Elon Musk

Following X’s request to come back to the country, Brazil’s Supreme Court said it won’t lift its ban on the social media platform until X agrees to pay “just over $5 million in pending fines,” writes Reuters.

That reportedly includes a new $1.8 million fine for X having briefly gone live for some users in the country last week.

Turns out the SEC doesn’t like it when you no-show on them. Now the regulator is seeking to penalize Musk for refusing to appear and testify in a probe into his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

It’s one of many details in a big New York Times piece about what goes into Musk’s extensive personal security.

Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes lifted the restrictions after transferring more than $3 million to the government to cover fines owed by X. Despite this, X still remains blocked in Brazil.

It popped up quickly with little transparency around its potential impact on the power grid, air quality, or water resources, local advocates say. The Elon Musk-led company is reportedly running gas generators without a proper permit. Local utility officials reportedly signed NDAs.

“We have been deemed by xAI not even valuable enough to have a conversation with,” says KeShaun Pearson, who grew up a few miles from the facility and is president of the local nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution. “To not even be included in conversations about what is transpiring in our own backyards.”

X’s head of global affairs, Nick Pickles, announced he’s leaving the company after a 10-year run. Pickles recently became X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s right-hand man and was one of the few remaining senior leaders from Twitter’s pre-Musk era. His departure comes right after Brazil banned X due to its refusal to block certain accounts and designate a legal representative in the country.

The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.

Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes presented Elon Musk with an ultimatum last night: appoint a new legal representative in Brazil within 24 hours or X will be banned.

The ongoing dispute follows X closing its office in Brazil after being ordered to remove several accounts for allegedly spreading hate speech and misinformation. The service remains available to Brazil’s estimated 40 million monthly users... for now.

The Elon Musk-led company is allegedly running gas turbines without the proper permit at a data center in Memphis, TN. Local environmental groups are reportedly urging regulators to investigate.

They’re worried about nitrogen oxides (NOx), smog-forming pollution that can aggravate respiratory illness.

Forbes noticed that Musk’s first two manifestos have been scrubbed from Tesla’s website. The first Master Plan, which was released in 2006, outlined Tesla’s plan to release a series of EVs and use the revenues to build more affordable models. The second plan included plans for additional EVs, as well as solar panels and battery storage. The earliest blog post on the company’s site now dates to 2019. Coincidentally, the purge comes as Musk as aligned himself with former President Donald Trump, and has come to the defense of the oil and gas industry.

According to the company’s latest progress update, the patient has used the implant in combination with a specialized Quadstick game controller to play the first-person shooter, in addition to designing his own custom Neuralink charger mount in CAD software.

This implant has also remained fully attached to the patient’s brain, unlike the recipient of the first procedure.

In response to a request by Jacob Silverman, a court filing reveals who else owns a piece of the property formerly known as Twitter.

Of course, being on the list doesn't necessarily mean those investments are going well, just ask the banks involved, but some of the names have bigger problems.

The resulting write-downs have hobbled the banks’ loan books and, in one case, was a factor that crimped compensation for a bank’s merger department, according to people involved with the deal.

Oh.

The former president said that Elon Musk is “a very smart guy. I certainly would, if he would do it.” The comment is a sign that Musk’s efforts to elect Trump could be personally beneficial, if they’re successful. Yet in the same interview with Reuters, Trump also said he’d consider ending the electric vehicle tax credit.

It’s seemingly easy to make the chatbot’s new image generator spit out the few things it supposedly can’t generate — including gore and even “child pornography if given the proper prompts,” says X user Christian Montessori.

While all AI models have loopholes, Elon Musk seems unfazed by the abuse, calling it a “step for people to have some fun.”

The social media platform says it’s seen a 60 percent surge in signups in the United Kingdom, telling Reuters that the region had “the most Bluesky signups of any country” for the majority of last week.

The spike comes as X users, including Labour MPs, claim to be jumping to alternative platforms following Elon Musk’s controversial comments about nationwide riots in the UK.

This time, it’s not House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) calling for a probe of platform censorship. His ranking member, Jerry Nadler (D-NY), is the one calling on Jordan to probe Elon Musk’s X for political censorship of Democrats on the platform. Jordan is typically the one raving about conservative censorship by Meta and others. I guess two can play that game.

Grok, X’s AI assistant, summed up how X users have evaluated Musk’s skills as an interviewer: not good.

He’s both not engaged enough and constantly butting in, trying to flex his knowledge on topics he knows little about. At one point he asked for a job!

Good thing he told us this would be a conversation, not an interview.

“I know you’re a big fan of the AI,” Trump said, “and I have to say that AI, and this is shocking to me, but AI requires twice the energy that the country already produces for everything.”

But rather than take the bait, Musk swerves hard back to inflation. Not sure if we’ll get back there, but anything is possible.

Fort Worth, Texas Judge Reed O’Connor, who is presiding over Elon Musk-owned X’s antitrust lawsuit against advertisers and one against Media Matters, has invested as much as $50,000 in Tesla stock, NPR reports.

O’Connor is known for conservative-friendly rulings, such as one calling Obamacare unconstitutional (later overturned because he didn’t have jurisdiction).

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton says the EU will watch for “spillovers” that violate the Digital Services Act, such as “content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political - or societal - events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”

The “conversation” starts at 8PM ET on the former president’s X account on the service formerly known as Twitter which Musk previously said “must be politically neutral” to deserve our trust. 

Musk says he’s doing some “system scaling tests,” hoping to avoid another system meltdown like we saw when he tried to launch Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign on Spaces.