The Tesla and SpaceX CEO first announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech.
“This is just my strong, intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” Musk said at a TED conference on the day he made his offer. “I don’t care about the economics at all.”
Even for one of the richest men in the world, $44 billion is a lot of money to cough up to buy a middling social platform. Despite his fervent declarations about expanding “the scope and scale of consciousness” through public discourse, the billionaire got cold feet. A month later in May, he tried to kill the deal , claiming that Twitter had more bots than its public filings let on. After a truly chaotic legal discovery process, which even included some embarrassing texts , Musk was forced to seal the deal . By October, the platform was his.
Since Musk bought Twitter and took the company private, the news around the microblogging platform has been a whirlwind, rife with verification chaos, API access shakeups, ban reversals and staggering layoffs. If you’re just catching up, here’s a complete timeline of what’s going down at the bird app.
Here’s an ongoing timeline of the notable Twitter updates and changes since Musk’s takeover, starting with the most recent news:
April 2023
Twitter introduces 10,000-character-long tweets for Blue subscribers
Twitter’s new feature will let Blue subscribers post 10,000-character-long posts — as if the social network is trying to compete with a rival newsletter platform . Twitter has also added support for bold and italic text formatting.
Long-form writing is also not entirely new. Last June, the company introduced a program called Twitter Notes for select writers . However, that program was shut down under Musk. After taking over the company he also killed newsletter tool Revue , a startup Twitter had acquired in 2021.
NPR, PBS and a handful of other news organizations bail on Twitter as Musk meddles with account labels
A PBS spokesperson confirmed to Axios that PBS had “no plans to resume tweeting” after Twitter gave it a murky “government-funded media” label over the weekend. A few other news entities appeared to have followed suit, including the prominent Boston NPR affiliate WBUR , Hawaii Public Radio and LA-based local news source LAist .
Twitter partners with eToro to show real-time stock and crypto information
This expands upon the social network’s Cashtag feature, which provided info about a limited number of stocks and crypto coins through TradingView data .
The new partnership with eToro goes beyond just displaying information. It also redirects users to the eToro site where they can engage in trading. If you search for a stock on Twitter, you will see a button saying “View on eToro,” which redirects to the site.
