Elon Musk bought Twitter, and here’s everything that happened next

The For You tab is about to get much worse, but at least it will still show tweets from people you actually follow, Musk said on Tuesday in a clarification to his unpopular new policy for Twitter. I’ll still be sticking with the Following tab.

The bookmarks counter launched first on iOS last week, but some Verge staffers are now seeing it on their desktop browsers, too. The company said it planned to expand the feature, so its arrival on the web isn’t too much of a surprise. I’m still not happy about it; the counter is yet another metric cluttering up tweets.

Apparently some researchers are being told that they could have to pay at least $500,000 a year to access a tiny portion of Twitter’s data. I recommend being skeptical about anything this company says until it actually happens, but given all its shenanigans around API access, this wouldn’t exactly be surprising.

He gave a high-level update on the state of the company’s financial health during an interview at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley.

Twitter is currently expecting to make $3 billion in revenue this year and is spending $1.5 billion annually in addition to the $1.5 billion in debt payments it owes, according to Musk. For comparison, Twitter was on track to report about $5 billion in revenue for 2022 before Musk bought it. Its costs were $2.8 billion during just the first half of last year, which implies that he has slashed spend by more than 70 percent.

Musk claimed Twitter now has 250 million daily users and 500 million monthly users, though it’s unclear how those metrics are calculated. The last time Twitter reported user numbers as a public company it said there were 237.8 million daily users during the second quarter of 2022.

The Verge’s friends over at Platformer report that Steve Davis, CEO of The Boring Company, is becoming a key player in Elon Musk’s management of Twitter. Musk says Twitter should be ready for a new CEO by the end of 2023 after users voted for him to step down — perhaps Davis will take that spot.

The weekend tweet by the once-again world’s richest man reacted to the reaction to Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ YouTube rant about Black people — that video was deemed unacceptably racist enough that newspapers and his syndication partner cut ties with the cartoonist.

In response, Musk says that these days, The Media is actually “racist against whites & Asians.”

There’s another call for a Twitter ad boycott, while The Information reports Musk is seeking people to build a ChatGPT AI alternative that isn’t so “woke.”

The company’s Slack had been shut down, and now it’s returning, though with all of the old channels archived, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. The company told employees the old Slack had a whopping 88,188 channels!

It’s at least the fourth round of cuts since Musk said on November 21st that layoffs were over.

Affected employees started receiving notices by email on Saturday. I’m hearing that this round is hitting a bunch of departments, including ads and infrastructure engineering, and Twitter likely has fewer than 2,000 employees now. It had about 7,500 when Musk took over.

Or “You Really Got Me.” The Kinks are being censored by Twitter, because I guess no one there likes classic rock. Sad!

Remember five days ago when we all had to schedule tweets if we wanted to post? That was fun. Anyways, if you see any out-of-time tweets popping up, that may be because the scheduler automatically times your tweets for five days out. You may want to check your profile to see if your tweet about being rate limited finally posted.

Last week Twitter announced that it wouldn’t shut down its free API until today, and that it’d be replaced by a new system with a limited free option and a $100 a month plan. Now, the company says that update won’t be coming until... sometime, and that eventually there will be more details. I’d take that with a grain of salt.

He's in a luxury box at the Super Bowl, next to Rupert Murdoch (who also knows the pain of wasting money on a social media site you've purchased and run into the ground, even if MySpace only cost Fox $580 million instead of $44 billion).

But at least no one can tweet where Elon's private jet is.

The “you are over the daily limit for sending tweets” messages apparently happened because “an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter,” according to Platformer. The team behind the service, however, has been gone since November.

In addition to allegedly failing to pay rent on its offices in San Francisco and London, a new lawsuit filed on Friday accuses Twitter of skipping out on $1.9 million in payments to an advisory firm.

Innisfree M&A assisted Twitter with its sale to Elon Musk last year, and claims it was never paid despite Twitter saying it “successfully processed” its payment in November.

As part of its initiative to take “less severe actions” against rule-breaking accounts, Elon Musk’s Twitter has started letting anyone dispute their account suspension based on the platform’s “new criteria,” which it still hasn’t shared.

We’ve talked a little about Elon Musk’s ambitions for turning Twitter into a “super app” (and his history with risk management at PayPal) — and it looks like Musk is serious. Twitter desperately needs fresh revenue streams as advertisers flee, and the Financial Times says the hope is to complete licensing for payments “within a year.”

Irwin has become one of the most prominent execs at the company under Musk’s turbulent tenure. Bloomberg reporter Davey Alba shared some of the highlights of the piece in a Twitter thread, which I also recommend reading.

Alex Heath joins the show’s first segment to talk us through the latest update on Elon’s first few months at Twitter, and then we turn to Apple’s eventless hardware announcement, HomePod and all.

We also dove into the revelations about CNET’s AI-written stories and discussed the recent spate of Big Tech layoffs, although we recorded the show (available in audio form here for your podcast apps) prior to Friday morning’s bombshell news from Google.

Twitter is testing yet another form of verification for journalists. The latest trial adds a small publication logo to the right of display names. It looks pretty messy to me, but that might just be the Daily Mirror logo used in the tests.

Anyway, remember when Elon Musk was talking about dropping features because they were a “waste of screen space”?

800 laid off employees are now seeking damages for the compensation Musk agreed to give them in his merger agreement but didn’t. Twitter is on the hook to pay the fees for these individual arbitration cases, which combined could total tens of millions of dollars.

That news kicks off the latest edition of Command Line, my weekly newsletter that just hit inboxes. Also in this week’s edition: why the CEO of Notion is all in on generative AI, and the co-founder of Nest wants to help you take out the trash.

We’ve talked before about how SpaceX is actually run by Gwynne Shotwell and as if to prove it, SpaceX is thriving now that Musk is ignoring it: “When Musk’s focus is elsewhere, there’s some semblance of calm,” writes Loren Grush at Bloomberg.

Okay, well, the real wrong was forcing us to see them at all; Twitter hasn’t done anything about that yet (and probably won’t). But hey, now the indicator is to the right of the retweet and like numbers.

The company will match spending up to $250,000, the WSJ reports. That’s almost as big of a freebie as the $500,000 in free ads Twitter offered in exchange for spending $500,000 in December.

According to its owner, without commenting further on API issues, Tesla pricing, or the new “for you” look for timelines.

Adi Robertson has explained the potential issues already:

Twitter’s algorithm also won’t explain how any given tweet was prioritized unless Twitter releases a huge amount of supplementary data, nor would it necessarily illuminate the rationale behind any human moderation that intersects with it. And it would be incredibly vulnerable to people who want to make bad-faith claims by taking pieces of it out of context, willfully misinterpreting them or sowing conspiracy theories about them.

Even Tweetbot developer Paul Haddad doesn’t know what’s going on. Speculation is that Musk is pulling the plug on third-party apps, but nothing’s for certain yet.

Twitter still does not have a comms department for us to ask.

It’s inconvenient for his origin story! So he tried to suggest the emerald mine was “fake” — only to see his tweet revealed as a blatant lie on Twitter.

FWIW, Snopes was unable to find proof that emeralds paid for Musk’s rise to fame, but it also notes some stories about the mine have been...disappearing. Here’s one dad money quote that’s still on the web: “We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe.”

Despite Elon Musk’s previous assertion that Twitter is done with layoffs, Bloomberg reports the company just let go of more people from the moderation team.

And as for the thousands of people affected — whether involuntarily or by their own choice — Fortune reports severance agreements are arriving with less compensation than many expected, and in a format that landed the messages in spam folders.

“I mean I expected him to f**k us (he did),” an impacted employee wrote to Fortune. “This is about 1/3 of what he contractually owes us based on his purchase agreement.”

The Information is reporting that the company laid off “about 40 data scientists and engineers working on advertising.” In November, Elon Musk told staff that the company wouldn’t be doing more layoffs, but that apparently wasn’t true.