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Elon Musk attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 14, 2024.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

X’s new terms of service, which took effect Nov. 15, are driving some users off Elon Musk’s microblogging platform. 

The new terms include expansive permissions requiring users to allow the company to use their data to train X’s artificial intelligence models while also making users liable for as much as $15,000 in damages if they use the platform too much. 

The terms are prompting some longtime users of the service, both celebrities and everyday people, to post that they are taking their content to other platforms. 

“With the recent and upcoming changes to the terms of service — and the return of volatile figures — I find myself at a crossroads, facing a direction I can no longer fully support,” actress Gabrielle Union posted on X the same day the new terms took effect, while announcing she would be leaving the platform.

“I’m going to start winding down my Twitter account,” a user with the handle @mplsFietser said in a post. “The changes to the terms of service are the final nail in the coffin for me.”

It’s unclear just how many users have left X due specifically to the company’s new terms of service, but since the start of November, many social media users have flocked to Bluesky, a microblogging startup whose origins stem from Twitter, the former name for X. Some users with new Bluesky accounts have posted that they moved to the service due to Musk and his support for President-elect Donald Trump.

Bluesky’s U.S. mobile app downloads have skyrocketed 651% since the start of November, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. In the same period, X and Meta’s Threads are up 20% and 42%, respectively. 

X and Threads have much larger monthly user bases. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates X had 318 million monthly users as of October. That same month, Meta said Threads had nearly 275 million monthly users. Bluesky told CNBC on Thursday it had reached 21 million total users this week.

Here are some of the noteworthy changes in X’s new service terms and how they compare with those of rivals Bluesky and Threads.

Artificial intelligence training

X has come under heightened scrutiny because of its new terms, which say that any content on the service can be used royalty-free to train the company’s artificial intelligence large language models, including its Grok chatbot.

“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” X’s terms say.

Additionally, any “user interactions, inputs and results” shared with Grok can be used for what it calls “training and fine-tuning purposes,” according to the Grok section of the X app and website. This specific function, though, can be turned off manually. 

X’s terms do not specify whether users’ private messages can be used to train its AI models, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“You should only provide Content that you are comfortable sharing with others,” read a portion of X’s terms of service agreement.

Though X’s new terms may be expansive, Meta’s policies aren’t that different. 

The maker of Threads uses “information shared on Meta’s Products and services” to get its training data, according to the company’s Privacy Center. This includes “posts or photos and their captions.” There is also no direct way for users outside of the European Union to opt out of Meta’s AI training. Meta keeps training data “for as long as we need it on a case-by-case basis to ensure an AI model is operating appropriately, safely and efficiently,” according to its Privacy Center. 

Under Meta’s policy, private messages with friends or family aren’t used to train AI unless one of the users in a chat chooses to share it with the models, which can include Meta AI and AI Studio.

Bluesky, which has seen a user growth surge since Election Day, doesn’t do any generative AI training. 

“We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” Bluesky said in a post on its platform Friday, confirming the same to CNBC as well.

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Bluesky CEO: Our platform is 'radically different' from anything else in social media

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ incident

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay 'kiss cam' incident

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.

Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.

“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.

Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.

Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.

Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”

In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

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Musk’s Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

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Musk's Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.

There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.

Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”

Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.

T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”

Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.

Read more CNBC tech news

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this story.

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says ‘no more blank checks’

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says 'no more blank checks'

The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
  • Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated

Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.

For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.

The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.

In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.

Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.

Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.

Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.

Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.

“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”

Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.

“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.

The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.

Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.

Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.

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