Twitter owner Elon Musk met with civil rights leaders Tuesday — here’s what happened
Elon Musk arrives on the red carpet for the automobile awards “Das Goldene Lenkrad” (The golden steering wheel) given by a German newspaper in Berlin, Germany, November 12, 2019.
Hannibal Hanschke | Reuters
Days after closing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk faced pressure from heads of civil rights groups to disallow many users who had been banned from the platform from returning, and to give company staffers access to the tools necessary to combat election-related misinformation.
Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Asian American Foundation and Free Press, a media reform advocacy group, spoke with Musk in an almost hour-long Zoom call on Tuesday, one week before the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, helped organize the call after speaking with Musk previously, and took part in the meeting, according to three of the attendees.
Some of the organizations represented have co-signed an open letter to Twitter’s advertisers to encourage them to “cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he [Musk] follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”
Bloomberg reported that some employees had been frozen out of their access to tools used for content moderation and policy enforcement, which could impact the company’s ability to eliminate misinformation on Election Day. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, defended the move as “exactly what we (or any company) should be doing in the midst of a corporate transition to reduce opportunities for insider risk.” He said Twitter is still enforcing its rules.
After the call with civil rights groups, Musk tweeted that users who’ve been banned from Twitter for violating its rules — a group that includes former President Donald Trump — will not have the chance to return to the platform for at least another few weeks. Prior reports suggested Musk was planning to allow people who’d been kicked off Twitter for disciplinary reasons to come back.
Musk told the group that he plans to retain and enforce Twitter’s election integrity measures, and staff will have access to the necessary tools by the end of this week, Free Press CEO Jessica Gonzalez, who was on the call, said in an interview.
Michael Kives, a longtime Musk ally, was also on the call, according to the participants. Kives’ firm, K5 Global, has backed SpaceX and The Boring Company, two of Musk’s other companies.
Musk was the only Twitter representative on the call. Neither Musk nor Kives, who reportedly worked as a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, immediately responded to requests for comment.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, told CNBC on Wednesday that he urged Musk to implement a consistent process for letting people back onto Twitter.
Robinson said he “spoke to him [Musk] about the folks that had incited violence and the message that it sends both to just replatform them without a very clear and transparent process.” He also said that, when it allows people to return, Twitter should “take accountability, not just for what these folks do, but to the message it sends their followers.”
Trump, who was banned after the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, wasn’t mentioned by name on the call, attendees said. But Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, said the group told Musk, “there are some people whose offenses are so egregious that they should never be allowed back on the platform.” Johnson added, referring to Trump, that “I would hope that he’s never placed back on the platform because we’d all be in danger.”
Musk said before he finalized his purchase of Twitter that it was a “mistake” to permanently ban Trump from the platform. But after the deal was completed, Musk quickly moved to reassure advertisers that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” just because he favors more lenient content moderation policies.
Musk told advertisers he acquired Twitter because he believes it’s “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.”
The Tesla CEO said he plans to create a council at Twitter that will help review its content moderation approach. He said the group “will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence.”
WATCH: Musk’s Twitter sees spike in racist posts and fake news
The photo illustration shows the Bitcoin cryptocurrency on November 12, 2024 in Shanghai, China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
The price of bitcoin leapt back above $100,000 to start the first full trading week of the new year.
The flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by about 4% at $102,234, according to Coin Metrics. The broader crypto market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, gained more than 3%. Bitcoin and ether are coming off their best weeks since Dec. 6, while Solana had its best week since Nov. 22.
“Overall, we are in a bullish environment and traders appear to be risk-on as we head into the new year,” Mario Jurina, CEO at crypto swaps platform Jumper.Exchange. “With Trump’s election set to be certified today, and January often being a bullish month — six of the past 10 years saw positive price action — it’s no wonder markets are moving upward.”
Bitcoin rises above $100,000 to start the week
The moves in crypto coincided with a rebound in tech stocks as Nvidia and shares of other chip names jumped. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was last higher by about 1.7%.
Crypto stocks Coinbase and MicroStrategy advanced nearly 6% and 5%, respectively. MicroStrategy Monday morning reported it has purchased another 1,070 bitcoins for about $101 million, bringing its total bitcoin holdings to 447,470.
Activity is coming back into the crypto market after a post-election rally that was driven by promises of a more supportive regulatory environment. The optimism sent prices rocketing for weeks before cooling at the end of the year. The price of bitcoin is expected to roughly double under the new administration this year, with some price predictions, like Fundstrat’s Tom Lee’s, being as high as $250,000.
Jakub Porzyck | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Global semiconductor stocks climbed on Monday after contract electronics giant Foxconn announced record fourth-quarter revenues, suggesting the artificial intelligence boom has far more room to run.
Hon Hai Precision Industry, which does business as Foxconn internationally, said in a Sunday statement that the company’s fourth-quarter revenue totaled 2.1 trillion New Taiwan dollars ($63.9 billion), growing 15% year-over-year.
Foxconn — which is a supplier to Apple — also set a record, posting the highest fourth-quarter revenue ever in company history, according to the statement.
The firm’s bumper revenue performance was driven by growth in its cloud and networking products — which includes AI servers like those designed by the likes of chipmaker Nvidia — and components and other products segments.
Computing products and smart consumer electronics — which numbers iPhone and other smartphones — saw “slight declines,” Foxconn said.
Shares of several semiconductor firms across Asia, Europe and the U.S. rose, as a result.
In Asia, TSMC hit a record high Monday and closed 1.9% higher in Taiwan.
The largest semiconductor manufacturer globally, TSMC produces chips for the likes of AMD and Nvidia.
Other Asian chip firms also logged share price gains — South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung rose nearly 10% and 4%, respectively.
In Europe, globally critical semiconductor equipment firm ASML saw its shares jump almost 6%, while fellow Dutch chip company ASMI’s stock rose almost 5%. Germany’s Infineon surged more than 6%.
Paris-listed shares of European contract chipmaker STMicroelectronics rose nearly 6%.
Stateside, Nvidia got a boost from the Foxconn numbers, climbing 2% in U.S. premarket trading.
Also boosting chip stocks on Monday was Microsoft’s announcement at the end of last week about plans to invest $80 billion in 2025 on data centers that can handle AI workloads.
Microsoft is one of several tech giants splurging on GPUs (graphics processing units) from Nvidia to train and run the most advanced AI models.
AMD, Nvidia’s closest rival, rose 3% in pre-market trading Monday, while fellow U.S. chip firms Qualcomm and Broadcom both climbed almost 2%.
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