Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of social media platform X, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Feb. 20, 2025.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
For X owner Elon Musk, the solution to monitoring misinformation online has been the community, rather than a group of fact checkers. Since buying the social media company formerly known as Twitter in 2022, he’s touted the Community Notes feature as the best way to correct false posts.
That is, until he didn’t like the results.
Musk wrote in a post Thursday that he intends to “fix” Community Notes because it “is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.” He provided no evidence to support his claim.
What apparently set Musk off was information members added in Community Notes correcting posts on X that claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s elected president, had low approval ratings among its citizens.
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, or KIIS, published survey results this week, based on February polling, that found that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted Zelenskyy while 37% said they did not. The polling contradicted President Donald Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is deeply unpopular in his country.
Tensions between the Trump administration, which includes Musk as a central figure, and the Ukrainian government have escalated over the past week, NBC News reported, before bubbling into public view.
Echoing Kremlin sentiments, Trump has accused Ukraine of starting a war with Russia that actually began when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade the neighboring country in February 2022.
Senior White House officials met their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, with the aim of laying the groundwork for peace talks on Ukraine, while excluding Kyiv’s officials and EU representatives from participating in discussions.
Trump has called on Ukraine to hold new elections.
Zelenskyy said he would reject any plan that did not include Ukraine’s involvement. Under its constitution, Ukraine can’t hold elections while it’s at war and under martial law.
In his post Thursday, Musk wrote, “It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!” However, there are other available sources.
A consortium that’s been conducting extensive polling in Ukraine since 2014 found “63% of Ukrainians now approve of Zelensky’s performance as president, a notable increase from the previous year,” Joe Stafford, the news and media relations lead at the University of Manchester, wrote in a post Wednesday.
High favorability ratings for Zelenskyy undermine the narrative that Trump and Musk want to tell.
“If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election,” Musk wrote, again without evidence. “He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election. In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine.”
First introduced by Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, and rebranded as Community Notes after Musk’s acquisition the following year, the feature was meant to help the social network combat misinformation and disinformation by enlisting users to flag misleading posts and provide correct information instead.
Community Notes has worked in a manner similar to Wikipedia. Facebook owner Meta, which has been aggressively seeking Trump’s favor in the early days of his second term in the White House, recently announced its own version of Community Notes. Alphabet’s YouTube has been testing a comparable tool since summer 2024.
Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physics professor who studies how misinformation and hate speech spread online, said the Community Notes model is problematic, but not because it can be gamed by large institutions. Rather, crowdsourcing is an inherently “imperfect system” for landing on the truth and is a poor substitute for “formal fact checking,” he said.
“Like any crowd, crowds can be fickle, and crowds can be driven by other interests,” Johnson said. “It’s not a paid person with the job of fact checking.”
Musk is not immune
Additionally, while Musk has pitched Community Notes as a way to replace fact checkers, a recent study by the Spanish fact-checking nonprofit Maldita showed that many X users still rely on information from professionals. The authors of the study, published earlier in February, looked at more than 1 million notes from Community Notes’ public dataset.
“The evidence from X clearly shows that users rely on the work of fact-checking organizations often” when proposing Community Notes, they wrote.
Neither Musk nor a representative from X responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Musk’s latest comments on Community Notes mark a sharp contrast to how he’s discussed the service in the past, and underscore the lengths to which he’s willing to go in pursuit of Trump’s agenda.
When talking about Community Notes in earlier posts, Musk has said that it can’t be manipulated by him or anyone else.
“The system is completely decentralized and open source, both code and data. Any manipulation would show up like a neon sore thumb!” Musk wrote in a post Dec. 30. “No one at X, including me, has any editorial control.”
Musk has also acknowledged in past posts that he is not immune from being corrected in Community Notes.
And Community Notes isn’t the only technology in Musk’s portfolio that could present problems by responding in ways he may not like. There’s also Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot that is owned by Musk’s startup xAI and is used on X.
Fortune published a story in January about the many negative responses Grok provides when users ask if Musk is a good person. Grok’s reasons for saying he isn’t a good person include environmental hazards from SpaceX, Musk’s “erratic” management style and his political views, Fortune reported, citing Grok responses. Futurism published a similarly themed piece in December, with the headline “Elon Musk’s Grok AI blasts Elon Musk as huge spreader of misinformation.”
Musk calls Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke.” Earlier this week, xAI introduced its latest AI model, Grok 3, claiming it can outperform offerings from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek based on early testing, which included standardized tests on math, science and coding.
Musk did admit during the demo that the model isn’t perfect.
“We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections,” Musk said. “But we will improve it rapidly, almost every day.”
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) passengers walk off a train at the Richmond station on March 15, 2023 in Richmond, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Commuters in and around San Francisco rode into work for free on Tuesday morning due to an outage in the Clipper card system, which is used to handle payments for train, bus and ferry rides.
“ATTENTION: The Clipper system is experiencing an outage on all operators this morning,” the Bay Area Clipper account wrote in a post on X. “Please be prepared to pay your fare with another form of payment if required by your transit agency.”
Many buses were waving commuters on without asking for payment, and at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train stations, the faregates were open, allowing travelers to walk through for free.
Clipper is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which manages transportation for the nine-county Bay Area. The service is used by hundreds of thousands of tech workers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
The MTC website said there were 1.35 million unique Clipper cards — physical and digital — used in May, the highest monthly toll for the year and the most since December 2019, before the pandemic. A fact sheet from the MTC says Clipper is used by 800,000 transit riders a day across the region.
BART fare gates open on July 1, 2025, due to Clipper outage
Kif Leswing
BART, in particular, has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, most notably installing fare gates starting in late 2023, with full deployment expected to be completed by the end of this year.
In the first five months of the year, average BART station exits totaled between 170,000 and 182,000 a month, according to its website. Those numbers are way down from the pre-pandemic days of 2019, when averages were generally above 400,000 a month.
The MTC has plans to roll out an updated system called Clipper 2.0, which it says will be a “customer-focused, cost-effective fare collection system” with a “flexible platform for future fare structures.” Features include use across the various mobile operating systems, updated communication and “expanded retail, online and mobile sales.”
The update, however, has been routinely delayed, leading to tense confrontations at recent Clipper executive board meetings.
Corporate treasuries have surpassed ETFs in bitcoin buying for a third consecutive quarter as more companies try to benefit from the MicroStrategy playbook in a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment.
Public companies acquired about 131,000 coins in the second quarter, growing their bitcoin balance 18%, according to data provider Bitcoin Treasuries. ETFs showed an 8% increase or about 111,000 BTC in the same period.
“The institutional buyer who is getting exposure to bitcoin through the ETFs are not buying for the same reason as those public companies who are basically trying to accumulate bitcoin to increase shareholder value at the end of the day,” said Nick Marie, head of research at Ecoinometrics.
Public company bitcoin holdings increased 4% in April, a tumultuous month after the market was rocked by President Donald Trump’s initial tariffs announcement, versus 2% for ETFs, he pointed out.
“They don’t really care if the price is high or low, they care about growing their bitcoin treasury so they look more attractive to the proxy buyers,” Marie added. “It’s not so much driven by the macro trend or the sentiment, it’s for different reasons. So it becomes a different kind of mechanism that can push bitcoin forward.”
Bitcoin ETFs, whose collective U.S. launch in January 2024 was one of the most successful ETF debuts in history, still represent the largest holders of bitcoin by entity with more than 1.4 million coins held today, representing about 6.8% of the fixed supply cap of 21 million. Public companies hold about 855,000 coins, or about 4%.
Regulatory relief
The trend reflects the significant regulatory relief the crypto industry broadly is benefiting from under the Trump administration. In March, Trump signed an executive order for a U.S. bitcoin reserve, sending a strong message that the flagship cryptocurrency, which has long been a source of reputation risk among many investors, is here to stay. The last time ETFs outpaced public companies in bitcoin buying was in the third quarter of 2024, before Trump was re-elected.
In the second quarter, GameStop began buying bitcoin, after its board approved it as a treasury reserve asset in March; health-care company KindlyMD merged with Nakamoto, a bitcoin investment company founded by crypto entrepreneur David Bailey; and investor Anthony Pompliano’s ProCap, kicked off its own bitcoin purchasing program and is going public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
Strategy, recently rebranded from MicroStrategy, is still the main behemoth in the bitcoin treasury game. The company pioneered the strategy that more than 140 public companies globally are now emulating. It holds about 597,000 BTC, and is followed by the bitcoin miner Mara Holdings, which has almost 50,000 coins.
“It’s going to be very hard to catch Strategy’s scale,” said Ben Werkman, chief investment officer at Swan Bitcoin. “They’re going to be the preferred landing spot for institutional capital because of the deep liquidity around their equity, while these smaller equities are going to be really good risk returns for retail investors and smaller institutions that want more of that upside – that initial growth that comes in kicking off the strategy – because a lot of people missed it with MicroStrategy.”
A long-term case?
Marie suggested that 10 years from now, there probably won’t be so many companies committed to the bitcoin treasury strategy. Firstly, he said, the more that enter the category, the more diluted the activity at each firm becomes. Plus, bitcoin may be so normalized by then that proxy buyers are no longer constrained by rules and mandates around direct exposure to bitcoin.
“You can think about this wave as a bunch of companies that are trying to benefit from this arbitrage,” Marie said.
Werkman pointed out that most investors that are attracted to bitcoin treasury companies today already have a thesis around bitcoin. For them, leveraged bitcoin equities are likely how they try to outperform bitcoin itself, the foundational component of their investments.
“What people really like about these companies, and why they like to get into these smaller companies, is because they can do something that the investors holding spot bitcoin can’t do: go and accumulate more bitcoin on your behalf because they have access to the capital markets and can issue securities,” Werkman said.
There’s also likely to be a fair number of companies that convert their existing treasury holdings to bitcoin without pursuing leverage the way Strategy does, Werkman noted.
“They’ve got that ability to generate more and more value behind their shares, backed by bitcoin, plus whatever the operations of the company are generating. It’s a unique value proposition,” he said.
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An image of a Quantix drone made by AeroVironment.
David Mcnew | Getty Images News | Getty Images
AeroVironment shares fell 7% Tuesday after the defense contractor said it plans to offer $750 million in common stock and $600 million in convertible senior notes due in 2030 to repay debt.
The drone maker said it would use leftover funding for general purposes such as boosting manufacturing capacity.
AeroVironment shares have soared 85% this year, ballooning its market value to about $13 billion.
Last week, shares of the Arlington, Virginia-based company rallied on strong fourth-quarter results, lifting higher as CNBC’s Jim Cramer called it the “next Palantir of hardware.”
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Last month, the company also closed its $4.1 billion acquisition of space-related defense tech company Blue Halo.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to boost drone production in the U.S. and crack down on unauthorized uses.
The company also has a high short interest level, which may have contributed to some of the recent gains, creating a short squeeze. This phenomenon occurs when a stock price surges, forcing those shorting the stock to purchase shares to cover their positions and prevent losses.