Musk became Twitter’s owner late Thursday as his $44 billion deal to take over the company closed, marking a new era for one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk has previously accused Microsoft and its partner OpenAI of “illegally” using Twitter data to develop sophisticated AI systems such as ChatGPT.
Yaccarino has worked at NBCUniversal for nearly 12 years—with her team generating more than $100 billion in ad sales since 2011, her company bio notes.
The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for $44 billion and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing.
The company experienced an uptick of instability and bugs in recent months after new owner Elon Musk cut its staff sharply.
It is not clear what caused Wednesday’s meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts have been warning that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since new owner Elon Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running.
While account passwords were not leaked, malicious hackers could use the email addresses to try to reset people’s passwords, or guess them if they are commonly used or reused with other accounts.
More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of Twitter voted yes when the poll closed on Monday.
Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts that he described as “basically assassination coordinates.”
The advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations was formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 marketers have not advertised on the social media network in the past two weeks, a Washington Post analysis of marketing data found.
The move could help the platform’s once loudest, bluntest force regain online attention just as a new presidential election begins.
Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has so thinned the ranks of software engineers that industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree: Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.
Hundreds of Twitter employees refused Thursday to sign a pledge to work longer hours, threatening the site’s ability to keep operating and prompting hurried debates among managers over who should be asked to return, current and former employees said.
By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns—a potentially serious blow, given that the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy.
Twitter’s relaunched premium service—which grants blue-check “verification” labels to anyone willing to pay $8 a month—was unavailable Friday after the social media platform was flooded by a wave of impostor accounts.
A Twitter user posing as Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly falsely tweeted that insulin was now free, prompting an apology from the actual company.
The latest erratic move on the minds of major advertisers—that the company depends on for revenue—was Musk’s decision to abolish a new “official” label on high-profile Twitter accounts just hours after introducing it.
The platform’s new owner issued the warning after some celebrities changed their Twitter display names—not their account names—and tweeted as ‘Elon Musk.’
Musk is expected to proceed with plans to lay off about 50 percent of Twitter’s staff, according to people familiar with the matter.
Elon Musk said Wednesday that Twitter will not allow anyone who has been kicked off the site to return until it sets up procedures on how to do that, a process that will take at least a few weeks.
