Musk vs. Soros: The Tweet Heard ‘Round the World

In a deal valued at $44 billion, Twitter announced on Apr. 25, 2022, that it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Elon Musk. The transaction would result in Twitter becoming a privately owned company.

Did Musk drop out of the Twitter deal?

On May 13, 2022, Elon Musk tweeted, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts represent less than 5% of users.” On July  8, he said in a letter to Twitter that the company’s “misrepresentation of the number of spam accounts” might be a “material adverse effect (MAE)” that would allow him to walk away under the terms of the deal contract.

Was that the end of it?

Twitter filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery against Musk on July 12, 2022, trying to force Musk to complete the takeover. Ahead of the Delaware court face-off on Oct. 17, Musk tweeted on Oct. 4, 2022, that buying Twitter would speed up his ambition to create an “everything app” called X and proposed to proceed with his original $44 billion bid to take Twitter, which he eventually did.

Twitter Blue is the company’s subscription service, allowing paying subscribers to recall tweets, theme their Twitter app and app icon, and experience new features early.

Where and when is Twitter Blue available?

Twitter first launched the Twitter Blue service in June 2021 in Canada and Australia on iOS. On Nov. 9, 2021, Twitter Blue became available in the US and New Zealand and on Android and the web. After purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk said he was considering raising the subscription price and moving all verified users to the paid program. Starting Dec. 13, 2022, the relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iPhone users. Subscribers see fewer ads, can post longer videos, and have their tweets emphasized.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Oct. 28, 2022, led to a 500% increase in the use of the N-word to demean Black people on the platform within just 12 hours, according to the National Contagion Research Institute, a disinformation tracking agency. Users were encouraged to amplify derogatory slurs on Twitter in several posts on the 4chan fringe message board website.

Is Trump returning to Twitter?

As of Nov. 2, 2022, Elon Musk announced Twitter would only allow people banned from its site to return once it sets up procedures on how to do so. That includes the former President, despite a fake meme stating otherwise.

After Elon Musk announced that his newly acquired company had restored Kanye West’s Twitter account, the rapper returned to the platform on Nov. 20, 2022. In October 2022, Twitter moderators blocked Ye’s page because of his antisemitic tweets. After confirming Twitter unblocked him, Ye tweeted: “Shalom : ).”

Is Ye still on Twitter?

By Dec. 1, West’s account was suspended after the troubled rapper tweeted an image of a Nazi swastika inside the Jewish Star of David. The indefinite suspension happened the same day Ye appeared on Infowars’ conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones’s podcast, during which he said, “I like Hitler.”

Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the social platform made a single-sentence update to its policies: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter will no longer enforce the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

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.

Linda Yaccarino, previously the head of advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal, was confirmed as the new CEO of Twitter on May 12, 2023. She was appointed by Elon Musk, who bought the platform last year for $44 billion. She will focus on business operations while Musk works on product design and technology. Yaccarino is one of the rare female chief executives in technology. She has often said she was the only woman at the table and faced bias incidents in her career.

On May 12, 2023, Twitter announced that it would limit access to some tweets and accounts in Turkey without specifying which ones or why. The company said it complied with the legal process and tried to keep Twitter available in Turkey. The decision sparked controversy and criticism from some observers who accused Twitter CEO Elon Musk of censoring Erdogan’s opponents and betraying his free speech principles. The content restriction came ahead of Turkey’s May 14, 2023, presidential election. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faced a close race against opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Both sides dispute the election results, and Turkey remains in a state of political uncertainty.

George Soros. Photo: Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

George Soros, a Holocaust-surviving Jewish-born investor, and philanthropist, is often the target of far-right, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. According to a regulatory filing, Soros Fund Management LLC sold all of its 2.5 million shares of Tesla Inc. in the first quarter of 2023. It also bought shares of Lucid Motors Inc., a competitor in the electric vehicle market. This prompted Musk to tweet on May 16, 2023: “Soros is a traitor to humanity and a threat to our planet,” comparing him to the X-Men’s civilization-crushing Magneto.

Tucker Carlson launched his brand-new show on Twitter on June 6, 2023. Carlson’s Twitter show, aptly named “Tucker on Twitter,” premiered with a 10-minute episode, receiving millions of views. In the first episode, Carlson suggested that the destruction of a major dam in Ukraine was self-inflicted, as usual, without providing any proof.

How did Fox News react?

Fox News has claimed that Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show violates his contract with the network. Carlson’s Fox News contract lasts until 2025. He was the top-rated talk show host on US cable television at Fox News.

On July 1, 2023, Twitter implemented this revised policy to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation. Verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts daily, while unverified accounts were restricted to 600 posts daily. This decision led to a digital uproar, with the hashtag #TwitterDown trending in some parts of the world. Not missing a beat, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, saw this as an opportunity to announce their new Threads app.

Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, and part-time digital drama king, pointed fingers at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for allegedly trying to “strangle” the platform. This is after ADL’s Director, Jonathan Greenblatt, tweeted on Aug. 31, 2023, about a “productive conversation” with X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, about addressing the platform’s hate speech. The post was met with backlash by white supremacists, leading to the trending hashtag #BanTheADL. And during this storm, Musk chose to voice his choked-up sentiments about the ADL with a lawsuit.

In a Sept. 18, 2023, live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk spilled some beans about Twitter, now known as “X”. Among the tidbits, he mentioned that X has 550 million monthly users. Musk suggested introducing a “small monthly payment” for X users during the same chat. Why, you ask? To combat those pesky “vast armies of bots.”

When Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, tweeted his agreement with a controversial statement accusing Jewish people of “hating white people” in November 2023, major companies like IBM, Apple, Lionsgate, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Warner Bros Discovery, and The Walt Disney Company announced they have stopped advertising on the platform. Soon after, X announced it was suing Media Matters, an organization monitoring hate speech in social media, for defamation.