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This is an unfortunate and pernicious pattern. Musk often refers to himself as moderate or independent, but he routinely treats far-right fringe figures as people worth taking seriously—and, more troublingly, as reliable sources of information.

By doing so, he boosts their messages: A message retweeted by or receiving a reply from Musk will potentially be seen by millions of people.

Also, people who pay for Musk’s Twitter Blue badges get a lift in the algorithm when they tweet or reply; because of the way Twitter Blue became a culture war front, its subscribers tend to skew to the righ

His promises to preserve free speech, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.

The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.

The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes.

Elon Musk is trying to win China back

Elon Musk's Tesla has endured a rough couple of months in China. Now he's working overtime to win Beijing back

The Tesla CEO lavished praise on China during an interview with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), where he pledged that the country would become his electric carmaker's "biggest market" in the long run

while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility. If people can’t tell whether an article was satirical or not, that chips away at trust that is essential for a news organization. But what’s good for comedy isn’t necessarily best practices for journalism or social media.

Even today when the lines between comedy and politics often blur — years after the press marveled that young people trusted Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” more than the news media, which now seems like a much darker development than it did back then — the idea that free speech might involve some trade-offs seems obvious.

But maybe not to Musk, who appears as naïve about comedy as he does about the economics of social media.

It’s useful to keep in mind that Twitter is an amplification machine. It is built to allow people, with astonishingly little effort, to reach many other people. (This is why brands like it.)

There are a million other ways to express yourself online: This has nothing to do with free speech, and Twitter is not obligated to protect your First Amendment rights.

When Elon Musk and his fans talk about free speech on Twitter, they’re actually talking about loud speech. Who is allowed to use this technology to make their message very loud, to the exclusion of other messages?

Since he started pursuing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter — and for years before that — the world’s richest man has made clear that advertising is not a priority.

Ads account for roughly 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue.

They have cited a litany of complaints, including that the company cannot target ads nearly as well as competitors like Facebook, Google and Amazon.

I’ve sometimes described being on Twitter as like staying too late at a bad party full of people who hate you. I now think this was too generous to Twitter. I mean, even the worst parties end.

Twitter is more like an existentialist parable of a party, with disembodied souls trying and failing to be properly seen, forever. It’s not surprising that the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as “this hellsite.”

Among other things, he’s promised to reinstate Donald Trump, whose account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Other far-right figures may not be far behind, along with Russian propagandists, Covid deniers and the like. Given Twitter’s outsize influence on media and politics, this will probably make American public life even more fractious and deranged.

Musk is not wrong that Twitter is chock-full of noise and garbage, but the most pernicious stuff comes from real people and a media ecosystem that amplifies and rewards incendiary bullshit

This dynamic is far more of a problem for Twitter (but also the news media and the internet in general) than shadowy bot farms are. But it’s also a dilemma without much of a concrete solution

Were Musk actually curious or concerned with the health of the online public discourse, he might care about the ways that social media platforms like Twitter incentivize this behavior and create an information economy where our sense of proportion on a topic can be so easily warped. But Musk isn’t interested in this stuff, in part because he is a huge beneficiary of our broken information environment and can use it to his advantage to remain constantly in the spotlight.

, the Twitter Files do what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.

The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.

it’s possible that a shred of good could come from this ordeal. Musk says Twitter is working on a feature that will allow users to see if they’ve been de-amplified, and appeal. If it comes to pass, perhaps such an initiative could give users a better understanding of their place in the moderation process. Great!

A social media account recommended by Elon Musk for its coverage of the Israeli war with Hamas with a long history of antisemitic posts is connected to a southwest London teenager, according to research and a text exchange with the account.

Both accounts were among seven cited a week ago by researchers at the University of Washington as the “new elites” of influence on X, with more than 1.6 billion combined views in the first three days of the war.

“Most of the accounts also use video and images frequently, framed in emotional ways,” researchers wrote. “Strikingly, many of these accounts have received prior promotion from X owner Elon Musk, either through direct recommendation or through Musk’s account replying to their content, which may explain some of their dominance of 'news Twitter.’”

His new company Neuralink will work on linking human brains with computers, utilizing “neural lace” technology.

Musk talked recently about this kind of technology, seeing it as a way for human to interact with machines and superintelligencies.

What's next? We'll wait for the details. Elon Musk's influence on our modern life and aura certainly continue to grow, especially if he'll deliver on the promises of his various enterprises.

Call it preemptive extinction panic, smart people buying into Sci-Fi hype or simply a prudent stance on a possible future issue, but the fear around artificial intelligence is increasingly gaining traction among those with credentials to back up the distress.

However, history doesn't always neatly fit into our forecasts. If things continue as they have with brain-to-machine interfaces becoming ever more common, we're just as likely to have to confront the issue of enhanced humans (digitally, mechanically and/or chemically) long before AI comes close to sentience.

Still, whether or not you believe computers will one day be powerful enough to go off and find their own paths, which may conflict with humanity's, the very fact that so many intelligent people feel the issue is worth a public stance should be enough to grab your attention.

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 

For some perspective on what’s happening with Elon Musk and Twitter, I suggest spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with one of Twitter’s sillier episodes from the past, a fight that erupted almost a year ago between the “shape rotators” of Silicon Valley and the “wordcels” (aspersion intended) of journalism and related professions. Many of the combatants were, at first, merely fighting over which group should have higher social status (theirs), but the episode also highlighted real divisions between West Coast and East — math and verbal, free-speech culture and safety culture, people who make things happen and people who talk about them afterward.

For years now, conflict between the two groups has been boiling over onto social media, into courtrooms and onto the pages of major news outlets. Team Shape Rotator believes Team Wordcel is parasitic and dangerous, ballyragging institutions into curbing both free speech and innovation in the name of safety. Team “Stop calling me a Wordcel” sees its opponents as self-centered and reckless, disrupting and mean-meming their way toward some vaguely imagined doom.

his audacity seems to be backfiring, as of course did Napoleon’s eventually.

Elon Musk says his companies SpaceX and Tesla are both still alive only "by the skin of their teeth".The entrepreneur told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) conference that both companies almost went bankrupt in 2008.

He said 2008 was an incredibly difficult year - SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket failed for the third time, and Tesla almost went bankrupt two days before Christmas.

Mr Musk also got divorced, and he said he had to borrow money from his friends to pay his rent.

Twitter was an intoxicating window into my fascinating new assignment. Long suppressed groups found their voices and social media-driven revolutions began to unfold. Movements against corruption gained steam and brought real change. Outrage over a horrific gang rape in Delhi built a movement to fight an epidemic of sexual violence.

“What we didn’t realize — because we took it for granted for so long — is that most people spoke with a great deal of freedom, and completely unconscious freedom,” said Nilanjana Roy, a writer who was part of my initial group of Twitter friends in India. “You could criticize the government, debate certain religious practices. It seems unreal now.”

Soon enough, other kinds of underrepresented voices also started to appear on — and then dominate — the platform. As women, Muslims and people from lower castes spoke out, the inevitable backlash came. Supporters of the conservative opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and their right-wing religious allies felt that they had long been ignored by the mainstream press. Now they had the chance to grab the mic.

Elon Musk, a man prone to ludicrous deadlines, has birthed another: test flights of his Mars spaceship next year."I think we’ll be able to do short flights, up and down flights, some time in the first half of next year," he told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.

Elon Musk is unquestionably the most interesting businessman in Silicon Valley - arguably the world - thanks to his almost single-handed reignition of the space race.After a string of failed rockets - and near bankruptcy - SpaceX wowed the world with its latest flight, Falcon Heavy, in February.

"This is a situation where you have a very serious danger to the public. There needs to be a public body that has insight and oversight so that everyone is delivering AI safely. This is extremely important.

In his extraordinary 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at Brookings, writes that modern societies have developed an implicit “epistemic” compact–an agreement about how we determine truth–that rests on a broad public acceptance of science and reason, and a respect and forbearance towards institutions charged with advancing knowledge.

Today, Rauch writes, those institutions have given way to digital “platforms” that traffic in “information” rather than knowledge and disseminate that information not according to its accuracy but its popularity. And what is popular is sensation, shock, outrage. The old elite consensus has given way to an algorithm. Donald Trump, an entrepreneur of outrage, capitalized on the new technology to lead what Rauch calls “an epistemic secession.”

Rauch foresees the arrival of “Internet 3.0,” in which the big companies accept that content regulation is in their interest and erect suitable “guardrails.” In conversation with me, Rauch said that social media companies now recognize that their algorithm are “toxic,” and spoke hopefully of alternative models like Mastodon, which eschews algorithms and allows users to curate their own feeds

The texts also cast a harsh light on the investment tactics of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. There’s Calacanis’s overeager angel-investing pitches, and then you have the

“This is one of the most telling things I’ve ever seen about how investing works in Silicon Valley,” Jessica Lessin, the founder of the tech publication The Information, tweeted of the Andreessen exchange. Indeed, both examples from the document offer a look at the boys’ club and power networks of the tech world in action.

the eagerness to pony up for Musk and the lazy quality of this dealmaking reveal something deeper about the brokenness of this investment ecosystem and the ways that it is driven more by vibes and grievances than due diligence.

Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence

Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.

If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,