The company’s never made sustained profits. Its audience is much smaller than Facebook or Instagram (both owned by Meta), YouTube (which is part of Google) or TikTok (owned by China’s ByteDance). It’s not even as big as Snapchat in terms of daily users.
Elon Musk knows this. He’s a canny businessperson who can read an earnings report.
So any chatter about Musk’s plans to revamp Twitter and turn it into a better business misses the mark. It doesn’t really matter if the math adds up for his new plan to charge $8 a month for verification or Twitter Blue or whatever it ends up being called.
Whether he cuts 25% or 50% or 75% of the staff and how much money he saves from doing so isn’t that important. Creating some super-app that imitates China’s WeChat in combining commerce and content — which, by the way, would pose interesting challenges on a service that allows anonymity and fake names — isn’t really the point, either.
Yes, running the business efficiently and improving cashflow will matter for the platform’s continued existence, especially now that Twitter has a $13 billion debt load to service. But like Mark Zuckerberg said in 2012 about Facebook, making money is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Musk’s net worth exceeds $200 billion. He’s going to be fine.
The real power of Twitter is its influence.
Musk frequently boasts that Tesla doesn’t spend on traditional advertising. Twitter, which he uses to communicate directly to his more than 100 million followers, is a big reason why.
Musk also got in hot water with the SEC for tweeting in 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take the car company private at $420 a share. The regulator charged Musk with fraud, and the two sides eventually settled, with the Tesla CEO required to have some future tweets first reviewed by a “Twitter sitter.”
As the owner of Twitter, Musk now controls a platform that has mounds of data about the connections among its users, their interactions, their interests and so on. Just imagine the information available about Tesla’s automotive competitors — how much they’re spending on advertising, which keywords and demographics they’re targeting, how they engage with customers and fans, how they receive and resolve customer service complaints and so on.
Most important, by owning Twitter, Musk expands his reach far beyond his own fanbase. He’ll be able to set principles that influence the entire flow of information through the platform.
Musk has hinted at this in his statements about Twitter as a bastion of free speech.
In April, when he first disclosed his investment in the company, Musk wrote to then-Chairman Bret Taylor, “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
More recently, when pledging to advertisers that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape,” Musk explained, “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
Of course, Musk subsequently tried to terminate his purchase agreement before eventually relenting and avoiding a high-profile court battle.
As for free speech, it’s complicated. Every platform and media company constantly has to make choices about what to allow and what to discourage — depictions of illegal activity, hate speech, harassment, porn, lies, tasteless jokes and so on. No platform gets it right every time. Users and advertisers complain, the platforms adjust, and the cycle continues.
But so far, Musk seems to equate “free speech” on Twitter with “looser moderation.”
During his first weekend owning the service, Musk responded to Hillary Clinton by tweeting an unfounded, anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. He then deleted it.
Also over the weekend, Twitter reportedly restored the suspended account of Arizona Republican secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, whom as a state legislator reportedly took steps to overturn the state’s vote for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election and who traveled to Washington D.C. for the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally. Finchem says he wasn’t part of the mob that stormed the capitol.
In the long run, looser moderation on Twitter blurs the lines between true and false. It becomes just another place where people can air competing views of objective reality and whip up mobs of agitators to promote or denigrate whatever facts or stories they don’t like. Everything becomes an equally weighted message, with the user left to decide what’s true. Marketing, journalism and propaganda would become indistinguishable.
In that world, the loudest messages with the most weight behind them are the ones that get heard. For a man running several major businesses and with strong opinions about regulation, legislation, unionization, and other matters, that’s a pretty attractive prospect even if Twitter, the business, never makes him a dime.
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.”
“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.
Coinbase is gearing up to launch an in-house prediction market, powered by Kalshi, a source close to the matter told CNBC — a strategic play to expand the number of asset classes available on the cryptocurrency exchange at a time some investors are shying away from digital assets.
The source said Coinbase and Kalshi will “soon” formally announce the prediction market, with news on the matter potentially coming as early as next week.
Rumblings of the prediction market launch have swirled for nearly a month. An alleged screenshot of Coinbase’s prediction markets dashboard shared by Silicon Valley researcher Jane Manchun Wong in an X post dated Nov. 18 offered some clues about the new product.
The Information first reported on Nov. 19 that Coinbase planned to launch prediction markets powered by Kalshi, adding that the exchange would unveil the new product at its “Coinbase System Update” event on Dec. 17. Bloomberg published a similar report on Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter, adding that Coinbase would also announce a tokenized stock offering at the showcase.
Coinbase declined to confirm the reports to CNBC, but said to tune into its event next week. The firm did not comment on a timeline for when its prediction markets would go live for its users.
Coinbase’s upcoming product launches underscore its push to refashion itself into an “everything exchange,” or a one-stop shop for trading all kinds of assets, including crypto tokens, tokenized stocks and event contracts. In May, CEO Brian Armstrong articulated that “everything exchange” vision to investors, saying Coinbase would aim to become a top financial services app within the next decade.
The trading platform is setting its sights on that goal as it faces intensifying competition from rivals such as Robinhood,Gemini and Kraken. All three have launched tokenized equity offerings to users outside of the U.S. within the past year, in addition to exploring prediction markets to varying extents.
Coinbase’s moves to expand the financial instruments available to its users also come as investor sentiment on digital assets cools. A series of liquidations of highly leveraged digital asset positions in mid-October triggered several pullbacks in the crypto market, prompting investors to rotate out of tokens and into gold and other safe-have assets.
Bitcoin fell as low as around $85,000 in early December, hitting its lowest level since last March. The token was last trading at $89,951, down 23% in the past three months. Coinbase has also fallen more than 16% over the past three months.
The deal also underscores U.S.-based prediction markets operator Kalshi’s push to embed its event contracts into various brokerages, widening its reach as the prediction markets space becomes increasingly competitive.
This year, Kalshi embedded several of its prediction markets into trading platform Robinhood, as part of a non-exclusive partnership between the companies. Kalshi has also engaged in talks with several other major brokerages, including those in the crypto industry, with the aim of closing more deals like the ones it has struck with Robinhood and now Coinbase, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.