The March 31 News Quiz: How Much has Musk Lost on Twitter?

On March 26, 2023, thousands of Israelis protested the country’s planned judicial overhaul after Prime Minister Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who said the judicial overhaul must be stopped due to the damage it is doing to the military. The next day, Netanyahu agreed to delay his flagship judicial changes to the next parliamentary session, saying he wanted time to compromise with his political opponents over the divisive package, but not before passing a law protecting him from prosecution while in office.

In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried instructed those working for him to pay a bribe of $40 million to one or more Chinese officials to help unfreeze trading accounts maintained by FTX’s sister company, Alameda Research, that held up to $1 billion in cryptocurrencies. Bankman-Fried was charged with 13 criminal counts, including foreign bribery, on March 28, 2023.

Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was one of the signatories of an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit backed by Musk, on March 29, 2023. The letter urged AI labs to stop training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large-language model. It suggested a six-month pause or government suspension to jointly allow independent experts to develop and implement shared safety protocols for AI systems.

Who co-signed the AI-stopping letter?

The letter was also signed by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author; Andrew Yang, entrepreneur, and former US presidential candidate; and more than 1,000 other tech leaders.

Elon Musk values Twitter at $20 billion, according to an internal memo reported by the Information on March 25, 2023. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022, meaning Twitter lost more than half its value in just half a year. However, Musk acknowledged it as an overpayment at the time of the deal. The company’s value dropped throughout the year as advertisers pulled out of the platform.

China’s commerce ministry declared it opposed a TikTok sale just hours before Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, testified before Congress about TikTok’s ties to China on March 23, 2023.

What was his testimony about?

During the five-hour testimony, Republican and Democratic lawmakers repeatedly asked Chew if TikTok was spying on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government, which he strongly denied. Chew also said that ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government – a notion undermined by China’s commerce ministry’s earlier statement.

First Citizens Bank is a family-owned bank founded in 1898 by Frank Holding Sr. and his family. It has become the largest family-owned bank in the US, with over 500 branches in 19 states. On March 26, 2023, the bank purchased all deposits and loans from Silicon Valley Bridge Bank. This was the financial institution whose collapse in March 2023 was the second-largest in US history and set off a chain reaction that caused the third-biggest bank-fail.

Former Florida school principal Hope Carrasquilla was given an ultimatum to resign or be terminated during an emergency meeting on March 20, 2023. This was after parents complained sixth graders were exposed to “pornography” during a lesson on Renaissance art that included Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture. The incident in Florida also prompted social media users to draw comparisons to a 1990s episode of “The Simpsons” where characters debate the censorship of the “David” statue.

Great Expectations follows the life of the orphan Pip, who meets Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella, falls in love with her, and aspires to become a gentleman to win her heart. He gets a mysterious benefactor who bankrolls his aspirations and sends him to London to become a gentleman. The new miniseries adaptation of Great Expectations, produced by Ridley Scott, Tom Hardy, and Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), and starring Olivia Colman, premiered on FX/BBC on March 26, 2023. Watch the trailer.

Pierce Global Media (PGM) is a fictional media conglomerate with news outlets and television networks featured on HBO’s Succession. The company is a major plot point in the show’s final season, inspired by Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal in 2007. Logan Roy’s company in the series Waystar Royco is loosely based on Murdoch’s News Corp. In the fourth season’s first episode, which premiered on March 26, 2023, the Roy siblings fight their father over PGM.

Lady Gaga filmed scenes for the upcoming Joker sequel, titled Joker: Folie à Deux, dressed as Harley Quinn, in New York City on March 25, 2023. The sequel is a musical scheduled for release on October 4, 2024. The original “Joker” was nominated for 11 Oscar awards in 2020 and won two.

Fun Fact: Margot Robbie played the Harley Quinn character in 2016’s Suicide Squad and its two spin-offs, 2020’s Birds of Prey and 2021’s The Suicide Squad, and even sang a short rendition of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in the role. She plays Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s 2023 comedy.

Kanye West claimed he liked Jewish people again after watching Jonah Hill’s acting in the 2012 film “21 Jump Street,” in an Instagram post accompanied by a photo of the movie poster. He added, “No one should take anger against one or two individuals and transform that into hatred towards millions of innocent people… Thank you, Jonah Hill, I love you.” West had previously made multiple anti-Semitic remarks, leading to him being temporarily removed from social media and losing multiple business deals. He returned to Instagram on March 25, 2023.

In John Wick 4, Keanu Reeves speaks just 380 words in 2 hours and 49 minutes, as reported by Wall Street Journal. John Wick fans can rejoice as Lionsgate motion picture group chair Joe Drake told The Hollywood Reporter on March 26, 2023, that a fifth John Wick movie is back on the table. This follows the recent movie’s series-record opening at the global box office. Keanu Reeves will return to the character in the future, but not necessarily in the lead role. He will appear in Ballerina, the series’ first spinoff starring Ana de Armas. (This explanation is 100 words long.)