In this photo illustration, the image of Elon Musk is displayed on a computer screen and the logo of twitter on a mobile phone in Ankara, Turkiye on October 06, 2022.
Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
After closing a $44 billion transaction to take Twitter private, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — now the de facto CEO of Twitter — announced that he plans to form a “content moderation council” at the social networking company. He says he will not make any “major content decisions” or reinstate any accounts that were previously banned before the council convenes.
In May 2022, after Musk had agreed to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share, he said he would reverse Twitter’s lifetime ban on former President Donald Trump if the acquisition went through.
At the time, Musk said, “I would reverse the permanent ban… I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don’t own Twitter?”
Musk has not yet offered details about how his content moderation council will work, who will be invited to it and whether Twitter’s will be more or less independent or powerful than Facebook’s oversight board.
One of Musk’s first big moves after closing the deal was to fire Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, and other executives including its prior head of safety, Vijaya Gadde, who was involved in the decision to suspend Trump, and ban political advertising on Twitter.
Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which occurred just as a joint session of Congress met to certify the election of President Joe Biden. The riot was intended to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes.
As CNBC previously reported, Trump was issued a subpoena earlier this month by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.
The committee, which voted unanimously on this move, is requiring Trump’s testimony under oath next month and records relevant to their probe into the attack, which the panel noted came after weeks of his denying losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in a letter to Trump cited what they called his central role in a deliberate effort to reverse his loss in the 2020 presidential election and to remain in power.
As NBC News previously reported, a Twitter employee named Anika Navaroli provided testimony to the Jan. 6 committee suggesting that the social network did not do everything in its power in time to prevent violence on that day.
It was clear that individuals using Twitter were plotting violence, according to her testimony, and Twitter detected a surge in violent tags like “Execute Mike Pence” around Jan. 6, for example. Trump had “fanned the flames” of violent users’ persistent calls to hang Mike Pence, she testified.
CNBC could not immediately ascertain whether Navaroli is still employed at Twitter.
Early in the Trump presidency, Musk served on a White House economic advisory board and a manufacturing jobs initiative council. But he stepped down from both in 2017, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords.
Despite this, Trump praised Musk effusively in 2020, calling him “one of our great geniuses” during an interview with “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Trump praised Musk again on Friday for taking Twitter private. The former president previously said he would not return to the platform, but that could change now that the company is run by Musk.
In May, Musk tweeted, “In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.