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.
Several AI applications can be seen on a smartphone screen, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Grok and DeepSeek.
Philip Dulian | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Money keeps flowing into artificial intelligence companies but out of AI stocks.
In what looks like — once again — a scenario of the left hand scratching the right, Microsoft and Nvidia will be investing a combined $15 billion into Anthropic, while the OpenAI competitor has committed to buying compute power from its two newest stakeholders. At this point, it seems as if a big proportion of AI news can be summarized as: “Company X invests in Company Y, and Company Y will buy things from Company X.”
Okay, that’s unfair. There are a lot of developments in the AI world that are not about investments but, well, development. Google unveiled the third version of Gemini, its AI model, which Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s AI unit DeepMind, said “will be “trading cliché and flattery for genuine insight.” (But I still want an AI chatbot to compliment me on my curiosity when I ask how to cut a pear, so I’m not sure if that’s a pro for me.)
Investors, however, still appear skeptical about AI. Major names such as Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft tumbled Tuesday stateside, giving the S&P 500 its fourth straight session in the red — the longest decline since August.
And if Nvidia — “the top company within the top industry within the top sector,” as CFRA’s chief investment strategist Sam Stovall puts it — fails to satisfy investors’ expectations when it reports earnings Wednesday, we might be seeing the S&P 500’s slide extend.
Anthropic signs deal with Microsoft and Nvidia. Microsoft announced Tuesday it will invest up to $5 billion in the startup, while Nvidia will put in up to $10 billion. That puts Anthropic’s valuation around $350 billion, according to a source.
Google announces its latest AI model Gemini 3. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday it will require “less prompting” for desired answers. The update comes eight months after Google introduced Gemini 2.5, and will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
A Tesla Inc. robotaxi on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, on June 22, 2025.
Tim Goessman | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla has obtained a permit to operate a ride-hailing service in Arizona, the state’s department of transportation said.
The electric vehicle company applied for a “transportation network company” permit on Nov. 13, and was approved on Monday, ADOT said in an emailed statement. Additional permits will be required before Tesla can operate a robotaxi service in Arizona.
In July, Tesla applied to conduct autonomous vehicle testing and operations in Phoenix, with and without human safety drivers on board. A month earlier, Tesla started a robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas, with safety valets and remote operators. Tesla also operates a more traditional car service in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tesla plans to take human safety drivers out of its cars in Austin before the end of this year. The company is aiming to operate a commercial robotaxi service in Phoenix and several other U.S. cities before the end of 2026.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website, Tesla cars equipped with automated driving systems were involved in seven reported collisions following the launch of the company’s pilot in Texas.
Competitors including Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China are way ahead in the nascent robotaxi ride-hailing market. In the Phoenix area, Waymo operates a sizable commercial business, with at least 400 autonomous vehicles, the company previously told CNBC. In May, Waymo said it had surpassed 10 million driverless trips served to riders across the U.S.
Baidu said in an earnings update on Tuesday that its Apollo Go service “provided 3.1 million fully driverless operational rides in the third quarter of 2025,” representing year-over-year growth of 212%.
Musk has been promising that Tesla will “solve” autonomy for years without reaching its goals. The world’s richest person has continued with the lofty pronouncements.
At the company’s 2025 shareholder meeting earlier this month, Musk said the “killer app” for self-driving technology is when people can “text and drive,” or “sleep and drive.”
“Before we allow the car to be driven without paying attention, we need to make sure it’s very safe,” Musk said. “We’re on the cusp of that. I know I’ve said that a few times. We really are at this point.”
Money keeps flowing into artificial intelligence companies but out of AI stocks.
In what looks like — once again — a scenario of the left hand scratching the right, Microsoft and Nvidia will be investing a combined $15 billion into Anthropic, while the OpenAI competitor has committed to buying compute power from its two newest stakeholders. At this point, it seems as if a big proportion of AI news can be summarized as: “Company X invests in Company Y, and Company Y will buy things from Company X.”
Okay, that’s unfair. There are a lot of developments in the AI world that are not about investments but, well, development. Google unveiled the third version of Gemini, its AI model, which Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s AI unit DeepMind, said “will be “trading cliché and flattery for genuine insight.” (But I still want an AI chatbot to compliment me on my curiosity when I ask how to cut a pear, so I’m not sure if that’s a pro for me.)
Investors, however, still appear skeptical about AI. Major names such as Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft tumbled Tuesday stateside, giving the S&P 500 its fourth straight session in the red — the longest decline since August.
And if Nvidia — “the top company within the top industry within the top sector,” as CFRA’s chief investment strategist Sam Stovall puts it — fails to satisfy investors’ expectations when it reports earnings Wednesday, we might be seeing the S&P 500’s slide extend.
Anthropic signs deal with Microsoft and Nvidia. Microsoft announced Tuesday it will invest up to $5 billion in the startup, while Nvidia will put in up to $10 billion. That puts Anthropic’s valuation around $350 billion, according to a source.
Google announces its latest AI model Gemini 3. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday it will require “less prompting” for desired answers. The update comes eight months after Google introduced Gemini 2.5, and will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
[PRO] Potentially resilient stocks amid AI slump. There are some global stocks and non-equity assets that could weather the turbulence in U.S. tech names happening recently, strategists told CNBC.
Miffed over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments related to Taiwan, China on Friday advised its citizens against travelling to the country. Japanese tourism-exposed stocks fell in the aftermath of that warning, while experts caution the impact could be more severe over a longer duration.
Takahide Kiuchi, executive economist at Nomura Research Institute, said tensions between the two Asian powers could result in a 1.79 trillion yen drop in Japan’s GDP over the course of one year — a 0.29% decline in the country’s GDP.