Twitter Sends Microsoft Mean Letter Because Elon Is Mad
- by Gizmodo
- Jun 17, 2024
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mind about how it was going to work when people made fun of him.
The right to tweet or download tweets is something that a lot of organizations don’t seem willing to pay for. New York City, for example, said it would shutter its MTA bot
which tweets about subway delays, until Twitter said, “Wait, actually, sorry, you don’t have to pay.”
Microsoft, too, said it wasn’t going to pay for the Twitter API. This is a much bigger deal, because Microsoft used the Twitter API to loop the social media company into its advertising system. Twitter wants most businesses to pay $42,000 a month to use the API. Microsoft’s response was essentially “No, thanks, we’re not going to pay for the right to share advertising revenue with you.”
This is what prompted Musk’s “Lawsuit time” tweet, and the threatening letter. If you unpack this for a moment, it doesn’t make much sense. If Microsoft was violating Twitter’s terms, that would be true whether or not Microsoft pays for the API. It almost sounds like protection money: you can break our rules, but only if you pay us. Twitter desperately needs ad money. The company makes almost every dollar of its revenue from ads, and Twitter’s list of big advertisers went off a cliff when Musk took over.
Advertising relies on what’s called “brand safety,” you want to be sure your ads don’t show up next to racism, for example, because that implies you support it. Too bad then, that hate speech skyrocketed
on Twitter immediately after Musk bought the company. The concern isn’t hypothetical: Elon unbanned several famous white nationalists and then Twitter ran ads on their profiles
. This problem certainly relates to Musk’s recent decision to step down as CEO and put former NBCUniversal advertising honcho Linda Yaccarino in his place
. (Elon is staying on as chief technical officer and executive chairman. So he’s Yaccarino’s subordinate and her boss at the same time. Wonder how that will go!)
Musk has a poor track record when it comes to going head-to-head with other big companies. Apple pulled back its ad spending
on Twitter ads amidst the chaos of Elon’s early days. You might think you’d reassure companies who are worried your platform might make them look bad. But not Elon. He’s playing 4D chess. Musk lashed out at Apple
, asking his millions of followers whether Apple made the move because it “hates free speech.” He also tweeted he was “going to war” with the iPhone maker, a message he later deleted.
Here’s how that “war” played out. Apple CEO Tim Cook invited Elon to visit the Apple campus. If you know what they talked about, I am begging you to email me, because that same day, Musk completely changed his tune. Not only did he stop criticizing Apple, he started praising the company, thanking Cook for his hospitality and groveling about the company’s “beautiful HQ.” Whatever Cook said to Elon, it turned him from a threat into a lap dog.
Perhaps Musk’s war on Microsoft will go better. At least in this case, there is a slightly better reason for the vitriol.
There is a broader debate that’s going on in the tech industry. For about a decade, all of the big technology companies walled off their own little gardens. Meta did social media. Google had web tools like Search, Gmail, Chrome, and YouTube. Apple made phones. Microsoft made boring software for businesses. Twitter, a tiny compared to these giants, was just happy to be there. There was a lot of crossover, but most of these businesses really didn’t compete with each other. They all had their own things going.
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