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.
Liquidated damages
Another unusual aspect of X’s new terms is its “liquidated damages” clause. The terms state that if users request, view or access more than 1 million posts – including replies, videos, images and others – in any 24-hour period they are liable for damages of $15,000.
While most individual users won’t easily approach that threshold, the clause is concerning for some, including digital researchers. They rely on the analysis of larger numbers of public posts from services like X to do their work.
X’s new terms of service are a “disturbing move that the company should reverse,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in an October statement.
“The public relies on journalists and researchers to understand whether and how the platforms are shaping public discourse, affecting our elections, and warping our relationships,” Abdo wrote. “One effect of X Corp.’s new terms of service will be to stifle that research when we need it most.”
Neither Threads nor Bluesky have anything similar to X’s liquidated damages clause.
Meta and X did not respond to requests for comment.
The artificial intelligence boom has sent energy demand soaring. Some of the supercomputers sucking up all that power are helping to find new energy sources.
Fusion energy is the process of forcing two hydrogen atoms to combine and form one helium atom, which releases huge amounts of power. It uses a stellarator, a type of fusion reactor invented in the 1950’s that produces heat.
Until now, the technology was too difficult to deploy commercially.
But this old concept has brand new potential. Type One Energy, a startup based in Tennessee, claims to have proven that fusion energy will be able to produce electricity in the next decade.
“It’s going to create heat that’s going to boil water, make steam, run a turbine and put fusion electrons on the power grid on a 24/7 reliable basis,” said Type One Christofer Mowry.
AI has made it all practical.
“Things have really accelerated remarkably over the last five or six years,” Mowry said. “The supercomputers have allowed industry, academia and large institutions to develop now and actually test at large scale the science machines that demonstrate the process.”
Dozens of other companies are working on different approaches to fusion energy, but Mowry said Type One is so far the only one with the proven stellarator technology to implement at existing power plants. It will soon be tested with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
TDK Ventures is betting that Mowry is right.
“With Type One Energy solutions, we expect outsized return potential,” said Nicola Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures. “Fusion is no longer science fiction, and Type One Energy’s technology is catching up fast to the vision of this low-cost, continuous green energy.”
Type One is also backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Centaurus Capital, GD1, Foxglove Capital, and SeaX Ventures, and has raised a total of $82.4 million.
Fusion energy is different from nuclear power, and there’s no risk of a nuclear accident. The power source has no long-term radioactive waste, and, according to Mowry, can’t be weaponized.
But for handling AI, it could be a critical solution. Fusion energy can be deployed anywhere, whether it’s next to a data center or near a large industrial park that needs clean, reliable energy.
Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, gestures during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
CoreWeave shares popped 19% after announcing a $2 billion debt offering.
The renter of artificial intelligence data centers powered by Nvidia chips said it had priced the notes at 9.25%, with a June 2030 maturity date. The deal represents a $500 million increase from its initial announcement.
CoreWeave said it plans to use the capital to pay off outstanding debt. The company confirmed to CNBC that the debt offering was five times oversubscribed.
In its first-quarter earnings report last week, CoreWeave said that it raised a total of $17.2 billion in equity and debt “to support its strategy to drive the next generation of cloud computing for the future of AI.” The company topped revenues expectations but posted wider-than-expected net loss and said it plans to spend big on capital expenditures to support infrastructure demand.
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During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week, CEO Michael Intrator defended CoreWeave’s spending plans after some investors cast doubt on its debt, and demand durability. He said the company is meeting “demand signals” from some of its major clients.
In a call with analysts, CoreWeave said it has no debt maturities until 2028 other than payments related to vendor financing and “self-amortizing debt through committed contract payments.” The company said it had about $3.8 billion in current debt and $4.9 billion in non-current debt at the end of the quarter.
A year ago, CoreWeave announced that it had raised $7.5 billion in debt, led by Blackstone and Magnetar, to more heavily invest in its cloud data centers. CoreWeave said in its IPO prospectus that it was “one of the largest private debt financings in history and signals the confidence that debt investors have in funding our company to build and scale the next generation AI cloud.”
CoreWeave counts Nvidia and Microsoft among its biggest customers and has signed two seperate deals with OpenAI, totaling nearly $16 billion.
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday that the company hasn’t seen any signs of consumers tightening their wallets in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
Jassy’s comments came during Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, which was held virtually on Wednesday.
“We have not seen any attenuation of demand at this point,” Jassy said during a question-and-answer portion of the meeting. “We also haven’t yet seen any meaningful average selling price increases.”
Amazon and other retailers continue to digest the impact of Trump’s tariffs. Rival retailer Walmartwarned last week that consumers could start seeing price hikes from tariffs later this month and in June. Within days, that sparked the ire of Trump, who urged the company to “EAT THE TARIFFS.”
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Targetsaid Wednesday it will likely need to hike prices on some items, while Home Depotsaid it expects to maintain its current pricing levels.
Jassy said last month the company made some “strategic forward inventory buys” to stock up on goods and is “pretty maniacally focused” on keeping prices low for shoppers.
Some third-party sellers, which account for roughly 60% of products sold, have increased prices on certain items, while others have opted to keep prices steady, Jassy said on Wednesday.
“I think that the diversity and the size of our marketplace really helps customers have the best selection of the best prices,” Jassy said.