Twitter has never been the most popular social media platform. Its never been the coolest, its never had the most features, and its never been the biggest moneymaker. It has, at times, been the weirdest, and many groups given to high-velocity posting have maintained valuable communities there over the years. But Twitters X factorsigh, pun intendedhas always been its strength as a platform for news.

In moments of crisis, Twitter has been essentialno more so in times of bloody conflict. Not only do professional journalists relay on-the-ground realities, but so do eyewitnesses and citizen journalists. War being war, the fruits of Twitters role as an information funnel have never been perfect. But theyve been a helpful first draft of the news.

In contrast, under the ownership of Elon Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion last October, the platform now called X has become a vortex of false claims and doctored footage. Its a fog-of-war machine.

Thats been the unmistakable reality in the days after Hamas deadly terrorist attack on Israeli civiliansa land, air, and sea operation that has killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and led to another 900 deaths in Gaza following Israels military retaliation.

Musks changes to the foundation of how Twitter works have not only rendered Twitter useless as a means of making sense of the conflict as (or even hours after) it unfolds, but made it actively counterproductive for users trying to figure out whats going on. As Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have rolled back the platforms rules of engagement and rid their ranks of the content-moderation teams and tools that actually keep X trustworthy, theyve also put in place a system that fundamentally incentivizes the spread of misinformation during times of mass panic and confusion, in part because X is now a platform that pays for viral content.

The end result is that Twitter, more so than any other platform right now, is fertile ground for a new kind of war profiteering.

On Oct. 8, the day after the initial Hamas attack, an account called @AGCast4 posted a video supposedly showing a Hamas rocket attack in Israel. The BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh debunked it: The footage wasnt from the ongoing conflict or any real-life war but from the video game Arma 3. The account wasand still isverified with a blue check mark.

Two days later, the investigative outfit Bellingcat, known for its visual forensics work, had to debunk some fake news about itself. A doctored BBC video was circulating on social media, claiming that Bellingcats journalists had confirmed Ukrainian weapon sales to Hamas. Weve reached no such conclusions or made any such claims, Bellingcats official account wrote on Twitter. In a screenshot, Bellingcat showed that a Twitter account called Geopoliitics & Empire had shared the video. Like the account that posted video game footage, this account was also verified with a blue check mark. (The account owner deleted the post and called it an honest mistake, simultaneously posting a meme captioned We are going to be famous.)

If a user had taken even a yearlong hiatus from Twitter and redownloaded the app this week to follow the goings-on of the emerging war, theyd be disoriented. Why are these accounts posting nonsense, and why are they allowed to do so without any ramifications? Twitter has always had problems with the spread of misinformation, but the current site experience is noticeably degraded. So, why is that?

First, the blue check mark doesnt mean what it used to. Verification once signified that Twitter had confirmed the identity of a person or organization of note: a journalist, a public health organization, or even a professional athlete. But in April, Twitter began removing check marks from all but the most famous.

But now anyone who pays for Twitter Bluerecently renamed X Premiumcan just buy a blue check mark for $8 a month, along with the veneer that they are a notable person or a legitimate source of information. Just last week, X removed headlines from linked news articles, making the site exponentially more confusing to scroll through.

There is a difference between platforms that take steps to mitigate harm, platforms that have not yet started taking these steps, and platforms that take steps to undo processes that mitigated harm, Chinmayi Arun, the executive director of Yale Law Schools Information Society Project, told me. Users who are accustomed to a different version of X may not know how to process or understand what they are seeing now.

Its been mere days since the war broke out, but European regulators are already peeved with what theyve seen. In a posted letter to Musk, European commissioner Thierry Breton asked the X owner to comply with the continents sweeping Digital Services Act. He urged the billionaire to respond within 24 hours with assurances that hes taking the spread of illegal content and disinformation seriously or face legal penalties.

Musk responded, Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.

Musk has delivered on a lot of what he promised. He campaigned to buy Twitter on a platform of restoring free speech, which meant loosening the sites rules, firing most of its content moderation staff, removing blue check marks from the accounts of professional journalists, and prioritizing subscription revenue over advertising.

What were seeing right now is the culmination of all of those factors: a degraded site that cant be trusted for sensitive breaking news.

There are several additional perks for paying $8 for a blue check mark. The first is that paying users now get priority placement in a tweets replies. Take a Musk tweet, for examplescroll down and itll take a while before you find any reply without a check mark next to it. (Good way for a billionaire to insulate himself from criticism, huh?) But they also get increased reach across the siteespecially on users algorithmic news feeds.

Theres another perk thats even more dangerous. In July, Musk began paying out the most engaging users on Xas long as they had bought a check mark. Twitter rewarded a number of prominent accountsmostly far-right influencers, as the Washington Post reportedwith big paychecks. Andrew Tate, a popular right-wing internet personality facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, received $20,000 in his first check alone.

Twitter lagged far behind other platforms that have been paying out top influencers for yearsYouTube began doing so in 2007. But the rules about who is eligible to receive payouts, and what rules they have to follow, are vague. By promising honestly very opaque parameters, said Christine Tran, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, the floodgates open for accounts to generate content about major events that arouses engagement without discriminationregardless of what good that information serves.

X did not respond to a request for comment, but according to its website, sensitive events, including war, are not eligible for monetization. That fine print, though, doesnt seem to stop would-be profiteers from trying, asking the platforms few remaining moderators to differentiate eligible posts from rule-breaking onesespecially since X doesnt seem to be punishing any misleading posts about war. The unclear rules about what engagement [leads to] monetization leads to See what sticks to the wall incentives to aggregate engagement, Tran said. It costs nothing to post (yet), but a viral post could lead to untold profit. Low risks, high reward.

Even if fake-news peddlers are unable to profit directly from viral posts about war, there are perks to merely being allowed to post them at all: Mass engagement like this can help an account build an audienceand from there, they can profit off future viral posts, sell stuff to their followers, and monetize their newfound following off-platform. In the creator economy, all attention can be good attention. But on X, the race for clicks is simultaneously a race to the bottom.

Twitter isnt the first platform thats financially rewarded the spread of misinformation, but its policy decisions have made it all the more vulnerable to abuse, an own goal that hurts not only trust in the platform but also users understanding of a major geopolitical event.

Instead, Musk has promoted the use of Community Notesa crowdsourced fact-checking system formerly known as Birdwatchand, in recent days, has claimed to have increased the speed at which these notes appear on misleading content. Further complicating things, a recent report found that hes also stopped allowing users to self-report political misinformation on specific posts. Community Notes is a helpful system (when its not wrong!), but Twitter is ultimately outsourcing the job of content moderation from in-house professionals to unpaid volunteers. And fundamentally, leaving bad information up with a user-generated addendum is not the same as removing or hiding it with a warning label, as Twitters old guard did.

Shannon McGregor, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills media and journalism school, has been arguing for years that the most powerful people on a platform shouldnt be treated with kid gloves but taken more seriously. That includes not only political leadersremember Donald Trumps ongoing feuds with Twitter?but also users paying for greater reach and the chance to make money.

Those with the greatest reach and power should be subject to at least the same policies as all users, if not perhaps either more stringent or more holistically enforced versions of those policies, McGregor said. Thats where we see the danger. Its not like some random person breaking a content moderation rule, which is a problem. Its a [bigger] problem when someone who has a ton of power and attention does it.

Musk may want to prioritize free speech and being open source, but millions of people rely on his platform for reliable information. And, as its played out time after time, there are often very scary real-world consequences when conspiracy theories and fraudulent stories are allowed to run rampant. The only thing thats transparent is the owners inattention.

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X/Twitter is useless for Israel and Gaza news. Here's how Elon Musk caused it. - Slate

Quotable Quote: On getting to Mars.

I think its sort of feasible within the next four years to do an uncrewed test landing there, Mr. Musk told Clay Mowry, the president of the International Astronautical Federation, during a one-hour question-and-answer session.

Mr. Musk and SpaceX have a strong track record of achieving remarkable breakthroughs in spaceflight. That includes the routine landing and reuse of the booster stages of SpaceXs current Falcon 9 rockets: The company has launched 70 times this year alone.

But Mr. Musk has another track record: taking far longer than predicted to achieve his goals.

Mr. Musk first unveiled his Mars rocket, then an even larger rocket called the Interplanetary Transport System, at an International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016. He predicted that SpaceXs first uncrewed landing on the red planet would occur in 2022, followed by the first flight with people aboard in 2024.

So far, there has been one test flight of Starship, in April, which made it off the launchpad before it spun out of control and an order was given to detonate the vehicle several minutes into its flight.

A second Starship is ready, Mr. Musk has said. But SpaceX is still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a new launch license, possibly as soon as this month.

On Thursday, Mr. Musk described some of the changes in the evolving design of Starship. On the second flight, the engines of the second stage will ignite before it separates from the booster. The maneuver, known as hot staging, can be tricky.

Youre essentially blasting the top of the booster with the second-stage engines, Mr. Musk said. This is actually, from a physics standpoint, the most efficient way.

Mr. Musk is no longer predicting to put humans on Mars in 2024, but he has other technologically ambitious predictions for Starship next year. For speedy turnaround between launches, SpaceX plans for the rockets Super Heavy booster to not only return to its launch site, but to also hover about the ground as two arms on the launch tower catch it in midair. The same maneuver would be used for the Starship upper stage when it returns from orbit.

Mr. Musk said there was a decent chance of catching a booster within the next year and possibly a Starship from orbit before the end of next year.

Mr. Musk also said that SpaceXs next-generation of Starlink satellites could start going up next year on expendable versions of the Starship stage that are not reused.

The conversation between Mr. Mowry and Mr. Musk just briefly touched on SpaceXs key role in Artemis, NASAs program to send astronauts back to the moon. A version of Starship is to take two NASA astronauts from orbit around the moon to a landing in the south pole region during the Artemis III mission.

Youre doing a lunar lander version, yes? Mr. Mowry said.

Mr. Musk acknowledged that, but pivoted to saying that what SpaceX was building for NASA would include only minor modifications from a spacecraft designed to land on Mars.

Artemis III is currently scheduled for late 2025, but NASA officials have suggested that date is likely to slip into 2026, at least.

A couple of months ago, James Free, NASAs associate administrator for exploration systems development, said NASA had received an updated schedule for Starship development and was reviewing it.

Without singling out SpaceX, Mr. Free said in August that if not all the technological pieces were ready for a moon landing, we may end up flying a different mission.

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Elon Musk Says SpaceX Could Land on Mars in 3 to 4 Years - The New York Times

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EU opens probe into Elon Musk's X over Israel-Hamas war misinformation - Financial Times

Elon Musk announced the date to press users to sign up for Twitter Blue.

Microblogging platform Twitter will remove the legacy blue tick from verified accounts from today (April 20). This comes weeks after company's CEO Elon Musk announced the date to press users to sign up for Twitter Blue, its paid for subscription service. Once this happens, Twitter will have verification marks only for paid users and businesses, and government entities and officials. The legacy 'blue ticks' were considered coveted as they were only given to notable social media users like celebrities, politicians and journalists who had passed strict verification processes online. The process allowed Twitter's team to verify a user's identity and prevent impersonators - something that many people have claimed will be diluted under the new service.

In his April 12 tweet, Mr Musk had said, "Final date for removing legacy Blue checks is 4/20."

"To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue," the microblogging platform added.

Twitter Blue is a premium subscription service for users that adds a blue checkmark next to users' profile name and also gives them early access to new features introduced by the microblogging platform. These include edit tweet, which allows users to edit their Twitter posts within 30 minutes, custom app icons, NFT profile pictures, and bookmark folders.

The service is available for web, iOS and Android devices. As per the microblogging website, the monthly subscription fee for iOS and Android users in India is Rs 900 while the fee has been kept lower at Rs 650 per month for the web. Twitter Blue users will also be able to send longer tweets - up to 4,000 characters and upload files with a file size up to 2 GB and a maximum duration of 60 minutes by paying the subscription fees.

Elon Musk-owned social media platform had previously stated that it would start removing the blue checkmark badges from legacy verified accounts on April 1. On April 2, Twitter changed the language in the description of verified users to read, "This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account." This meant users will not be able to tell who is paying for a blue checkmark and who isn't.

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4/20: Elon Musk's Deadline To Remove Legacy Blue Ticks Today. What's Next - NDTV

In Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, young Lemuel Gulliver survives a shipwreck and washes up on the island of Lilliput. Despite standing a mere six inches high, the Lilliputians are a vain and self-important race. They are also clever, as Gulliver realizes when he awakens from a long slumber on the grass to find himself securely pinned down with slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs. The Lilliputians call Gulliver the Man-Mountain and eventually offer him his freedom if he agrees to a number of strict edicts. For example, the said Man-Mountain shall confine his walks to our principal high roads, and not offer to walk or lie down in a meadow or field of corn. The Man-Mountain would be allowed to roam, in other words, but only under the strict regulatory gaze of the diminutive Lilliputian officials.

A year after his impulsive acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk finds himself in a position not unlike that of Gulliver. As an entrepreneur, Musk is a Man-Mountain without equal. His start-ups Tesla and SpaceX have rewritten the rules of two global industries and made himfor a time, at leastthe richest man on the planet. Some of his ventures in other fields (tunnel boring, brain interfaces) remain long shots. But his growing constellation of Starlink broadband-access satellites looks like another global game-changer, and, for better or worse, that companys policies are already having a world-historical impact.

So what does Musk have to fear? Two things: The Lilliputians. And himself.

In Gullivers Travels, Lemuel treats the Lilliputians with gracious courtesy. Thats not Musks style. Every industry Musk works intransportation, space, health, communicationsexists within a dense web of regulatory oversight. A more cautious executive might try to slip below the regulatory radar. Musk is not wired that way. He cant help antagonizing the very officials whose forbearance he requires to build his ventures. In both Europe and the U.S., those officials have lately begun stretching out their slender ligatures. Tesla, SpaceX, and X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) all now face a flurry of regulatory entanglements from government agencies.

For his new biography, Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson spent months shadowing the peripatetic executive. In the end, though, Musk remained a cipher to him, a man with an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien, as if his Mars mission were an aspiration to return home. After a difficult childhood, Isaacson writes, Musk developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama. When I interviewed Musk, more than a decade ago, he didnt strike me as a carefree daredevil so much as a man haunted by his pursuit of risky endeavors. I feel fear quite strongly, he told me. I just proceed nonetheless.

Isaacson describes Musk as a man-child. A former Tesla engineer I know called him basically a big kid, the kind of person who cant resist poking a hornets nest just to see what happens. Musks childish and stubborn nature helped him launch extraordinary companies and bully his way through ever greater challenges and risks. In some ways, Musk resembles a high-altitude mountaineer; as soon as he escapes one near-death experience, hes planning an even harder climb. But mountaineers operate in an environment where they and their rope mates are as far from society as a person can get. An executive engaged in global businesses must navigate complex social and political landscapes. Musk himself admits that hes not cut out for delicate diplomacy. When he hosted Saturday Night Live in 2021, Musk described himself as having Aspergers syndrome and noted that he often says things that upset people: To anyone whos been offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and Im sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?

Perhaps his unique neural wiring helps Musk hyper-focus while tuning out distractions and naysayers. It might also explain his habit of ignoring conventional business guardrails. I think he has long been a regulatory disaster waiting to happen, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle told me. Most executives in sensitive industries learn to tiptoe through china shops. Musk instead blusters and overpromises.

For years he implied that Tesla cars were on the verge of full self-driving capability when, in fact, they merely offered a highly evolved form of cruise control. Time and again he has invited scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission for his carnival-sideshow salesmanship. His astronomical risk tolerancecombined with a talent for going all Tasmanian devil until somehow it all works outhas made him rich, McArdle continued. But naming your driver-assist autopilot is an invitation to bankruptcy-level class-action suits, and buying Twitter on a hahaha-oops lark has eaten most of his financial margin for error, while giving him an entirely new scope to piss off a lot of government officials.

Indeed. Rather than trying to finesse his way through his current travails, Musk seems determined to find new hornets nests to poke. Even before he bought the platform, he was taking to Twitter to express his heterodox ideas. In May 2022, Musk tweeted, In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. A CEO shouldnt have to worry that hes taking his professional life in his hands if he expresses a political opinion. But that idea really applies only to liberals. For Musk, coming out of the closet was a daring, even reckless move. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold, he predicted. Hornets nest spottedand poked.

Musk seems to take a special pleasure in tweaking progressive sensitivities. When Bernie Sanders tweeted, We must demand that the extremely wealthy pay their fair share, Musk shot back: I keep forgetting that youre still alive. Last year, he managed to offend both Covid extremists and transgender advocates by tweeting, My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci. Since buying Twittersorry, XMusk has taken to behaving almost like a political candidate. Last month he visited the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, to draw attention to illegal immigration. In a livestream, he said the situation is beyond insane and growing fast.

Musks pokes at the left are often funny. But his occasional dalliances with sketchy far-right, QAnon-adjacent, and sometimes anti-Semitic accounts have become alarming. His comments on Ukraine, for example, show a worrisome solicitude toward the invading country rather than the one being invaded. Accusations of anti-Semitism spiked in September when Musk blamed the Anti-Defamation League for a fall-off in advertising on the X platform. The ADL had earlier charged that Musks policy of relaxing moderation rules was allowing a surge of virulent antisemitism on the site. The ADL is trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic, Musk tweeted. As Seth Mandel wrote in the April 2022 COMMENTARY, todays ADL is more devoted to its progressive allies than to defending Jews. Still, accusing any Jewish organization of pulling strings behind the scenes was not a good look for Musk. Since that brouhaha, X and the ADL have arrived at a truce, and the ADL again advertises on the platform.

It gets worse. During the Hamas assault on Israel, Musk recommended two X accounts as useful for following the war in real-time. One of them, @WarMonitors, is an openly anti-Semitic account that endlessly attacks the Zionist regime. Musk deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. The most charitable explanation is that he wanted users to see that X has up-to-the-minute coverage, but he failed to do even a cursory check to see whether the sites were reputable. I truly hope thats the case. (In a chummy livestream discussion with Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Musk stressed his opposition to anti-Semitism.) But people are entitled to wonder why Musk keeps making these kinds of blunders. How much of his feed is made up of edgy extremists? At the very least, he is sloppy about the company he keeps.

Musks repeated flirtations with extremismeven if accidentalmake him a dubious advocate for what remains a vital mission: making X a haven for free speech. Prior to Musks takeover, leftist activists, traditional media, and social media outlets worked in near lockstep when it came to suppressing topics they labeled misinformation. Remember how effectively they squelched the story of Hunter Bidens laptop, or questions about whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab? The liberalization of Xs speech restrictions brought a fresh blast of ideological diversity to online discourse (and, yes, too much ugly stuff as well). Then Musk opened the Twitter Files to Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and other independent journalists. The documents revealed that the White House, the FBI, and other government agencies routinely strong-armed Twitter executives to suppress certain topics. Clearly, with Musk in charge, the governments back-channel influence over the platform was finished.

Almost overnight, a host of federal agencies began taking a harder line on X and Musks other companies. According to a report from the House Judiciary Committee, in the months after Musk took over, the Federal Trade Commission began attempting to harass Twitter and pry into the companys decisions on matters outside of the FTCs mandate. The FTC demanded information about issues, including journalists working to expose abuses by Big Tech and the federal government; all of the companys internal communications relating to Elon Musk; and the reasons why the firm terminated a former FBI official who worked at the company, along with hundreds of other demands.

The SEC began investigating Musks Twitter acquisition even before the deal closed. Musk provided the agency with documents and willingly testified, but then refused to appear at a follow-up deposition. Enough is enough, his attorney said. Now the SEC has filed suit against the mogul.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is eager to launch a second test flight of its revolutionary Starship from its space port at Boca Chica, Texas. But first it needs green lights from the FAA and, believe it or not, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and both are taking their sweet time issuing approvals. SpaceX is also being sued by the Department of Justice for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, the department announced. SpaceX responds that, under national-security laws, it is not allowed to give non-U.S. citizens access to sensitive space technology. This is yet another case of weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes, Musk said in a tweet. Nor does Tesla get a pass, despite its key role in enticing Americans to buy electric cars, a top Biden priority. The Justice Department and the SEC are investigating whether the company provided excessive benefits to CEO Musk. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial abuses at its Fremont, California, manufacturing plant.

The Lilliputians of our federal bureaucracies have been busy, in other words. Can they keep the Man-Mountain tied down? Musk has wriggled out of tight spots before. But this time, some of his biggest challenges are self-imposed. His repeated proximity to extremist views (even if accidental) undermines his high-minded claims about free speech. At the same time, his rash decision to buy Twitter has put him in a financial bind, which gives his regulatory antagonists more power over him. And while Musk loves being on social media (way too much), owning a social-media company doesnt play to his strengths. Hes an engineer, not a sociological savant. Many of his decisions at Xincluding that ridiculous nameleave me scratching my head. Still, the work Musk does remains important. SpaceX might prove to be one of the most transformative companies in American history. And freeing our social-media platforms from censorship is vital. It would be a shame if Musks own character flaws brought it all crashing down.

I wish we lived in a country where top executives could express conservative ideas with the same freedom as liberals. I wish we lived in a country where bureaucrats carried out their duties with scrupulous disregard for politics. But we dont live in that country. Our federal agencies have been weaponized against conservatives at least since Obamas IRS tried to kneecap the Tea Party. That isnt fair, but ignoring that fact isnt smart. Thats why I wince every time Musk pokes another hornets nest. I hate it when he seems more interested in making enemies than in building cars and rockets. I hate it even more when he casually amplifies random extremists on X. Musks mercurial, intense personality has helped him build a high-tech empire. Maybe his next project should include working on himself.

Photo: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

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The Question of Elon Musk - James B. Meigs, Commentary - Commentary Magazine

Elon Musk says he wants "just a normal person" as president.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The 2024 presidential election is a year away, but Elon Musk already knows who he wants to see in office.

Musk has praised and criticized Biden and Trump alike, and he now says he wants a "normal person" as president.

He told Fox News he'd like a president "whose values are smack in the middle of the country."

Elon Musk says the ideal presidential candidate for him is "just a normal person."

In an interview that aired Monday night on Fox News Channel's "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the billionaire discussed his voting history and who he'd be inclined to vote for in 2024.

"I didn't vote for Donald Trump. I actually voted for Biden. Not saying I'm a huge fan of Biden because I would think that would probably be inaccurate, but you know, we have difficult choices to make in the presidential elections," Musk said.

Looking ahead, Musk added, "I would prefer, frankly, that we put just a normal person as president, a normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country, just center of the normal distribution and I think that they would be great."

Musk has praised and criticized President Biden and Donald Trump alike in recent years. He's said the US and many other countries have a "gerontocracy," referring to a government controlled by citizens much older than most of the population. He's also called for maximum age limits for lawmakers and said politicians should be "ideally within 10 or at least, 20 years of the average age of the population."

Musk's outward political stances have shifted to the right in recent years. Last summer, he said he voted Republican for the first time, backing former Texas GOP Rep. Mayra Floresin a special election.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Continued here:

Elon Musk says he wants a 'normal person' for president in 2024 whose values are 'smack in the middle of the country' - Yahoo News

Elon Musk was seen adorably playing with his 2-year-old son in a rare outing with the youngster at a Miami event Tuesday evening.

The entrepreneur shares the boy with his on-off-girlfriend Grimes, and he previously came under fire in 2020 when he bizarrely named the child 'X AE A-XII'.

Appearing on stage at Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel, the 2-year-old stole the show as his billionaire father joined a conference panel discussion.

Musk brought his son on stage to cheers from the crowd, while the boy appeared comfortable in the limelight as he enjoyed a cookie.

Named 'X AE A-XII', the boy stole the show as he joined Musk in Miami

The billionaire brought his 2-year-old son out on stage to raucous applause

Musk, 51, welcomed his son with musician Grimes in May 2020.

The billionaire has nine known children with three women, including another child via surrogate with Grimes named Exa Dark Siderl, which the couple had in December 2021.

Musk came under criticism after naming his son 'X AE A-XII', who goes by the nickname 'X', according to his musician ex-girlfriend.

Musk also fathered twin babies just month before his surrogate child with Grimes, with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his tech firm Neuralink.

'X AE A-XII' appeared comfortable in the limelight as he enjoyed a cookie on stage

Musk welcomed the child on stage while he joined a conference panel in Miami

The billionaire has nine known children with three women

Musk's love life has been the subject of intrigue for years, with the Space X founder going through a series of divorces and high-profile relationships in recent times.

He married his first wife, Justine Wilson, in 2000. Their first son Nevada tragically passed away at 10-weeks in 2002, before the couple welcomed twins Griffin and Xavier in 2004.

Musk and Wilson went on to have triplets, Kai, Saxon and Damian, in 2006, with all five children conceived via IVF.

The couple divorced in 2008, and Musk began dating British actress Talulah Riley, who has had starring roles in films such as Inception and Pride and Prejudice.

After tying the knot in 2010, their first marriage only lasted two years, and Riley reportedly walked away with $16 million in the divorce settlement.

Musk and his first wife, Justine Wilson, met while they were both attending Queen's University, and they tied the knot in 2000

Musk and Wilson split in 2008. Twins Griffin and Xavier are pictured with Musk and his second wife, Talulah, in 2015

Musk and Heard, pictured in 2017, began dating after the billionaire reportedly pursued her for several years

Musk and singer Grimes began dating in April 2018 after reportedly meeting online, a month before they made their red carpet debut at the Met Gala (pictured)

The couple then remarried the following summer, before again filing for divorce in December 2014. The divorce filings were withdrawn the following year, before Riley requested a divorce from Musk for the third and final time in 2016.

Musk then dated actress Amber Heard, 35, for several months in late 2016 and early 2017, after he reportedly pursued her for many years.

Heard's ex-husband, Johnny Depp, later accused Heard of cheating on him with Musk while they were still married, but both Musk and Heard denied the affair.

They split in the summer of 2017, and afterwards, he told Rolling Stone in 2017 that he was 'really in love' with Heard and that their breakup 'hurt bad.'

He would then begin dating singer Grimes in April 2018, and the eccentric couple captured headlines when they made their red carpet debut at the Met Gala the following month.

Amid a series of breakups and reconnections, the pair welcomed their son 'X AE A-XII' in May 2020. With the arrival of their second child the next year, Grimes shares two of Musk's nine children.

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Elon Musk steps on stage with 2-year-old son 'X AE A-XII' in rare outing - Daily Mail

It seems Elon Musk wants to join the artificial intelligence arms race.

"I'm going to start something which I call TruthGPT," Musk told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Monday, adding that he'd want his AI chatbot to be a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."

The timing of Musk's announcement which, to be clear, was not an actual product unveiling is notable, given that just three weeks ago, the Tesla and Twitter CEO signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on all work on AI systems more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4.

Musk spoke about the dangers of rapid AI development before pitching his own version, alleging that chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Bard are being trained to be "politically correct." He didn't provide evidence for those claims, or detail exactly what a "truth-seeking AI" might entail.

"A path to AI dystopia is to train AI to be deceptive," Musk said. "AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production ... [It] has the potential of civilization destruction."

Broadly speaking, that sentiment echoes a recent chorus of worries from tech luminaries and CEOs, including from billionaire investor Mark Cuban and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in, noting that Bard can "hallucinate" answers to human prompts writing responses that sound plausible, but are factually inaccurate.

"It could cause harm," Pichai told CBS News' "60 Minutes" on Sunday.

One of Musk's specific criticisms of OpenAI which he co-founded in 2015, and helped fund before leaving its board three years later centers around the organization's restructure from nonprofit to "capped-profit" in 2019, meant to help the company accept external funding.

That opened the door to a partnership with Microsoft, which helped train ChatGPT-4, OpenAI announced earlier this year. For-profit status could influence the ethics behind an AI program's development, Musk said on Monday.

Twitter which intends to pursue generative AI, Musk told the BBC last week is a for-profit company. So is X.AI, a new startup Musk quietly incorporated in Nevada last month.

Musk didn't immediately respond to CNBC Make It's request for comment. He admitted on Monday that he's "very late" to the chatbot race, but said he's still motivated to try due to concerns over the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership and Google dominating the market.

His timeline remains unclear, particularly considering his history of starting and then abandoning or indefinitely pausing ambitious projects, like The Boring Company's high-speed tunnels between major U.S. cities or Neuralink's computerized brain implants.

"I'm definitely starting late, but I will try to create a third option," Musk said. "This might be the best path to safety, in that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans, because we are an interesting part of the universe."

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Elon Musk now says he wants to create a ChatGPT competitor to avoid 'A.I. dystopia'he's calling it 'TruthGPT' - CNBC

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said some time ago that the Model Y would outsell all of Tesla's other cars, and by a wide margin. This came as a surprise since it's much more expensive than the popular Model 3. The CEO went on to predict that the Model Y would eventually become the best-selling car in the world. Many people thought he was crazy, but there's a much better chance of it actually happening than you might think.

When the Tesla Model Y first debuted, it was a bit of a disappointment to many people. The entire unveiling ceremony revolved around the history of Tesla, and the electric crossover was barely present. When it was finally shown, it wasn't shown in great detail, and there was no look at the third row. All you could really tell was that it wasn't much more than an inflated Model 3.

That said, the Model Y has been selling exceedingly well across the globe. In fact, it already made some top sales lists in 2022, and Tesla's sales stand to be much stronger in 2023. While many people love to pick on Elon Musk for his wild ideas and terrible timelines, he often proves them wrong. Sure, there are some promises Musk has made that have come true very late or still not come to fruition, but many of his dreams people doubted years ago are already a reality.

If all continues to move forward as it has thus far this year, Musk could have another "I told you so" moment.

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According to Electrek, Musk said in 2016 that the Model Y would create demand for 500,000 to 1,000,000 units per year and eventually become the world's best-selling passenger car of any kind. Keep in mind, it didn't even come to market until 2020. In 2022, Tesla noted that the Model Y would soon keep pace with the top-selling Toyota Corolla, which sees some ~1.2 million units sold per year.

Tesla could inform us during its upcoming earnings meeting that the Model Y is already on track to become the best-selling car in the world as early as this year. It topped all rivals in China, the world's biggest automotive market, for Q1 2023. Meanwhile, in the world's second-largest car market, the US, early data points to the Model Y being the best-selling passenger car for the quarter.

The Model Y is also breaking sales records in many European markets, and Tesla has ramped up its production at Giga Berlin to 5,000 copies per week. Tesla is also ramping up production at Giga Texas while constantly making tweaks and upgrades in Fremont and Shanghai.

Tesla aims to produce some 1.8 million EVs globally in 2023, though Musk has said the company could possibly achieve 2 million. If everything falls into place as planned, the Model Y has a very good chance of being the best-selling car in the world.

What do you think? Leave us your words of wisdom in the comment section below.

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Elon Musk May Have Been Right, His Tesla Model Y Guess Could Come True - InsideEVs

Here is an edited excerpt from this weeks CxO newsletter. To get this to your inbox, sign up here.

Elon Musk, like other tech peers, is wary of middle managers.

Growing up, I watched my dad cycle through several careers, from being a distributor of polyvinyl flooring to an independent bookseller. He called himself a salesman but Ive always thought his greatest job skill was managing a sales team, which he did for several global carpet companies. On car trips, wed listen to him reassure Helena, joke with Bob, debate tactics with Stan, and quote Winston Churchill to cheer up Mel. Textile tycoon Roger Milliken was celebrated as the boss whod tried to best Des Brady in a quote battle. At night, Id fall asleep to the sound of him telling my mom stories about the quirks and characters of office life.

With his dry Scottish wit and vague distrust of authority, my father wasnt what youd call a Company Man. The words private beach were practically marching orders to trespass. But his curiosity, competitive spirit and desire to help people get where they wanted to go made him a great manager.

Middle management is a tough place to be these days. Long before the pandemic even started, they were the unhappiest employees in most companies. Now, they have to deal with layoffs, tighter budgets, and pressure to meet their numbers while attending to the emotional wellbeing of people who may still be working from their bedrooms. Oh, and their boss thinks a bot could do their job.

I believe in the value of the middle manager, as do management thinkers like McKinseys Bill Schaninger, who believes theyre critical in driving large-scale organizational change. He is co-authoring a new book on the topic that will be out this summer and will be speaking at our upcoming Future of Work Summit on June 1st the day after hell be retiring from McKinsey to start his new adventure. In a recent article, Schaninger and colleagues argue that middle managers are less a symptom of bureaucracy than victims of it.

Managers are an especially vulnerable species in Silicon Valley, where startups often fumble from Lord-of-the-Flies-like chaos to plush seating and a plethora of cool new titles once the money comes in. (Time Ninja, youll be across the hall from our Dream Alchemist and Chief Happiness Engineer.) When the headwinds come, those who measure excellence in lines of code might look at that middle layer as a cost center to cut.

Exhibit A is Metas Mark Zuckerberg, who declared 2023 to be a Year of Efficiency a telling signal when the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp already laid off 11,000 people the year before. Indeed, the company plans to close 5,000 open roles this year and lay off an additional 10,000 people, possibly starting today.

In a Q&A with employees earlier this year, reported in Command Line, Zuckerberg said, "I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

That sounds like a Dystopian nightmare, or a sign that the Meta CEO may not be clear on what a number of his people actually do. Then again, this is a leader who equates being well understood with complacency, which cant have helped morale.

The same could be said of Elon Musk, who came into Twitter, tweeting that there seem to be 10 people managing for every one person coding.

Was the new Twitter CEO confusing functions like sales or, say, compliance with management? Possibly. He tends to recognize excellence in a form that reminds him of himself, which may explain why he says its hard to find people to delegate to. Musk also believes every manager should have the technical skills of the people they manage, even though studies suggest training in leadership skills may be more important. Certainly, middle managers are not to blame for the outages, misinformation, eroding value and general chaos at Twitter in recent months. If anything, the platform could use more good managers.

Instead, at Twitter and elsewhere, their numbers are likely to dwindle. Salesforce, Google and Amazon have also targeted middle management as areas to cut. In some ways, that makes sense. But lets distinguish between those who manage people and administrators whose functions add layers of bureaucracy. (Senior contributor William Baldwin lays out the compelling case to slash the ranks of administrators at Harvard.)

Great middle managers are the carriers of culture, the motivators of people, the agents of change. People tend to quit their boss, not their job, which makes nurturing better bosses a meaningful factor in a company's success.

During the last chapter of my dads career, he managed an independent bookstore with one employee and some occasional interns. He loved books but not that much. He seemed happiest when showing my son how to repair old books, dispensing life advice to the young woman working the cash register, or marching as Mr. Pickwick in the town parade. Like a lot of great middle managers, he was a teacher, a mentor and a coach. We could all use more of those right now, especially as technology transforms how we work.

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Why Mark Zuckerberg And Elon Musk Fire Their Most Valuable People - Forbes

SAN FRANCISCO Elon Musks latest wave of firings has seen the dismissalof the man formerly in charge of making sure the Twitter CEO looked like absolute hell every time you saw him, sources have confirmed.

Damn, not sure Ill be able to find more work in this field, said Cal Harper, who up until recently was in charge of laying out Musks awkwardly fitting wardrobe and coaching him on how to look out of place no matter what he was doing. I thought he was joking when he brought me onboard a while ago to make sure he looked uncomfortable and inhuman on every occasion both public and private, but you know, I wasnt going to say no to the money. This was the best job I ever had. He sent my family on a vacation after those pictures of him on that boat worked out so well for us.

Musk defended the move, stating that he had learned enough to perform the tasks himself.

Probably going to do his job from here on out, he said. No reason to pay someone to apply skin pastener and fuck my hair all up when Im perfectly capable of doing it myself. Based on current trends, cases of me looking weird and bloated and making those dumb faces should be down to zero by late April.

As of press time, the full time employee that was paid to hang around and talk about how strong Musks meme game was had also been dismissed.

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Elon Musk Fires Guy in Charge of Making Him Look Like Shit All the ... - Hard Drive

Twitter CEO Elon Musk shared his business perspective on inflation and the emerging banking crisis on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Billionaire Elon Musk warned Tuesday that the inflationary pressures which have wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy over the last year will persist until economic productivity increases.

Musk said in an appearance on Fox News "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that the turmoil caused by the banking crisis and difficulties in the commercial and residential real estate markets is a symptom of the Federal Reserves efforts to tamp down inflation through higher interest rates. He noted that "inflation is going to happen no matter what. If you increase the money supply, you get inflation."

"Theres not some magical cure for getting rid of inflation except to increase the productivity, the output of goods and services," Musk said. "So, what is money? Youve got these sort of its basically numbers in a database that comes up with some total. Then youve got the output of goods and services of the economy, and as long as the ratio of money to ratio of goods and services stays if that stays constant, you have no inflation. If you add more to the system faster than you increase goods and services, then you have inflation."

ELON MUSK SAYS TWITTER HAD MANY EMPLOYEES BUT LITTLE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Elon Musk attends the 2022 Met Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue) (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue / Getty Images)

Inflation reached 40-year highs in 2022, which prompted the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates. Prices surged in the wake of federal spending and deficits reaching record levels following the enactment of a series of pandemic relief measures.

Inflation remains elevated and prices were up 5% year-over-year in March more than double the Feds target rate of 2%.

"So, all of these COVID sort of stimulus bills were not paid for. They just generated more currency," Musk continued. "More, you know, more money was created because the federal government, the checks always pass, you know, unless you hit a debt limit, which theres probably going to be some debt limit crisis later this year."

ELON MUSK LAUNCHES NEW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANY, X.AI

Billionaire Elon Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, recently launched an artificial intelligence company called X.AI. (REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo / Reuters Photos)

"But provided you havent hit the debt limit, the federal government, unlike state governments or city governments or individuals, can simply issue more money. And thats what they did. As the old saying goes, theres no free lunch," Musk added.

The billionaire then asked, "So if you could just issue massive amounts of money without negative consequences, why dont we just take that to the limit, make everyone a trillionaire? Well, I mean they tried that in Venezuela, howd that work out?"

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Carlson responded, "Well, they had to eat zoo animals."

"Right. Its not good, you know. Theres no free lunch. Theres not some ability to issue money and not have inflation," Musk said.

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Elon Musk: No magical cure for inflation - Fox Business

The centerpiece of the first day of the inaugural Possible conference in Miami Beach took place yesterday when Elon Musk the polarizing but brilliant founder of Tesla and Starlink, and current owner of Twitter took to the main stage to offer up his version of what Twitter is doing to address the concerns of brand marketers about brand safety on the platform.

In a conversation with NBC Universals global chair of advertising & partnerships Linda Yaccarino who is seen by many as a possible candidate for the CEO position at Twitter, which is currently occupied by his dog Floki Musk talked of championing citizen journalism while also deriding mainstream media, vowing he would be treated the same way as anyone else on Twitter, and promising freedom of speech while limiting hate speech through a series of community controls.

People may not be aware of this already, but we have adjacency controls in place that are really quite effective, Musk told the packed mainstage room where hundreds recorded his comments on their cell phone cameras even after it was rumored that electronic recordings of the session somehow would not be permitted. Additionally, Musk took a handful (several overly fawning), questions from the audience after it was expressly said he would do no such thing.

Whether Musk, who charmed the audience and even got applause for his freedom of speech position, holds true to his words remains to be seen. He certainly tried to woo the roomful of marketers with some of his messaging. Advertising goes all the way from spam to compelling content, he said. And I really want to focus on obviously the compelling content, to make it relevant, make it interesting.

Rishad Tobaccowala, an author, speaker and advisor who for decades was a high-ranking executive with Publicis Groupe, offered his thoughts on Musks comments in a video segment below with Digiday immediately following the Twitter owners session with Yaccarino.

https://digiday.com/?p=500154

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Elon Musk aims to charm marketers with vow to focus on 'compelling ... - Digiday

Who's that sliding into your Twitter DMs? Is it the federal government? Well, according to Elon Musk, who took over the social media platform last year, government bureaucrats were routinely taking a close look at users' content.

Thanks to the Twitter Files, a collaboration between Elon Musk and independent journalists, as well as the Facebook Files, my own investigative project for Reason, we now know that social media companies constantly faced pressure to censor speechand that pressure was coming from the government. The State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and even the White House all targeted legitimate online speech. Federal law enforcement agents flagged tweets and posts for deletion under the guise of protecting national security.

And no one should be surprised. The feds love to invoke national security, and then take away more of your rights and pretend they're keeping you safe.

Well, guess what: They're at it again. Following a massive leak of U.S. intelligence documents that were posted on Discord, another social media platform, the Biden administration wants more power to monitor online chat rooms.

A senior administration official told NBC News that the government "is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track."

That's bad. We know where it will lead: More government surveillance of the American people, and eventually, more censorship of political speech. In the runup to the 2020 election, for example, the FBI warned social media sites to be wary of Russian-based disinformation. But then they also started flagging joke tweets written by Americans that happened to be about the election.

You see, the feds just can't help themselves: They'll use the new powers we give them to pressure the internet to shut down dissent. We've seen it happen time and again.

So let's keep the government out of our chatrooms. And watch out for your DMs.Photos: Javier Rojas/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Michael Ho Wai Lee/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; BOB STRONG/UPI/Newscom; Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom

Music: "New CarInstrumental" by Rex Banner via Artlist

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Elon Musk warns Tucker Carlson: The feds are in your Twitter DMs - Reason

Housing

The Tesla founder has broken ground on a plot in Texas, while Google and Meta are building workers homes in California. Should we be celebrating or worrying?

Welcome to Snailbrook, Texas. Established: 2021. Population: about 12, but with many more to come. In fact, in a decade or two, Snailbrook could be a gleaming, utopian city, shaped by the futuristic vision of the unavoidable tech titan of our day, Elon Musk.

Musk is moving into Texas big time. According to reports, he has quietly bought as many as 2,430 hectares (6,000 acres) in the Austin area where his core business, Tesla, has been headquartered since 2021 upon which factories and facilities are under construction for the rocket company SpaceX and the tunnelling company Boring (whose mascot is a snail, hence the towns name). Now, Musk is adding housing for workers (which reportedly will be more affordable to rent than that in Austin) and Boring executives are talking of building an entire city. Should we be celebrating or worrying?

Corporation-built towns tend to go one of two ways: heavenly or hellish, but usually the second. On the one hand, companies want to build a place that attracts and nurtures its employees; on the other, they want to minimise overheads and squeeze as much out of their captive townsfolk as they can get away with.

Overriding all of this is the temptation for the founders (almost always white men) to build monuments to themselves and rule like dictators. Given Musks reputation for impulsive heavy-handedness and extreme attention-seeking, this does not bode well. But this is the guy who promises to colonise Mars, so it is worth examining what he is doing down here on Earth.

What will Musktopia look like? Details are scant. As well as factories, the Snailbrook site in Bastrop county, about 35 miles outside Austin hosts 12 prefab trailer homes and a depressing-looking outdoor recreation area. Plans submitted to the county in January, called Project Amazing Phase I, show basic outlines of a few streets with Boring-themed names Boring Boulevard, Waterjet Way, Cutterhead Crossing fringed by blank plots for 110 more detached homes. Where the streets meet the adjacent parcel of land, they simply end, promising more to come.

If there is a vision for Snailbrook, it has yet to emerge. If anything, Musk and co have tried to keep the scheme a secret and it might have worked if it werent for inquisitive neighbours such as Chap Ambrose, a computer programmer who lives nearby and has flown drones over the site. The work that they have done so far does not give me confidence that theres a masterplan, he says. You see the public documents, and you see the way they work, what they do and have to redo. The grand vision is unclear at this point, I guess, is a nice way to say it.

In some ways, Snailbrook is similar to the first American company towns, which sprang up in the 19th century as industries such as mining, textiles and steelworks sought to house large numbers of workers in remote or sparsely populated areas. Employees would have to take what they were offered usually tents or basic wooden shacks housing several families. At best, there might be a church or a school, plus a company-owned store, which would often earn back what the company paid its workers or lead them into debt.

They were often closer to prison camps than ideal cities. Colorado coal-mining towns owned by John D Rockefeller were policed by armed guards, who prevented anyone entering or leaving. An inspector visiting one in 1910 wrote that the miners dwellings smack of the direst poverty Not all of the houses are equipped with water, and practically none have sewerage The people reflect their surroundings; slatternly dressed women and unkempt children throng the dirty streets and alleys of the camp.

When the miners went on strike over their conditions in 1913, the conflict turned violent, culminating in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914. The National Guard attacked the strikers tent city on the companys behalf, killing at least 19 people, including a dozen children.

Even in more peaceable settlements, paternalistic captains of industry sought to control every aspect of their worker-citizens lives. In Lowell, Massachusetts, established in the 1820s by the cotton magnate Francis Cabot Lowell, the workforce was overwhelmingly young, single and female (women were cheaper than men). Lowell had rigid ideas about how his employees should conduct themselves. They slept in dormitories, rose to a bell at 4.30am and worked 12-hour days. They were forbidden from swearing, talking during work or drinking alcohol, while attendance at church was compulsory. The Lowell girls did at least receive some education, via evening classes (if they could stay awake), which meant many were able to leave after a few years to enter a less gruelling profession.

The idea of the company town as a utopian model took root in Britain in the late 19th century, where reforming industrialists sought an alternative to the urban squalor endured by most of their factory workers. The result was model villages, closer to the garden city philosophy, with quality housing and plenty of fresh air and green space. The idea was to keep workers happy, healthy and productive.

Many of them still stand today: Creswell in Derbyshire, built by the local coal-mining company; Titus Salts Saltaire and Joseph Rowntrees New Earswick in Yorkshire; Port Sunlight on the Wirral, founded by William Lever to house workers at his soap factory; and the textbook example, Bournville, near Birmingham, built by the Cadbury family.

Despite indulging Britains sweet tooth, George Cadbury was an abstemious Quaker and a visionary social reformer, says Peter Richmond, the chief executive of the Bournville Village Trust. I think what really drove him was: How can I tackle the inequalities and the social ills and the problems that I see in the inner city? This was about benefiting the population of Birmingham, and dealing with the challenges in Birmingham, as much as having a good local workforce.

In 1893, Cadbury began buying up rural land to the south-west of Birmingham and laying out a low-density village, alongside the young architect William Alexander Harvey. There were semi-detached cottages in a variety of architectural styles, with modern conveniences and large gardens (each with a fruit tree). There were parks and allotments, schools, hospitals, a swimming pool and a sports ground, but no pubs; the Quakers still had boundaries. Another part of the estate had a sort of country retreat for children from the inner cities, says Richmond. About 20,000 children a year came out just to enjoy two weeks in decent air in what would have then been the countryside.

Crucially, Bournville was not exclusively a workers town: Cadbury employees made up only 50% of its population. In 1900, Cadbury put the Bournville estate under the control of an independent charitable trust, which still manages it today. So unlike in many company towns, residents tenancy was not dependent on their employment status. Bournville remains a nice place to live, says Richmond, with a mix of private and social housing (but still no pubs).

American industrialists were thinking along similar lines to those in Britain, albeit with more capitalism and less philanthropy, resulting in factory towns such as Hershey, Pennsylvania (what is it with chocolate companies?) and Pullman, Chicago, founded by the railway-carriage maker George Pullman.

Pullman was even grander than Bournville, featuring modern brick houses with gas and running water, grand civic buildings, parks and hotels (but, again, no bars serving alcohol). But when a recession hit in 1893, Pullman fired hundreds of his workers or lowered their wages by up to 30%, while keeping their rents and utility charges the same. Already fed up with Pullmans feudal reign, the townsfolk went on strike. Railway workers across the country joined in and the National Guard had to be called in to get the trains running again. A few years later, the Illinois supreme court ordered the company to sell the town.

If there is one utopian whom Musk brings to mind, though, it is Walt Disney. Like Musk, Disney was a committed futurist with an almost boyish belief in technologys liberating potential (albeit combined with socially conservative values). Like Musk, Disney sought to put his ideas into action by secretly buying up large tracts of land in central Florida the area that is now Disney World.

Just as the Disney corporation negotiated concessions from state authorities to effectively police and service its Florida domain (which the governor, Ron DeSantis, is trying to strip away over Disneys defence of LGBTQ+ rights), so Musk was attracted by Texass relatively low taxes and loose planning regulations. As Ambrose puts it: As a Texas landowner, you can pretty much do damn well what you want.

Disneys vision for the Florida site was to build Epcot the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. Epcot was to be a city of constant change, a test lab for new technologies; corporations would provide advance models of appliances such as televisions and microwave ovens to every home. However, Disney alone would dictate those changes; citizens would be allowed to live there for a maximum of three years, so no one would acquire voting rights.

Architecturally, Disneys unrealised scheme makes a lot of sense by todays standards. Epcot was laid out like a garden city, with concentric rings of homes and green belts around a compact city centre that was to be air-conditioned, pedestrian and car-free. Cars were banished to the periphery, while public transport was to be provided by electric people movers, like those at Disneys theme parks, and a high-speed monorail. Musks hyperloop concept of transportation via underground tunnels (for which Boring was created) could almost be seen as a successor.

If Musk was to try to do what Walt tried to do, its sort of 40 years too late, says Sam Gennawey, a Disney historian and urban planner. Hes not being like Walt Disney and visionary in the sense of: Im going to create a different kind of community. What Musk is doing is much more akin to Pullman or Lowell, where its just housing nearby owned by the guy who owns the company. Its basically an economic decision thats being made. Is the architecture gonna look cool? Damn, I hope so. At least, betterlooking than his cars.

Corporate utopias have taken a different form in the 21st century. Rather than building model towns, the tech titans of Silicon Valley have ploughed their energies into their campuses, hiring world-class architects (Norman Foster in the case of Apple, Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick for Google, Frank Gehry for Facebook) and building sealed-off enclaves offering free facilities: restaurants and cafes, beauty spas, jogging tracks, health centres, games arcades all the amenities of real cities, but without the distracting civilians. This is the most dystopian model of all. Rather than work with us and well give you nice housing, the message seems to have become why go home when you could live at work?

Musk has taken this logic to its extreme. Shortly after taking over Twitter and firing half the companys workforce, Musk demanded long hours at high intensity of the remaining employees, even installing beds in Twitters San Francisco offices. The local building regulators were not best pleased. Perhaps Musk has decided he can get away with more in Texas.

There are signs the tide is turning, however. Musk is not the only one taking another look at the idea of company towns. Google plans to build three neighbourhoods around its headquarters in Mountain View, in the Bay Area, with 7,000 homes 20% of which will be affordable. Meanwhile, in Menlo Park, Facebooks owner, Meta, is working on Willow Village, a mixed-use neighbourhood including 1,700 residential units, developed collaboratively with and for our neighbours and the broader community, a spokesperson says.

Ironically, the company that is setting the standard for corporate town-building is one that has helped destroy many American towns: Walmart. The worlds largest retailer started in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1950 and has never left. It is building a huge campus there, but it has also added to the citys infrastructure and amenities, most conspicuously with the $400m (250m) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in 2011 and is free to visit. As well as a huge art collection, it includes public spaces, ponds, outdoor concerts and nature trails.

Drawn by Walmarts economic gravity, hundreds of other retailers have also set up shop in Bentonville. The byproduct of that is theyve infused a huge working population within walking distance of the Bentonville business district, says Gennawey. It has all the amenities of a beautiful small southern town, with every store full and lots of activity and people walking around and sitting in the square. So, quite honestly, if Walmart offered me a job, Id really think about it.

If Snailbrook is to be a success, this is the kind of thing Musk will have to do, although there is little indication he is leaning in this direction so far. If there is a lesson to be learned from the history, it could be that company towns work best when their creators put civic responsibility over egotistical urges and employee wellbeing over corporate profit. Does that sound like Musk?

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Is Elon Musk creating a utopian city? The hellish, heavenly history of company towns - The Guardian

While Elon Musk worries about too few babies and climate activists predict an overpopulation crisis, the United Nations is warning that the bigger threat could be alarmism on either side of the population debate.

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Clashing fears of overpopulation and underpopulation are pushing countries to act to either lower, increase, or stabilize their birth rates, according to a new report by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) published Wednesday.

But reasonable concerns could be morphing into population alarmism, according to the report, risking potentially dangerous new policies that might undermine yearslong efforts to improve basic human rights and gender equality.

This alarmism poses real risks, the report said. One, that population anxiety will distract us from serious but solvable problems, and two, that population anxiety will become a rationale for denying the rights and bodily autonomy of women and girls.

Concerns about population have hit a fever pitch recently. When the world population exceeded 8 billion people in November, fears of overpopulation spread in sub-Saharan Africa, where eight countries will account for more than half of global population growth from now to 2050, according to the UN.

Officials in the region say the demographic struggles stem from population growing faster than economies, and that countries lack enough time and resources to build the infrastructure and food systems necessary to ensure every citizen has access to enough resources.

But at the same time, stalling birth rates in the developed world that fell even lower during the COVID-19 pandemic have sparked fears of the opposite phenomenon: underpopulation. Tesla and Twitter CEO Musk is among the more vocal advocates of higher birth rates, arguing that economies and civilization could collapse if the world runs out of enough young people. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far, he tweeted last year while confirming he had recently fathered twins, his eighth and ninth children.

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The two doomsday scenarios have elicited a range of policy reactions. Countries with fast-rising populations like Nigeria have recently overhauled their policies to expand access to family counseling and planning. Meanwhile, birth control has become much harder to access in wealthier European nations including Croatia and Poland.

It is true that birth rates in many countries, including the U.S., have for several decades been below the replacement rate needed to maintain population levels. This has sparked fears of looming economic catastrophe, as not enough young workers are entering the labor force in developed countries to replace the rising number of retirees. The situation could, in turn, lead to economic trouble as public spending on health care, long-term care, and pensions increases.

But while reasonable solutions to these problems exist, the UN report found that the burden of slowing birth rates tends to largely fall on women who choose to delay having a family or avoid it altogether. The blame, in many contexts, is laid at the feet of women, who are often castigated for rejecting marriage and motherhood, the report said, adding that in many parts of the world declining population is fueling policies that call for a return to a submissive model of femininity and traditional family and gender values.

The report found that recent policy changes in countries such as Poland and Turkey have not only limited access to contraceptives, they also reduce paid government services for counseling and reproductive health care and cut back on sex education in schools.

The UN also warned against conflating demographic adjustments as the only remedy to global issues such as climate change, saying that overpopulation and underpopulation risk becoming a scapegoat for many problems. Instead, the report recommended voluntary family planning services, education on reproductive health, and expanded access to birth control and abortion as ways to fix demographic issues without impeding human rights.

The UN cautioned against enforced, top-down decisions prescribing fertility rates, as economic benefits would likely be at the expense of equality, human rights, and progress, and could limit the essential goal of empowering women and girls to exercise choice over their own bodies and futures.

It isnt the first time the UN has warned population alarmism could worsen demographic issues. Last year, as the global population neared the 8 billion mark, UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said rising population was not a cause for fear, and that history showed population control policies ranging from restrictions on contraceptives to forced sterilization are often ineffective and even dangerous.

We cannot repeat the egregious violations of human rightsthat rob women of their ability to decide whether [or] when to become pregnant, if at all. Population alarmism: It distracts us from what we should be focused on, she said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Too many countries are freaking out about population the way Elon Musk hasand its hurting women worldwide, the UN says - Yahoo Finance

SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk said on Wednesday that electric vehicle (EV) giant Tesla likely will launch full self-drive technology this year and generate significant profits that offset some of the margin pressure it's facing due to aggressive price cuts."I hesitate to say this but I think we'll do it this year," said Tesla CEO Musk, speaking on a conference. Musk has missed his previous targets to achieve self-driving capability dating back years.The test version of what Tesla calls Full Self-Driving (FSD) software will be "two steps forward, one step back between releases," Musk said, "but the trend is very clearly towards full self driving, towards full autonomy."The technology as it stands now has drawn legal and regulatory scrutiny following crashes. Tesla has said the technology does not make the car autonomous, and requires driver supervision.Tesla's financial chief Zachary Kirkhorn said its automotive margin in the first quarter was hurt not only by price cuts, but also increased deferred revenue for FSD software and that 'this deferral should get recognized once some of the software catches up'.Kirkhorn did not elaborate.Guidehouse Insights analyst Sam Abuelsamid said Tesla is making some changes to the car's hardware, which disables some FSD features on newer vehicles temporarily.Tesla sells FSD software as an option for as much as $15,000.Late last year, Tesla removed ultrasonic sensors from Model 3 and Model Y cars, and said some features such as 'smart summon' and 'autopark' would be temporarily unavailable."We do have this unique strategic advantage," Musk said. "We are making a car that, if autonomy pans out, that asset will be worth a hell of a lot more in the future than it is now."Tesla reported a lower-than-expected quarterly margin on Wednesday but Musk said he would prioritise sales growth over profits in a weak economy.

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Elon Musk says Tesla likely to launch full self-drive technology 'this year' - Indiatimes.com

Taylor Swift may have been the only celebrity with doubts about the legality of FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed last year, according to a lawyer leading a class-action lawsuit against the groups high-profile ambassadors.

Adam Moskowitz, a key attorney in the class-action lawsuit against the celebrity ambassadors who promoted FTX, said legal discovery proceedings revealed that Swift did due diligence on FTX. Moskowitz made the comments on The Blocks The Scoop podcast released Wednesday.

FTX failed last year amid allegations of fraud, wiping away billions of dollars of customer and investor money and shaking crypto markets. Sam Bankman-Fried, the exchanges founder and former CEO, faces a number of financial crime charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Moskowitz and representatives for Swift and Bankman-Fried didnt immediately respond to requests for comment from Barrons.

Among those named in the lawsuit, which alleges that celebrities endorsed a potential fraudand potentially promoted unregistered securitiesare football star Tom Brady, basketball icon Shaquille ONeal, and businessman Kevin OLeary. Representatives of none of the three immediately responded to requests for comment early on Wednesday.

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None of these Defendants performed any due diligence prior to marketing these FTX products to the public, the lawsuit alleges.

Swiftwho the Financial Times reported was courted by FTX to be among the groups celebrity ambassadorsmay have been the outlier.

The one person I found that did that was Taylor Swift, Moskowitz said on The Scoop podcast, in response to a question from host Frank Chaparro on why some celebrities didnt seem to talk to lawyers before signing contracts to make sure they would not be peddling unregistered securities.

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In our discovery Taylor Swift actually asked that: Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities? Moskowitz said.

It makes the music artist a rarity in choosing not to be linked with FTX, which not only attracted high-profile brand ambassadors but a body of venture-capital and pension fund investors. One, venture-capital powerhouse Sequoia Capital, wrote down its investment in FTX to zero before the exchange went bankrupt, noting that it had run a rigorous diligence process but was in the business of taking risk.

One of the worlds richest people, for his part, isnt shocked that Swift appears to have been skeptical about what the Financial Times reported was a sponsorship deal worth more than $100 million.

Im not surprised, Tesla

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Some of Swifts biggest tracks are Dont Blame Me, I Knew You Were Trouble, and Bad Blood.

Write to Jack Denton at jack.denton@barrons.com

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Taylor Swift May Have Known FTX Was Trouble. Why Elon Musk Is Not Surprised. - Barron's

ELON Musks dad Errol claims he bankrolled his billionaire sons escape from South Africa to America with emeralds from an under the table mine in Zambia.

The Tesla CEO, 51, last week offered a million Dogecoin (almost $93,000 at the time of writing) to anyone who can prove the existence of the mine his dad supposedly owned.

He has previously slammed the claim, saying: The fake emerald mine thing is so annoying. Like where exactly is this thing anyway!?

But in an exclusive interview with The U.S. Sun, Errol claimed it was his emerald venture which helped pave the way for Elon to become a wildly successful captain of industry in the U.S.

Describing the moment he heard of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency reward, Errol joked: When I read that, I wondered, Can I enter, because I can prove it existed.

Elon knows its true. All the kids know about it. My daughter has three or four emerald pendants.

Elon saw them (the emeralds) at our house. He knew I was selling them.

To prove his point, Errol provided pics of some of the bright green precious gemstones, which he says came from the mine.

He explained that it is in the Lake Tanganyika region of Zambia, the second biggest emerald-producing country in the world after Colombia.

But Errol admits it was far from being a conventional mining setup - and that might explain why Elon is so sure no one can prove its existence.

Errol says he first stumbled into the emerald business while flying from South Africa en route to the UK to sell a Cessna Golden Eagle plane.

Landing at an airstrip near Zambias northern borders with Tanzania and what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he met and befriended the Italian owner of the airstrip.

It turned out the Italian-employed locals dig out emeralds deep in the Zambian bush and Errol decided to go into business with him.

The workers would bring them in for shipment to Errol in what the retired electromechanical engineer described as an under the table operation.

The Italian business partner would then pay the locals around $2 a load, enough to feed an entire family for a month, Errol says.

He explained: What Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine.It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere.

There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements.

No one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was a free for all.

Not even he knew exactly where the border was. At that time, it was like the Wild West.

Errol can only say for sure that the deposit was about 40 miles from where he had landed his Cessna in Kasaba Bay, which is now a tourist hub.

Explaining why he thinks that Elon has pushed back on the emerald mine story, Errol said: Elon's main concern is not to appear to be a 'trust fund kid who got everything given to him on a plate.

That's what his nay-sayers are pushing. It's not true. Elon took risks and worked like blazes to be where he is today.

The emeralds helped us through a very trying time in South Africa, when people were fleeing the country in droves, including his mother's whole family, and earning opportunities were at an all-time low. That's all.

Describing how he used the proceeds from the emeralds to set Elon and his brother Kimbal on a new path, Errol said: In the late 1980s, Elon was doing a business degree at the University of Pretoria.

But he was very unhappy there. The last straw for him was when someone stole his expensive bicycle I had bought him.

One day, I found him in bed looking depressed. It was heartbreaking to see him like that.

I said to him, You're not very happy, Elon, are you? He said, No.

And suddenly, it came to me out of the blue to ask him, 'Would you like to go and study in the United States?

He looked up at me, his face beaming and exclaimed, Yes!

Ten days later, Elon left South Africa with a return ticket for a year for America with emerald money in his pocket.

Elon first spent a year working for the Bank of Nova Scotia in Canada between 1989 and 1990.

Then, he enrolled on a scholarship at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton Business School, one of the top business schools in the world.

Errol said: During that time, I managed to send money Id made from emerald sales to him and Kimbal for living expenses.

But when the bottom dropped out of the emerald business due to the emergence of a cheaper lab-made version of the gemstone, Errol had to sell assets to keep cash flowing to his sons.

He unsuccessfully tried to cash in on his share in a game farm, so was forced to his ocean-going yacht for R100,000 (then around $29,000), a quarter of its value.

Errol says he then had to send the cash via an Israeli broker because of strict exchange control regulations.

He explained: I took a hell of a chance because people I knew were sent to jail for doing a similar thing.

I managed to send them about R400,000 (then around $115,000) in total.

It helped them with rent and food. Kimbal told me that they could never have survived without the money.

Elon has previously claimed that he arrived in Canada in 1989 with just CA$2,500 and paid his own way through college, ending with $100,000 in student debt.

But despite repeatedly stating that there is no evidence of an emerald mine, he has reportedly admitted that it did exist - and that he visited it.

According to fact-checking website Snopes, Elon said in a since-deleted interview with Forbes in July 2014: This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.

I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didnt realize how dangerous it was.

I couldnt find my passport, so I ended up grabbing my brothers - which turned out to be six months overdue.

So, we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person.

There were AK-47s all over the place and Im thinking, Man, this could really go bad.

The U.S. Sun has reached out to Elon Musk for comment.

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Elon Musks dad Errol says he can prove existence of emerald mine in new bombshell claim revealing its lo... - The US Sun

(Beast Philanthropy Productions via AP)

GREENVILLE, NC (WNCT) MrBeast took to Twitter on Tuesday to share some irony Elon Musk is now subscribed to his Twitter profile.

MrBeast speaks out on transphobic comments made about one of his collaborators, Chris Tyson

Elon Musk is now paying me $5 a month, whos really in charge now, MrBeast, also known as Jimmy Donaldson, tweeted.

MrBeast named one of the most influential people by Time magazine

The post started going viral just hours after being uploaded. Now, a day later, it has more than 30.5 million views.

MrBeast visits Harvard, teaches business class

Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and is attempting to make the platform more creator-friendly by monetizing subscriptions to accounts. For $4.50 a month, content creators with enough followers and activity on the app will be able to charge Twitter users for exclusive posts.

Note: Were going to spotlight events, videos and other social posts that revolve around MrBeast, who lives in Greenville, and all the great work he does online, in the community and around the country. To follow MrBeast, click here:

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Ironic twist: MrBeast paid by Elon Musk for Twitter subscription - WNCT