Twitter - X

As reported by CNBC, the New York Times, and others, trading commenced at a price 11 percent above the $135 IPO price, but lower than the $175 shown in some earlier indications. It’s already spiked as high as $167, before falling back to $155. As long as the share price remains above $138, that is enough to make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

iOS users now have the option to “React with Video” under the reposting symbol on the X app, allowing you to respond to clips and static images by recording yourself. You can choose between green screen, split screen, or picture-in-picture recording styles.

Unverified users only need to worry if they’re making more than 50 original posts and 200 replies per day, compared to the previous limit of 2,400 daily posts. This move is presumably trying to tackle bot accounts, since 50 posts is far more than most people will use.

We also discover that Nadella has no idea if Altman and Musk talked about Musk’s mean Microsoft/OpenAI tweets. As a side note, we are referring exclusively to “Twitter” and “tweets” even for posts after the X rebrand.

Following a missed April court date, French prosecutors have formally opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino over the platform’s role in spreading sexualized AI deepfakes and illegal content, as reported by CNBC.

While Elon Musk has settled his Twitter case with the SEC, nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters says the FTC has ended a “retaliatory” investigation about whether it worked with advertisers to boycott Elon Musk’s website:

The platform claims the app has “no tracking” and is “fully end-to-end encrypted.” Benji Taylor, who leads design at X, says the launch is “just the beginning of what we’re building for messaging.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren is worried about X Money, Elon Musk’s upcoming payment platform, and the risks it poses to consumers and the financial system. She’s probably right to worry, but the solution might have been in front of us the whole time:

Digital privacy non-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced it’s leaving X, citing a sharp decline in views for its posts. With EFF off the platform, some commenters agree with the organization’s thinking.

Elon Musk said it was “war” in 2024, as X filed its antitrust lawsuit against World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) members over their Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative.

Musk’s lawyers are trying to overturn the recent verdict that found his self-described “stupid tweets” were liable for losses incurred by Twitter investors, pointing to an emoji reaction to a post on LinkedIn from the account of Judge Kathaleen McCormick. In a filing of her own, Reuters reports McCormick said she hadn’t read the post, and that “I either did not click the ‘support’ icon at all, or I did so accidentally.”

The in-development feature reported by @nima_owji shows a toggle that allows users to disclose synthetically made or manipulated content. The move may be in response to India ordering social platforms to embrace provenance systems like C2PA, a standard that X abandoned after Elon Musk stepped in.

Europe’s privacy watchdog has opened yet another investigation into the millions of sexualized images, some of children, produced and shared on the platform last month. It joins the EU’s DSA effort already underway, whatever France is doing, and a few more in the UK.

The Tech Transparency Project identified several Iranian government agencies and officials enjoying the perks of X Premium accounts. Normally, Premium requires a paid subscription, which could violate US sanctions. Suspiciously, when Wired flagged some of those accounts to X, they were stripped of their blue checkmarks:

Presumably this tweet was timed before Elon Musk’s Grok posted an estimated 3 million sexualized images onto the platform, including 23,000 of children, averaging an estimated 190 images per minute over an 11-day sample period:

The removals — which follow the Trump administration’s previous data purging efforts — target all posts prior to the president returning to office in January 2025, with a goal to “limit confusion on US government policy,” A spokesperson told NPR that the department’s X accounts “are one of our most powerful tools for advancing the America First goals.”

Maybe combining Musk’s companies is really about space AI data centers. But reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal indicate that SpaceX’s IPO pursuit includes a push to have major index providers find a way around the usual waiting periods before they’ll add newly listed companies.

I used to compare Elon Musk to an old boss of mine who would spin up a company division every time he found a new hobby, but this might be just as apt:

The Paris Prosecutor’s office announced that it’s abandoning X after French police raided the offices of Elon Musk’s social media network on Tuesday, part of a year-long investigation into whether X’s algorithm was used to interfere in French politics. Here’s a machine translation of its departing post:

While X has long allowed NSFW images, The Washington Post reports that the platform’s content moderation filters couldn’t handle the estimated millions of sexualized deepfakes of real women and children being generated by Grok.

After suffering multiple issues last month, X is down again to kick off February. Downdetector and NetBlocks both confirmed the outage. Users are reporting that the most recent posts they’re able to see are from an hour ago.