Ad giant IPG advises brands to pause Twitter spending after Musk takeover

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3 years ago

November 1, 2022

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The Twitter logo is seen on a mobile device in ths illustration photo in Warsaw, Poland on 30 October, 2022. Twitter is losing its most active users according to research done by Reuters. Despite the most impactful tweeters making up only 10 percent of the monthly users they are together responsible for 90 percent of all tweets and around half of the company’s revenue.

STR | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Advertising giant Interpublic Group has recommended that clients of its IPG Media Brands agencies suspend all paid advertising on Twitter for at least a week following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media network.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the firm is telling its clients — who may independently choose to keep advertising on Twitter — to wait for clarity on the social network’s plans for trust and safety, and to see whether Musk will be able to prevent Twitter from becoming, as he called it, a “free-for-all hellscape.”

Some of the agencies’ clients include CVS Pharmacy, Nintendo and Unilever. These companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the recommendation.

Morning Brew contributor Ryan Barwick first reported on the ad giant’s recommendation to IPG Media Brands clients, citing an e-mail sent by MAGNA, a media intelligence business that is part of the group.

MAGNA reportedly advised clients in that email that Twitter had not been in direct, clear communications with each marketing agency yet, and that “the current situation is unpredictable and chaotic, and bad actors and unsafe behaviors thrive in such an environment.”

On Friday, automaker GM told CNBC it had temporarily suspended advertising on the service “to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership.”

The user experience on Twitter is already undergoing significant changes mere days after Musk’s takeover.

By the time Musk closed the deal on Oct. 28, racist and other hateful tweets had begun to plague the social network at much higher levels than usual, according to research by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Dataminr, as reported by NPR. Bad actors on some other platforms, notably 4Chan, have encouraged fellow users to post and amplify racist epithets and other derogatory slurs on Twitter, and the change has driven away several celebrity users and inspired a call-out by NBA star LeBron James.

Yoel Roth, head of safety at Twitter, has posted several threads to Twitter discussing how the company is combating this. On Monday, Roth wrote on Twitter, “We’ve made measurable progress, removing more than 1,500 accounts and reducing impressions on this content to nearly zero.”

Last week, Musk wrote that Twitter would be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints” and promised he would make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” before the council convenes.

While he has not yet revealed whether such a council has been established, Twitter recently restored all functionality to the account of a previously restricted user, Mark Finchem, who is the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona.

Finchem called upon Musk personally for help in a tweet, and Musk said in a reply on Twitter that he was “looking into” the matter. Finchem has been a prominent 2020 election denier and an Arizona state legislator. The politician has been roundly criticized for sharing anti-Semitic tropes and memes on Twitter.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

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Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

Published

9 hours ago

December 13, 2025

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Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

Technology

Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

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2 days ago

December 12, 2025

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Oracle says there have been 'no delays' in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.

The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.

“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”

The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.

“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.

Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.

In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.

Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”

But no announcement has come yet.

In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”

OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.

On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.

“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”

OpenAI declined to comment.

WATCH: Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

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AI order from Trump might be ‘illegal,’ Democrats and consumer advocacy groups claim

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2 days ago

December 12, 2025

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AI order from Trump might be ‘illegal,’ Democrats and consumer advocacy groups claim

“This is the wrong approach — and most likely illegal,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in a post on X Thursday.

“We need a strong federal safety standard, but we should not remove the few protections Americans currently have from the downsides of AI,” Klobuchar said.

Trump’s executive order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create a task force to challenge state laws regulating AI.

The Commerce Department was also directed to identify “onerous” state regulations aimed at AI.

The order is a win for tech companies such as OpenAI and Google and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which have all lobbied against state regulations they view as burdensome.

It follows a push by some Republicans in Congress to impose a moratorium on state AI laws. A recent plan to tack on that moratorium to the National Defense Authorization Act was scuttled.

Collin McCune, head of government affairs at Andreessen Horowitz, celebrated Trump’s order, calling it “an important first step” to boost American competition and innovation. But McCune urged Congress to codify a national AI framework.

“States have an important role in addressing harms and protecting people, but they can’t provide the long-term clarity or national direction that only Congress can deliver,” McCune said in a statement.

Sriram Krishnan, a White House AI advisor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, during an interview Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” said that Trump is was looking to partner with Congress to pass such legislation.

“The White House is now taking a firm stance where we want to push back on ‘doomer’ laws that exist in a bunch of states around the country,” Krishnan said.

He also said that the goal of the executive order is to give the White House tools to go after state laws that it believes make America less competitive, such as recently passed legislation in Democratic-led states like California and Colorado.

The White House will not use the executive order to target state laws that protect the safety of children, Krishnan said.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called Trump’s order “mostly bluster” and said the president “cannot unilaterally preempt state law.”

“We expect the EO to be challenged in court and defeated,” Weissman said in a statement. “In the meantime, states should continue their efforts to protect their residents from the mounting dangers of unregulated AI.”

Weissman said about the order, “This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior
by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate.”

In the short term, the order could affect a handful of states that have already passed legislation targeting AI. The order says that states whose laws are considered onerous could lose federal funding.

One Colorado law, set to take effect in June, will require AI developers to protect consumers from reasonably foreseeable risks of algorithmic discrimination.

Some say Trump’s order will have no real impact on that law or other state regulations.

“I’m pretty much ignoring it, because an executive order cannot tell a state what to do,” said Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat who co-sponsored the anti-discrimination law.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a law that, starting in January, will require major AI companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols.

That law’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said that Trump’s stated goal of having the United States dominate the AI sector is undercut by his recent moves.

“Of course, he just authorized chip sales to China & Saudi Arabia: the exact opposite of ensuring U.S. dominance,” Wiener wrote in an X post on Thursday night. The Bay Area Democrat is seeking to succeed Speaker-emerita Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Trump on Monday said he will Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to “approved customers” in China, provided that U.S. gets a 25% cut of revenues.