The entire story of Twitter under Elon Musk

Forget Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company — Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter.

Elon Musk owns Twitter, and his new big idea is charging people to read more than a few hundred tweets per day. Verified Twitter Blue subscribers can read up to 6,000 tweets per day, no one can browse the site without logging in, and unverified accounts are limited to reading 300 tweets per day, which Musk blames on AI startups scraping the site to feed large language models like ChatGPT.

How’d we get here?

On April 4th, 2022, we learned that Musk had purchased enough shares of Twitter to become its largest individual shareholder. Eventually, he followed up with an unsolicited offer to buy 100 percent of Twitter’s shares for $54.20 each, or about $44 billion. Twitter accepted Musk’s offer, but then things got weird because he tried to cancel the deal.

There was a lot of back-and-forth about bots and text messages, but in the end, Musk settled on buying the company rather than facing a deposition or Chancery Court trial and eventually strode into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.

Since then, there have been layoffs, more layoffs, and even more layoffs — plus drama over Substack, unpaid bills, and blue checkmarks. With ad revenue still down from previous years, Elon finally abdicated the role of CEO, installing longtime NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino.

Read on for the latest updates about what’s going on inside Twitter right now.

Highlights

PINNED

May 13

Nilay Patel

Welcome to hell.

Twitter 1.0 was particularly notable for standing up to government censorship around the world. Twitter 2.0 under Elon Musk is actively complying with authoritarian government censorship demands ahead of elections. Well done. This is what hell looks like.
TODAY, 1:28 AM GMT+2

Jay Peters

Instagram’s Twitter competitor launches July 6th, according to the App Store

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

The Twitter competitor from Meta, Instagram Threads, is expected to launch on July 6th, according to the App Store listing for the app showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone. This follows an Android listing for Threads, an Instagram app, that briefly showed up on Google Play on Saturday with similar screenshots and some initial details. Another listing I saw that’s still live on Google Play doesn’t have a release date, so this App Store page may give us the official date for Threads to launch.

Here is the official — and brief — description of the app, from the App Store:
TODAY, 12:51 AM GMT+2

Jay Peters

Tweets aren’t showing up in Google results as often because of changes at Twitter

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google can’t display tweets and pages from Twitter in search results as effectively as it usually does because of changes at Twitter, according to a statement given to The Verge. “We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” spokesperson Lara Levin said. “Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.”

Over the past few days, Twitter has made some major changes to the visibility of tweets on the site. On Friday, it started blocking unregistered users from being able to browse tweets, and on Saturday, it introduced “temporary” limits for the number of tweets people can read in a day. Given Levin’s statement, it appears the changes have had some effect on how Google crawls Twitter as well
TODAY, 12:32 AM GMT+2

Jay Peters

Twitter’s ‘new’ Tweetdeck lives behind a verified paywall

Image: Twitter

Twitter is officially launching its “new” version of TweetDeck to everyone, according to a tweet from Twitter’s support account, which is a step that it had to take to help mitigate some of the issues TweetDeck has been experiencing lately. The switch comes with a potentially-heartbreaking catch: TweetDeck is going to become a Verified-only feature in 30 days, the account says, meaning you’ll need to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription to be able to use it.

This updated version of TweetDeck has been in preview for nearly two years.
Jul 3

Jay Peters

The latest hit on Twitter? A full-length upload of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

It’s been up for more than 12 hours and already has nearly 19 million views. The person who uploaded says they’ll be posting more movies and is soliciting requests for which ones.

Twitter has run into this movie re-upload issue before — earlier this year, posts with The Super Mario Bros. movie and Avatar: The Way of Water were floating around. I emailed Twitter to ask about this Spider-Man re-upload, but the press email address auto-replied with a poop emoji.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Jul 3

Jay Peters

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino may lay out her vision for the company in August.

That’s according to a report from Financial Times that I missed last week — she may do it the first week of August in a Twitter Spaces room.

Apparently, Yaccarino also wants to add “full-screen, sound-on video ads” when looking through Twitter’s short-form video feed. Can’t wait! Wonder if those ads will be rate limited!

Linda Yaccarino’s vision for Twitter 2.0 emerges

[FinancialTimes]
Jul 3

David Pierce

So where are we all supposed to go now?

Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore.

You could argue, I suppose, that this is just the natural end of a specific part of the internet. We spent the last two decades answering a question — what would happen if you put everyone on the planet into a room and let them all talk to each other? — and now we’re moving onto the next one. It might be better this way. But the way it has all changed, and the speed with which it has happened, has left an everybody-sized hole in the internet. For all these years, we all hung out together on the internet. And now that’s just gone
Jul 3

Jon Porter

TweetDeck is falling apart after Twitter’s rate-limiting fiasco

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Twitter’s power-user focused TweetDeck interface is experiencing major issues after owner Elon Musk announced limits on the number of tweets users can view daily. The Verge has experienced these issues first hand with our publication’s Twitter accounts, and multiple users across the platform (including at least one Twitter Blue subscriber, spotted by TechCrunch) are reporting seeing an empty interface that would normally be filled with tweets. Users are reporting varying aspects of the interface being broken, with notifications, mentions, likes, and lists failing to load.

While users have been reporting issues with Twitter throughout the weekend, problems with TweetDeck are likely to create issues for professional and power users of Twitter, who rely on the service to build their brands, promote their work, and — in the case of many newsrooms — as a reporting tool.
Jul 2

Jay Peters

Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter

Image: Bluesky

Update July 3rd, 5:35PM ET: Bluesky has resumed user signups again. Our original story follows.

Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx of new users has been a problem.
Jul 1

Richard Lawler

The logic behind putting reading limits on a service that relies on advertising revenue.

Has Elon Musk forgotten that instead of paying to read more on Twitter, people who run into the new limits can just do something else? Despite his posts and retweets about touching grass, it looks like another side effect of monopoly brain, as mentioned in this April episode of The Vergecast.

Separately — Musk has lost Esther Crawford. The former Twitter Blue product manager, who posted a picture of herself sleeping at the office while trying to meet the new boss’ deadline (before being laid off in February), responded to the changes by tweeting:

Hubris + no pushback – customer empathy – data = a great way to light billions on fire
Jul 1

Wes Davis and Richard Lawler

Elon Musk blames data scraping by AI startups for his new paywalls on reading tweets

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.

Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers) still allow reading only a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.