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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.
Trump’s January 6th Twitter lawsuit settled for ‘about $10 million’
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Elon Musk’s X has agreed to pay President Donald Trump “about $10 million” to settle his lawsuit against Twitter, reports The Wall Street Journal. The settlement would come on top of an estimated $250 million that Musk, who now seemingly has broad authority over government agencies as the head of DOGE, put toward helping Trump get elected last year.
Trump sued Twitter, Facebook, and Google over his account suspensions following the January 6th, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, and a judge dismissed this lawsuit in 2022, rejecting arguments that the company was a state actor or that Section 230 is unconstitutional.
Trump drops his Twitter lawsuit appeal.
Lawyers representing President Trump, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and what is now X moved to dismiss Trump’s pending case before the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, reports Bloomberg.
He was appealing the dismissal of a lawsuit that accused Twitter, which is now owned by DOGE head Elon Musk, of violating the First Amendment when it banned his account in 2021.
X says its payments service will finally launch this year
The Verge / Cathryn Hutton
X is one step closer to finally launching its payments platform. According to X CEO Linda Yaccarino, the X Money service will debut “later this year” with Visa announced as its first partner.
In her announcement, Yaccarino says the service will support “secure + instant funding to your X Wallet via Visa Direct,” allowing users to make P2P payments and instantly transfer money to their connected bank account. (It sounds a bit like Venmo.) The X Money profile Yaccarino tagged in her announcement says the service is “launching in 2025.”
Elon Musk email to X staff: ‘we’re barely breaking even’
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Ever since Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter he’s claimed the company, now called X, is in “a very dire situation from a revenue standpoint.”
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that banks are preparing a coordinated move to sell off some of the $13 billion in debt they loaned Musk to finance the deal. It mentions an email sent to employees this month, also confirmed by The Verge, where the Chief Twit said, “...we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes,” but also claimed, “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.”
Dozens of subreddits are banning links to X
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Dozens of popular subreddits are banning links to X after Elon Musk made a gesture that historians and human rights groups have described as a Nazi salute. Communities that have instituted a ban on links to X include r/formula1, r/military, r/nursing, r/TwoXChromosomes, and r/nintendo.
The shift is spreading across Reddit after neo-Nazis celebrated Musk’s speech at a rally on Monday for Donald Trump’s inauguration. During the speech, Musk twice raised his arm in a salute that historians, elected officials, and organizations that support Holocaust survivors have observed as a Nazi salute. During his speech, Musk places his hand on his chest and throws his arm forward at an angle, holding it mid-air for a few moments. “My heart goes out to you,” he says to supporters. Some supporters of Musk have defended him, saying the gesture went along with his words.
Elon Musk is being sued by the feds over the way he bought Twitter
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has resulted in a federal lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that he broke securities laws with a late disclosure, and saved $150 million in the process.
Before Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, before he tried to back out of that deal, before he was forced to go through with it, and before he changed its name to X, he started by acquiring a substantial stake in the company but didn’t reveal that fact until weeks later.
How Elon Musk’s xAI is quietly taking over X
Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge
When Elon Musk launched his own AI startup, xAI, he touted a key advantage over his competitors: access to the vast trove of data from his newly acquired social media platform Twitter. By implementing new API fees on the network he quickly renamed X, Musk locked out other AI companies, maintaining exclusive access for his own models. And he began using X’s millions of users to test the results.
Musk has been using this distribution channel since xAI launched its first version of the Grok large language model, adding features like trending story summaries and AI-generated questions on posts as well as releasing the Grok chatbot (initially) to X users exclusively. Now, a slew of new AI features is coming. Per the findings of reverse engineer Nima Owji, the platform appears to be developing AI-powered post enhancements, including a feature that lets Grok modify your tweets. The chatbot also appears to be adding location-based queries, letting users ask about things nearby, like grocery stores.
Elon Musk says X’s algorithm pushes “too much negativity.”
Musk posted last night that the platform’s algorithm will soon “promote more informational/entertaining content” in order to “maximize unregretted user-seconds.”
X’s new ‘Aurora’ image generator is gone.
The “Grok 2 + Aurora” option has vanished from Grok’s model selector menu only a day after it appeared, Engadget reports, replaced by “Grok 2 + FLUX beta” instead. The model still makes photorealistic images, but it was less willing to reproduce celebrities when I asked.
X owner Elon Musk wrote yesterday that the photorealistic and largely unrestricted model is a beta “internal image generator.”
Update: Added testing detail.
X gives Grok a new photorealistic AI image generator
Image: The Verge
X has given Grok a new AI image generator model called “Aurora” that seems to create far more photorealistic imagery than Grok’s other image generator, with similarly few apparent restrictions on what it will produce, TechCrunch reports. Like Grok, anyone can use Aurora. It lives in a new “Grok 2 + Aurora beta” option in the Grok model selector, though you’ll only get a few queries before you hit the X Premium subscription paywall and have to wait.
TechCrunch found that the model, which X employee Chris Park posted is available this morning, was willing to create copyrighted characters and public figures, including Mickey Mouse and “a bloodied Donald Trump,” but that it “stopped short of nudes.” Its lack of restrictions isn’t surprising, given our experience with Grok’s other model.
Who actually owns your social media accounts? (Not you.)
As 404 Media and others note, Elon Musk’s X has inserted itself into The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars, arguing that neither Alex Jones nor the estate handling his bankruptcy owns the associated social media accounts.
Since X simply grants a license for their use, the lawyers say that can’t be transferred without permission.
Musk dodged a sanction over skipping an SEC meeting in September.
A federal judge said Friday that sanctioning Musk was unnecessary “because he already agreed to reimburse the SEC $2,923 to cover airfare for the trio of agency lawyers he stood up in Los Angeles in September,” Bloomberg writes.
The agency sought to sanction him after he ditched a testimony over his Twitter acquisition to watch a SpaceX launch.
A study found that X’s algorithm now loves two things: Republicans and Elon Musk
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Elon Musk’s X may have tweaked its algorithm to boost his account, along with those of other conservative-leaning users, starting around the time he announced his support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That’s according to a new study published by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which found that Musk’s posts in particular were suddenly much more popular.
The study’s authors — QUT associate professor in digital media Timothy Graham and Monash University communications and media studies professor Mark Andrejevic — first looked at Musk’s engagement before and after his July endorsement of Trump. They report that starting around July 13th, Musks’ posts received 138 percent more views and 238 percent more retweets than before that date.
Don Lemon says he’s leaving X.
Lemon cited, among other things, the site’s new terms of service that require disputes to be brought in Texas courts, where a Tesla stock-owning judge recently recused himself from an advertiser lawsuit against X.
The Guardian is quitting X.
The news outlet says it will no longer post on any official Guardian accounts:
This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.
X is allowing people you’ve blocked to see your posts
Illustration: The Verge
This weekend, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced it’s “starting to launch” a controversial change to how blocking works on its platform. Company owner Elon Musk first revealed the change in September, which will allow people you’ve blocked to continue to see your posts, and, as noted by TechCrunch, your following and followers lists.
Musk claimed that stopping people from seeing your public posts “makes no sense,” but due to a post-Musk change that stops logged-out users from scrolling even a public profile, this could make it easier for blocked users to continue harassing someone.
X was supposed to be a bank by now
Image: The Verge
When Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter two years ago, he said his goal was to turn the platform into two things: the “digital town square” and the “everything app.” He has failed at both goals.
X isn’t something that is upsetting “the far right and the far left equally,” Instead, it has become Musk’s political weapon. In fact, he may be so preoccupied with trying to get Donald Trump elected that he has forgotten that X was supposed to be a bank by now.
X’s biggest anti-immigrant poster is... Elon Musk.
We’ve been sounding the alarm about Elon’s great replacement posts for a while, and Bloomberg just ran the numbers. Musk posts about the supposed link between immigration and voter fraud more than any other topic.
To be clear, Noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent, despite Musk’s claims to the contrary. Even a Heritage Foundation analysis shows just 68 instances of noncitizen voting in elections since 1980.
The EU may fine Elon Musk’s other companies for X violations
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
The European Union has reportedly warned X that it could use the revenue of several companies owned by Elon Musk to calculate fines levied against the platform for violating social media laws. European regulators may take the annual revenues of Musk’s other companies — including SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and the Boring Company — into account to calculate fines, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
X is being investigated for potentially violating several provisions of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a sweeping law that requires major platforms to remove posts that contain illegal content — and holds them financially accountable if they don’t. Under the DSA, which was passed in 2022, regulators can fine companies as much as 6% of their yearly annual revenue for failing to follow transparency rules or address illegal content or disinformation on their platforms.
X blocked hacked JD Vance dossier links after the Trump campaign flagged it
Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge
The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump asked X to stop links to a story containing VP nominee JD Vance’s hacked dossier from circulating before X chose to block them, reports The New York Times. X had cited its “rules on posting unredacted private personal information” as its justification for suspending the reporter who first published the dossier in his story.
That’s a markedly different set of actions than those Musk took two years ago after criticizing Twitter’s decision to suppress a 2020 news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He called the choice “a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment” and seeded internal documents related to the decision to certain journalists to report on — which doxxed people in the process.
X drops Unilever from its ‘advertiser boycott’ lawsuit
Image: The Verge
X will pay its Premium users to engage with each other
Image: The Verge
X is making a big change to how creators can earn money from the platform. Since last year, X has shared ad revenue with creators based on how many verified users see ads in replies to their posts. But the company announced today that creators are instead going to be paid based on “engagement with your content from Premium users.”
Put another way: the more people that subscribe to X Premium and engage with content from other Premium subscribers, the more money they all make. In theory.
Brazil clears X for return after a monthlong ban
Image: The Verge
On Tuesday, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the country’s telecommunications agency Anatel to unblock X within 24 hours, writing that it has fulfilled “all the requirements necessary for the immediate return of activities.
However, this won’t mean an immediate return to service for the app. As noted by the Brazilian outlet Poder360, Anatel still needs to notify Brazil’s 20,000 different internet service providers to remove the restrictions, which will vary by the system they use.
X argued it shouldn’t owe a fine in Australia because it’s not Twitter.
The company claimed that it’s not liable for failing to fully answer a notice asking how it handles child abuse imagery because Twitter “ceased to exist” after the notice was sent, as ArsTechnica writes.
Musk’s $44 billion Twitter now valued at just $9.4b as X.
The markdown comes courtesy of Fidelity which now values its initial $19.66 million investment in X at just $4.18 million.
The asset manager, which helped Musk acquire the social network formerly known as Twitter, has further reduced the value of its holding in X to a total markdown of 78.7 percent as of August’s end, based on newly released disclosures from Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund.
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