Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, he's made big changes to the site. Here's everything that's happened since the acquisition.
- by Business Insider
- Jun 14, 2024
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Share Elon Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter.
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Musk named Linda Yaccarino as Twitter's new CEO after saying in May that a new chief would start in around six weeks. He tweeted: "@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app."
Musk also walked back the changes to Twitter's paid parental leave. The company's HR told employees in an email that it would give them seven weeks of paid leave and birthing parents would receive nine additional weeks.
Twitter announced that companies sharing information as a public service will be able to start using Twitter's API for free again.
As of May 2023, Twitter's full-time employee count numbered about 1,000, down from around 7,500 employees when Musk first took over.
June 2023
Representatives from software firm Oracle started calling current and former Twitter staff to seek payment for past-due invoices, which was at least six figures. Musk also has outstanding payments owed to companies, including Amazon and Google's cloud services and landlords of its offices in the US, Europe, and Asia.
An internal Twitter document reportedly showed ad revenue was down 59% from April to May, according to internal documents, despite Musk's claims that "almost all advertisers have come back."
July 2023
Meta launched Threads, a new text-based social-media network, in July and that same night Musk's lawyer sent the company a cease-and-desist letter claiming it was a "copycat" app. The letter claims Meta hired "dozens of former Twitter employees" to help build its rival app Threads. It also claimed Meta had been "crawling and scraping" Twitter data on users.
The weekend prior to Threads' launch, Twitter's "rate limit" was temporarily imposed on the number of tweets users could view and users were locked out from viewing posts for several hours. Musk later said it was necessary because AI companies were scraping "extreme levels" of data from the platform, which meant it had to "bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis."
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However, Musk and Yaccarino didn't brief staff on these changes. Staff in the sales and advertising division didn't get a response about what they should say to clients about how the limit would impact ads.
Musk announced he was renaming the company as "X" and making it into an "everything app". Soon after he scrapped Twitter's bird logo in favor of a monochrome X and had a giant X sign installed on its San Francisco headquarters. The sign was removed three days later after complaints rolled in.
August 2023
Musk said X would keep ad revenue from content creators who don't have a Blue premium subscription. He continued to bring in sweeping changes such as removing headlines of articles from X posts.
X was fined $4,447 by San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection for installing the X sign on the roof, which attracted 24 complaints, including concerns that it looked unstable and the flashing strobe light from it could disturb nearby residents.
September 2023
Musk laid off more employees who worked on the trust and safety team in the first week of September. The roles involved keeping the platform safe for advertisers and users. Between five and 10 people were affected by the layoffs.
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Yaccarino appeared at Code Conference and had a car-crash interview where she seemed undermined by Musk, and appeared to struggle to answer questions concisely. In one segment, she was asked about X's daily active user numbers, and she responded with only estimates, saying it had 200 million to 250 million daily active users or "something like that."
A biography on Musk by Walter Isaacson hit the shelves in September.
It included revelations about his upbringing and character, such as him going into "demon mode" — "when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain," according to his ex-girlfriend Grimes.
An EU Commission report found X had the highest amount of Russian disinformation out of the major social media platforms. It called for Musk to ramp up its efforts to tackle disinformation. The European Commission's vice-president, Vera Jourova, advised Twitter that "we are watching what you are doing."
October 2023
The SEC revealed it was investigating Musk's acquisition of Twitter and asked a California federal court to force him to comply with a May subpoena asking him to sit for testimony.
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The filing revealed what the agency said has been "an ongoing nonpublic investigation by the SEC regarding whether, among other things, Musk violated various provisions of the federal securities laws" with his initial secret collection of Twitter stock in early 2022 and his later purchase of the company, along with statements he made about the deal.
Data provided exclusively to Business Insider's Lara O'Reilly by the marketing consultancy Ebiquity showed that a large majority of X's biggest-spending advertisers have stopped advertising on the platform since Musk acquired the company.
Just two of Ebiquity clients, which accounts for 70 of the top 100 top-spending advertisers, had purchased ads on X in September, down from 31 brands 12 months earlier.
Musk announced the launch of two new tiers of X premium subscription service.
"One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive, but has no ads," he said in a post on X.
Musk told his followers that they could get updates on the Israel-Hamas conflict by following accounts known for peddling misinformation. He deleted the post after three hours, but by that time it had been seen by 11 million users.
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