadline on Thursday that they planned to reject the ultimatum, citing a toxic work environment they say the billionaire has introduced. Another Twitter employee told CNN Wednesday they were still weighing the decision, saying the email from Musk “felt like a punch in the gut because no matter how you felt about wanting to stay or wanting to go, you were forced to make a decision and feel like you’re up against the time clock to make the best decision for you and your family.”
The employee added: “Those decisions are more than just 24 hours.”
Musk told employees on Wednesday that his goal is to build “Twitter 2.0” and that employees who choose to stay will be required to commit to working “long hours at high intensity” and presumably agreeing to Musk’s demand for Twitter employees, who have been largely working remotely, to return to in-office work. As of midday Thursday, employees still did not have clarity on which remote-work exceptions would be granted if they decide to stay, one employee said.
Later on Thursday, amid an apparent scramble by management to avoid losing too many workers to the ultimatum, Musk sent an email to staff attempting to clarify his position on remote work, according to text of the email obtained by CNN from a Twitter employee who asked not to be identified.
“Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution,” Musk said in the email, adding that workers would be expected to attend in-person meetings no less than once a month.
Twenty minutes later, Musk sent a follow up email saying: “At risk of stating the obvious, any manager who falsely claims that someone reporting to them is doing excellent work or that a given role is essential, whether remote or not, will be exited from the company.”
The decision to issue an ultimatum came after Musk earlier this month fired half of Twitter’s staff, reducing its workforce to around 3,700 employees, and also reportedly cut many of Twitter’s contract workers. He also pushed out its top leadership and dissolved the board of directors. Musk also recently fired some employees for criticizing him in tweets or on internal Slack channels.
“I don’t want to stick around to build a product that’s being poisoned from the inside and out,” said one of the employees who plans to reject the ultimatum, but requested anonymity to avoid putting the severance at risk. “Everyone has a price to a certain degree and this severance gives me some comfort into looking for a better environment in the time frame despite the economy.”
That employee said management now appears to have grown concerned about the number of people planning to depart and are “scrambling” to convince talent to stay. Twitter, which has reportedly eliminated most of its public relations team, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another Twitter employee, who asked not to be quoted, shared similar concerns and said they planned to also exit the company.
A recently laid off employee who remains in touch with former coworkers told CNN that everyone they had spoken to plans to reject Musk’s ultimatum and exit the company. “People can’t overlook the public mockery and firing of other employees,” the former employee told CNN. “In the same vein, they can’t overlook or feel comfortable working for someone who has handled the last few weeks in the way Elon has.”
“People don’t want to sacrifice their mental health and family lives to make the richest man in the world richer,” the former employee added.
But the decision may not be so easy for others. The ultimatum comes during a difficult period for the tech industry, following mass layoffs and hiring freeze announcements at many major firms including Meta, Amazon, Lyft and others. Employees working in the United States from other countries could also risk losing their work visas if they leave the company.
A fourth employee told CNN Thursday they plan to stay at the company “because change is rarely influenced from the outside.”
The shakeup likely to come as a result of the ultimatum will be the last element of the “fundamental organizational restructuring” following Musk’s takeover, he told a Delaware court Wednesday during a trial over his Tesla pay package.
Musk said in the Wednesday email that the “new Twitter” will be “much more engineering-driven,” leaving some non-engineering workers questioning whether their jobs could be at risk even if they opt to stay.
“There’s no assurance in this, you’re just like, ‘I might be able to advocate for myself, I might not,’” the employee who expressed uncertainty about the decision said. “What’s behind this door? You don’t know. The only door you know that’s certain is the exit door.”
WILMINGTON, Del. — Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the witness stand Wednesday to defend himself in a shareholder lawsuit challenging a compensation package he was awarded by the company’s board of directors that is potentially worth more than $55 billion.
Musk denied that he dictated terms of the compensation package or attended any meetings at which the plan was discussed by the board, its compensation committee, or a working group that helped develop it.
“I was entirely focused on the execution of the company,” he said.
Plaintiff’s attorney Greg Varallo spent much of his early cross-examination trying to draw Musk into admitting that he controls Tesla to such an extent that he can sway the board to do his bidding. Among other things, Varallo questioned Musk about his title of “Technoking,” a role that Musk has previously noted comes with “panache” and “great dance moves.”
“I think comedy is legal,” Musk told Varallo, who had questioned whether Musk was “stone-cold sober” when he came up with the title.
Varallo also suggested that one of the reasons that Musk developed a “master plan” for Tesla was to let people know he was in charge. He also noted that Musk makes recommendations regarding compensation for senior executives, and that he unilaterally made the decision to pause Tesla’s policy of accepting bitcoin from vehicle purchasers.
“You’re asking complex questions that can’t be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” Musk said when Varallo asked whether he came up with the vision for Tesla.
The lawsuit alleges that the performance-based stock option grant was negotiated by the compensation committee and approved by Tesla board members who had conflicts interest due to personal and professional ties to Musk, including investments in his companies. It also alleges the shareholder vote approving the compensation plan was based on a misleading proxy statement.
The shareholder plaintiff alleges that the proxy wrongly described members of the compensation committee as “independent,” and characterized all of the milestones that triggered vesting in the stock options as “stretch” goals meant to be difficult to achieve, even though internal projections indicated that three operational milestones were likely to be achieved within 18 months of the stockholder vote.
Attorneys for the defendants have noted that two institutional proxy advising firms that urged shareholders to reject the plan nevertheless noted that it would require “significant and perhaps historic achievements” and require growth that “appear stretching by any benchmark.”
The plan called for Musk to reap billions if Tesla hit certain market capitalization and operational milestones. For each incidence of simultaneously meeting a market cap milestone and an operational milestone, Musk, who owned about 22% of Tesla when the plan was approved, would get stock equal to 1% of outstanding shares at the time of the grant. His interest in the company would grow to about 28% if the company’s market capitalization grew by $600 billion.
Each milestone in the plan includes growing Tesla’s market capitalization by $50 billion and meeting aggressive revenue and pretax profit growth targets. Musk would receive the full benefit of the pay plan, $55.8 billion, only if Tesla hit a market capitalization of $650 billion and unprecedented revenue and earnings within a decade.
To date, Tesla has achieved all 12 of the market capitalization milestones and 11 operational milestones, resulting in the vesting of 11 of the grant’s 12 tranches and providing Musk over $52.4 billion in stock option gains, according to the lawsuit. Since the grant was awarded, Tesla’s market capitalization has increased from $59 billion to more than $613 billion now, having briefly hit $1 trillion early this year. Musk has sold Tesla stock to finance the Twitter purchase, adding downward pressure on the shares.
Shares of Tesla and other automakers have been battered this year, but the Austin, Texas, company earned $5.5 billion in 2021, blowing away the previous year’s profit of $721 million. It also produced a record 936,000 vehicles, nearly double vehicle production in 2020.
Attorneys for the plaintiff have suggested that incentivizing Musk to remain at Tesla’s helm by offering a huge compensation package was unnecessary, because he’s never suggested that he might leave. They’ve also suggested that Musk’s true motive in negotiating the package was to fund his dream to colonize Mars.
In a November 2017 email to former Tesla General Counsel Todd Maron, Musk expressed optimism that the compensation package would be seen in a favorable light.
“Given that this will all go to causes that at least aspirationally maximize the probability of a good future for humanity, plus all Tesla shareholders will be super happy, I think this will be received well,” he wrote, adding that “it should come across as an ultra bullish view of the future.”
While on the stand, Musk also said that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.
“I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” Musk said, according to multiple media reports.
