Elon Musk’s first year of owning Twitter – looking back on a tumultuous timeline
Start with the big idea and deal with any issues down the line.
That was the assessment of Elon Musk biographer Michael Vlismas a year ago when asked how the world’s richest man might go about running Twitter.
The SpaceX owner had just bought the bird app for $44bn (£38bn) with a vague goal of transforming it into an “everything app” called X.
Modelled on China‘s WeChat, it could become your one-stop shop for not just getting into arguments online and posting memes, but video calls, podcasts, and even banking.
All while being an internet town square, committed to free speech, where anyone’s views have as much cache as a celebrity, news outlet, or academic – no matter how controversial.
A noble goal, many would argue.
But as Vlismas had indicated, a plan light on detail. And the execution – from huge lay-offs to putting verification behind subscriptions – has been debatable at best.
“He always has a grand vision, but in this instance the details have been a quagmire for him,” says Vlismas.
“Perhaps it’s showing you can’t be everything to everyone – and that’s the challenge with an ‘everything app’.
“It’s got to be a clear vision in terms of what he wants out of it.”
Elon Musk has brought some big changes to the platform formerly known as Twitter
A tumultuous timeline
Musk’s own Twitter timeline was rarely dull, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that once he ruled the roost, Twitter’s own timeline would follow suit.
His first act (other than carrying a sink into the firm’s San Francisco HQ for the sake of a bad pun) was firing executives and thousands of employees quickly suffered the same fate.
Skittish advertisers, concerned about Musk’s stance on content moderation, helped see revenues fall and within a month even the prospect of bankruptcy was being mooted.
Musk’s flagship attempt to drive up company income was to offer verification ticks as a paid-for benefit in a subscription that has expanded to include features like an edit button and longer posts.
A fake Tony Blair, OJ Simpson, and very naughty Super Mario later, it was clear there were flaws in this plan to allow anyone to pay to add the once-respected blue tick to their account.
According to analysis by research group AMPLYFI, which used AI to judge user sentiment on Twitter over time, the furore was “the initial catalyst for things turning sour” for much of the platform’s audience.
“It created chaos,” says Drew Benvie, founder of communications agency Battenhall.
“People don’t know if they’re talking to the real deal.”
Ahead of a year that will include a US presidential election, and with ever-improving AI deepfakes, it’s an issue that could become even more serious.
Many famous faces were initially left without a blue tick when Musk changed the policy
Other changes have included reinstating banned accounts like those of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump, raising further concerns about the proliferation of hate speech on the platform.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a group X has sued over its damning assessments of its content moderation standards, says Musk has welcomed back a host of bad actors “with open arms”.
Speaking to mark the Muskiversary, CCDH founder Imran Ahmed condemned it as a “grave betrayal of users, advertisers and the wider public”.
That, coupled with the gutting of the company’s trust and safety teams, damaged Twitter’s reputation as a place to seek out verified news – an issue brought home by the Israel-Hamas war.
And then, of course, came rebranding Twitter into X.
A name so embedded in modern society that “tweet” had entered the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries, now one which would have once done nothing but arouse suspicion in your browsing history.
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Twitter sign removed in ‘X’ rebrand
‘He has decimated the business’
Musk said Twitter’s transition from talking shop to everything app meant the name no longer made sense, and has claimed the rebranding reflects his ambitions.
Of course, some may have spotted an obvious trend and concluded he simply likes the letter X.
Not only is it part of the name of his successful rocket company, but one of his children; his AI start-up; and an internet banking firm he co-founded that became PayPal.
Social media expert Beth Caroll, of Wunderman Thompson, is sceptical of Musk’s apparent plans.
“There’s a vague possibility he could have this bigger picture idea, this super app like a WeChat, and if he were to deliver that then he might have a viable product,” she says.
“But for now he has just decimated the business.”
Indeed, earlier this year the company was valued at less than a third of the $44bn Musk paid for it.
Even the hiring of Linda Yaccarino, an experienced figure from NBCUniversal, as chief executive has done little to repair the monetary or reputational damage.
It’s worth remembering, Caroll says, that Musk did try awfully hard to back out of buying Twitter, and all the challenges he’s faced are perhaps a sign of why.
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Musk to start charging people to use X
Can Musk really have it all?
Yet despite it all, for its remaining users – whether enthusiastic or reluctant – X remains best at this particular type of social media, where real-time updates reign supreme.
For Dr Annmarie Hanlon, lecturer in digital and social marketing at Cranfield School of Management, would-be rivals from the “clunky” Mastodon to Meta‘s “basic” Threads have failed to offer a comparable experience.
“The everything app is still a work in progress,” she says.
“But when Threads opened, everyone said ‘this is the death of Twitter’. And it hasn’t been.”
Of course, given the contempt Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have for each other, don’t expect the Meta boss to abandon his company’s new app anytime soon.
Meta’s Threads emerged as a rival to X over the summer
And when it comes to “the death of Twitter”, Musk would happily claim responsibility, with X the phoenix rising from its ashes.
But unlike the rockets of SpaceX (well, most of them), biographer Vlismas doubts how far it can fly.
“With SpaceX, the grand vision is colonising Mars,” he says.
“But the core purpose is launching rockets into space and it’s very effective at that.
“If you wanted to do anything else with it, it dilutes that purpose.
“The longer X is a bit muddled like this, the worse it is. And the more people will turn away.”
Arturo Suarez cries as he hugs his family for the first time in months.
His sister’s modest home in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city, is decorated with red, blue and black balloons and banners to welcome him back.
Friends and neighbours fill the living room and the street outside.
Mr Suarez reunited with his family
He video calls other family members elsewhere in the world. This is the first time they have heard his voice since March.
“I hadn’t felt so safe for a while,” Arturo tells Sky News, “when I hugged my brothers, my uncle, my aunt, that’s where I felt that the nightmare was over, that I had made it home.”
Then the story of what he had endured begins to pour out of him.
The 34-year-old was one of more than 250 Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, despite having no criminal record in any of the four countries he has lived in.
Mr Suarez speaks to Martha Kelner
Last week, he was released as part of a prisoner swap with 10 American citizens and permanent residents detained in Venezuela.
But he is scarred by the four months he spent at the CECOT prison, a terrorism confinement centre, in El Salvador, alongside some of the world’s most dangerous men.
Arturo Suarez back with his family in Caracas
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“We were constantly beaten,” he says, “we suffered physical, verbal, and psychological abuse.
“There wasn’t a day the wardens didn’t tell us that the only way we’d leave that place was if we were dead. In fact, the first words the head of the prison said to us after the first beating was ‘welcome to hell’.”
Arturo is an aspiring singer. He had moved to the US to escape Venezuela’s authoritarian regime and set up home in North Carolina.
Mr Suarez is an aspiring singer
He had a feeling when Donald Trump became president for a second time that there would be a crackdown on immigration, as promised in his campaign.
But, because Arturo had followed all the legal channels to enter the country, he didn’t think he would be caught up in the deportation policy. He was wrong.
While he was filming a music video in a house in North Carolina in March, he was arrested by immigration agents and accused by the White House of being a gang member, although they have provided little evidence publicly to support that claim.
His family had not heard from him since March
He was then flown to El Salvador – a country he had never even visited – and put in a maximum security prison. His ordeal was under way.
“We were sleeping 19 people to a cell,” he says, “if we spoke loudly, they would take away our mattresses, if they found us bathing more than once a day, they’d take away the mattresses from us.
“The punishment was severe. It was beatings and humiliations and they took away our food.
“I remember we were exercising and a cellmate, very politely, asked the prison head if we could bathe a second time that day, since we were doing exercise.
“His words were ‘that’s your problem, it’s not my problem if you exercise’. We were also made to eat with our hands.
“They tried to take our humanity away from us. They tried to make us lose everything.”
The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to detain the 252 Venezuelan men, claiming they were part of the notorious Tren De Aragua gang.
Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, visited the prison for a tour and photoshoot in March and Arturo saw her.
“Obviously they did a show of this,” he says, “they had cameras. When she came in, my cellmates and I began to make the help sign, which she disliked a lot. We began to shout freedom.”
Arturo was denied due process to appeal his extradition to El Salvador and was not allowed to speak to a lawyer or any family or friends during his time in prison.
I spoke to Arturo’s brother Nelson in April as he appealed for his release.
He said Arturo’s only crime was having tattoos, which the White House cited as evidence of involvement with gangs.
On a video call, Arturo shows me the tattoos.
Most of them, he says, are in tribute to his late mother. I ask if he thinks that the Trump administration believed he was a gang member.
“I think it was just an excuse to get us out,” he says, “we weren’t taken for having tattoos or belonging to a criminal gang.
“We were taken for being Venezuelans. And today I want to tell the world that being Venezuelan is not a crime.”
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When he applied for asylum in the United States, Arturo had hoped to be reunited eventually with his wife, Nathali, and their 10-month-old daughter Nahiara, who are currently in Chile.
“When I was given the opportunity to go to the United States, I was going to go with my wife,” he says, “we found out that she was pregnant but I went anyway because it was for the future, for my daughter’s future.
“Unfortunately, this decision led me to one of the most brutal prisons. What I most long for, is to be with my daughter and my wife.”
He’s now being supported by other family members in Venezuela, but he will never return to the US.
He went for a better life but instead was labelled a criminal. Now, he says, he just wants to clear his name.
A judge in the US has rejected a justice department bid to unseal grand jury materials related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The US government had filed a motion to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the former financier, who took his own life while awaiting trial in 2019.
Materials from grand juries are typically kept secret under US law, though exceptions can be made for a handful of reasons.
In a ruling issued on Wednesday, US District Judge Robin Rosenberg said the justice department’s request did not fall into any of these exceptions.
It comes as Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been officially subpoenaed to testify to the House Oversight Committee from prison.
The grand juries on Epstein were held in Florida in 2005 and 2007, according to a court document.
Under the US justice system, grand juries decide whether there is a criminal case against a person and whether they should be put on trial.
In 2007, prosecutors agreed not to bring federal charges against Epstein in exchange for him agreeing to plead guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution, for which he served 13 months in prison.
Last Friday, Donald Trump said attorney general Pam Bondi had been asked to release the transcripts because of “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
The Department of Justice said criminal cases against Epstein and Maxwell were a matter of public interest.
Undated handout file photo issued by US Department of Justice of Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: PA
The department previously said it had around 200 documents relating to Epstein and that the FBI had thousands more.
It is unknown how much of this is grand jury testimony.
The judge’s decision is the first ruling in a series of attempts by President Trump’s administration to release more information on the case amid calls by some in his MAGA group of supporters for the full details of Epstein’s activities to be released.
Mr Trump has faced renewed scrutiny over his relationship with Epstein since his administration’s U-turn on the so-called “Epstein files”.
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Donald Trump had pledged to release the ‘Epstein files’ – and his U-turn has riled supporters. Pic: AP
The MAGA movement had accused the Biden administration of suppressing the extent of Epstein’s crimes and Mr Trump pledged to release the files during his second presidential term.
But after a review of the evidence, the justice department said recently that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted”.
As pressure has grown for Mr Trump to act, there has been increased attention paid to claims he was friends with Epstein – a relationship he denies.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) last week published a story saying Mr Trump wrote a bawdy letter to Epstein to give him as a 50th birthday present in 2003.
Mr Trump responded by filing a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch, who owns the WSJ, two WSJ reporters and the publication’s owner, News Corp, as well as saying the letter was a “fake”.
The summons for Ghislaine Maxwell from the House Oversight Committee is for a deposition to occur on 11 August.
Chairman of the committee, Republican James Comer said: “I have issued a subpoena to Ghislaine Maxwell for a deposition to occur at Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee on August 11, 2025.
“The Department of Justice is cooperating and will help facilitate the deposition at the prison.”
A man who murdered four University of Idaho students in November 2022 has been sentenced to life in prison – as the mother of one of his victims expressed her disappointment that he won’t be executed.
Bryan Kohberger, a 30-year-old former criminal justice student, initially denied the killings but later pleaded guilty as part of a deal that meant he would avoid the death penalty.
Kohberger sneaked into the rented home in Moscow, Idaho, which is not far from the university campus, through a kitchen sliding door and murdered Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves.
Bryan Kohberger in court, and his victims Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen and Xana Kernodle, and Xana’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin. Pic: AP
Kohberger has never revealed his motive and it is not clear why he spared two roommates who were in the home.
Post-mortem examinations showed the four who died were stabbed multiple times and were likely asleep when they were attacked – with some sustaining defensive wounds.
Kohberger was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania weeks after the killings following a nationwide search.
Judge Steven Hippler sentenced Kohberger to four life sentences without parole for four counts of first-degree murder today.
Kaylee Goncalves (bottom left), Maddie Mogen (top left) and Xana Kernodle, and Xana’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin
A ‘delusional, pathetic, hypochondriac loser’
Family members of the victims gave statements in court today ahead of the sentencing – with the murderer’s mother Maryann Kohberger in attendance for the hearing.
Ms Kohberger quietly wept at times as the other parents described their grief.
Ms Goncalves’ mother Kristi Goncalves said she was disappointed that Kohberger won’t be executed by firing squad but revelled in how he would suffer in prison.
“You will always be remembered as a loser, an absolute failure,” she said.
“Hell will be waiting,” she added.
Kristi Goncalves at a hearing earlier this month. Pic: AP
Alivea Goncalves, the victim’s sister, drew applause after belittling Kohberger, who remained expressionless as she insulted him.
“You didn’t win, you just exposed yourself as the coward you are,” she said. “You’re a delusional, pathetic, hypochondriac loser.”
Steve Goncalves, the victim’s father, spoke to Kohberger directly and said: “Today we are here to finish what you started.”
Kohberger nodded subtly in response.
Alivea Goncalves speaks during the sentencing hearing. Pic: AP
Mr Goncalves added: “You tried to break our community apart, you tried to plant fear, you tried to divide us. You failed.”
In a statement read on her behalf by her lawyer, Ms Mogen’s mother Karen Laramie said: “Any one of us would have given our own life to have been outshone by hers.”
Ms Mogens’ mother declined to address Kohberger directly, as he remained expressionless, but closed her statement by saying the family might never forgive him or “ask for mercy” for what he did.
“His acts are too heinous,” her statement read.
Karen and Scott Laramie, the mother and stepfather of Madison Mogen, outside court. Pic: AP
Bethany Funke, who survived the attack, said about her roommates in a statement to the court: “I hated and still hate that they are gone, but for some reason, I am still here and I got to live. I still think about this every day. Why me? Why did I get to live, and not them?”
She described one of the victims, Ms Kernodle, as “one in a million. She was the life of the party”.
Much of her statement was devoted to remembering her four close friends who died – recounting the nights they spent binge-watching reality television, making dinner together, going to parties at their university and the love that they had for each other.
Her testimony reduced many at the hearing to tears.
Bryan Kohberger. Pic: Reuters
Dylan Mortensen, the second surviving roommate, said in court that she has panic attacks that force her to relive the trauma of what she experienced.
She said: “I was too terrified to close my eyes, terrified that if I blinked, someone might be there. I made escape plans everywhere I went… “He may have shattered parts of me but I’m still putting myself back together piece by piece,”
Kohberger’s head bobbed slightly as she spoke.
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