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.
Google was on Tuesday hit with an EU antitrust investigation over its use of online content for AI purposes, marking the latest in a series of crackdowns from the bloc on regulating U.S. big tech companies.
The European Commission said it was investigating whether Google had breached EU competition rules by using the content of web publishers, as well as content uploaded on the online video-sharing platform YouTube, for AI purposes.
The probe will examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to that content and placing developers of rival AI models at a disadvantage, the Commission said.
“AI is bringing remarkable innovation and many benefits for people and businesses across Europe, but this progress cannot come at the expense of the principles at the heart of our societies,” said the bloc’s commissioner for competition Teresa Ribera.
“This is why we are investigating whether Google may have imposed unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, while placing rival AI models developers at a disadvantage, in breach of EU competition rules.”
The Commission said it would investigate to what extent the generation of AI Overviews and AI Mode by Google is based on web publishers’ content without appropriate compensation and without the possibility for publishers to refuse without losing access to Google Search.
In September, the EU fined Google nearly 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) for breaching antitrust rules by distorting competition in the advertising technology industry.
At the time, Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland said the EU decision was “wrong” and the firm would appeal. “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before,” she said.
EU vs. U.S. big tech
The move follows a slew of actions the bloc has taken against U.S big tech companies in recent days.
The Commission hit Elon Musk’s social media app X with a 120-million-euro ($140 million) fine on Friday for breaching transparency obligations around its advertising repository and “the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark.'”
Musk called for the European Union to be abolished in response, with key Republican officials also criticizing the decision.
Last week the EU also announced it had opened an antitrust investigation into Meta over its new policy on allowing AI providers’ access to WhatsApp, which it said may breach the bloc’s competition rules.
Signage for Tata Electronics Pvt Ltd. at the company’s factory in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, India, on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tata Electronics has lined up American chip designer Intel as a prospective customer as the division of Mumbai-based conglomerate Tata Group works to expand India’s domestic electronics and semiconductor supply chain.
Under a Memorandum of Understanding, the companies will explore the manufacturing and packaging of Intel products for local markets at Tata Electronics’ upcoming plants.
Intel and Tata also plan to assess ways to rapidly scale tailored artificial intelligence PC solutions for consumers and businesses in India.
In a press release on Monday, Tata said that the collaboration marks a pivotal step towards developing a resilient, India-based electronics and semiconductor supply chain.
“Together [with Intel], we will drive an expanded technology ecosystem and deliver leading semiconductors and systems solutions, positioning us well to capture the large and growing AI opportunity,” said N Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons, the principal investment holding company of Tata companies.
Tata Electronics, established in 2020, has been investing billions to build India’s first pure-play foundry. The facility will manufacture semiconductor products for the AI, automotive, computing and data storage industries, according to Tata Electronics.
The firm is also building new facilities for assembly and testing.
India, despite being one of the world’s largest consumers of electronics, lacks chip design or fabrication capabilities.
However, the Indian government has been working to change that as part of efforts to reduce dependence on chip imports and capture a bigger share of the global electronics market, which is shifting away from China.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the partnership with Intel was a “tremendous opportunity” to rapidly grow in one of the world’s fastest-growing computer markets, fueled by rising PC demand and rapid AI adoption across India.
The company is “here to finish what we started,” CEO David Ellison told CNBC, upping the ante with a $30-per-share, all-cash offer compared to Netflix’s $27.75-per-share, cash-and-stock offer for WBD’s streaming and studio assets.
Investors were certainly pleased, sending Paramount shares 9% higher and WBD’s stock up 4.4%.
Another development that traders cheered was U.S. President Donald Trump permitting Nvidia to export its more advanced H200 artificial intelligence chips to “approved customers” in China and other countries — so long as some of that money flows back to the U.S. Nvidia shares rose about 2% in extended trading.
Major U.S. indexes, however, fell overnight, as investors awaited the Federal Reserve’s final rate-setting meeting of the year on Wednesday stateside. Markets are expecting a nearly 90% chance of a quarter-point cut, according to the CME FedWatch tool.
Rate-cut hopes have buoyed stocks. “The market action you’ve seen the last one or two weeks is kind of essentially baking in the very high likelihood of a 25 basis point cut,” said Stephen Kolano, chief investment officer at Integrated Partners.
But that means a potential downside is deeper if things don’t go as expected.
“For some very unlikely reason, if they don’t cut, forget it. I think markets are down 2% to 3%,” Kolano added.
In that case, investors will be waiting, impatiently, for the Fed meeting next year — hoping for a more satisfying conclusion.
Trump allows Nvidia to sell H200 chip to China. But that’s only if the U.S. gets a 25% sales cut, the White House leader said in a Truth Social post on Monday. Trump added that Chinese President Xi Jinping had “responded positively” to the proposal.
China’s trade surplus roared above $1 trillion in November for the first time ever, despite the ongoing global trade war that has resulted in a steep drop in exports to the U.S. In the first 11 months this year, China’s overall exports grew 5.4% compared to the same period in 2024 while imports fell 0.6%.
The rebound in export growth would help mitigate the drag from weak domestic demand, putting the economy on track to deliver the “around 5%” growth target this year, said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.
