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
Marc Benioff is keeping an eye on Palantir.
The co-founder and CEO of sales and customer service management software company Salesforce is well aware that investors are betting big on Palantir, which offers data management software to businesses and government agencies.
“Oh my gosh. I am so inspired by that company,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in a Tuesday interview at Goldman Sachs‘ Communacopia+Technology conference in San Francisco. “I mean, not just because they have 100 times, you know, multiple on their revenue, which I would love to have that too. Maybe it’ll have 1000 times on their revenue soon.”
Salesforce, a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, remains 10 times larger than Palantir by revenue, with over $10 billion in revenue during the latest quarter. But Palantir is growing 48%, compared with 10% for Salesforce.
Benioff added that Palantir’s prices are “the most expensive enterprise software I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe I’m not charging enough,” he said.
It wasn’t Benioff’s first time talking about Palantir. Last week, Benioff referenced Palantir’s “extraordinary” prices in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, saying Salesforce offers a “very competitive product at a much lower cost.”
The next day, TBPN podcast hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays asked for a response from Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and CEO.
“We are very focused on value creation, and we ask to be modestly compensated for that value,” Karp said.
The companies sometimes compete for government deals, and Benioff touted a recent win over Palantir for a U.S. Army contract.
Palantir started in 2003, four years after Salesforce. But while Salesforce went public in 2004, Palantir arrived on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
Palantir’s market capitalization stands at $406 billion, while Salesforce is worth $231 billion. And as one of the most frequently traded stocks on Robinhood, Palantir is popular with retail investors.
Salesforce shares are down 27% this year, the worst performance in large-cap tech.
Salesforce and Palantir year to date stock chart.
Gemini Co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, U.S., Sept. 12, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Shares of Gemini Space Station soared more than 40% on Thursday after the exchange operator raised $425 million in an initial public offering.
The stock opened at $37.01 on the Nasdaq after its IPO priced at $28. At one point, shares traded as high as $40.71.
The New York-based company priced its IPO late Thursday above this week’s expected range of $24 to $26, and an initial range of between $17 and $19. That valued the company at some $3.3 billion before trading began.
Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded by the Winklevoss brothers in 2014 and held more than $21 billion of assets on its platform as of the end of July. Per its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gemini posted a net loss of $159 million in 2024, and in the first half of this year, it lost $283 million.
The company also offers a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, credit cards with a crypto-back rewards program and a custody service for institutions.
The Winklevoss brothers were among the earliest bitcoin investors and first bitcoin billionaires. They have long held that bitcoin is a superior store of value than gold. On Friday morning, they told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” they see its price reaching $1 million a decade from now.
In 2013, they were the first to apply to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, more than 10 years before the first bitcoin ETFs would eventually be approved. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s rejection of the application, which cited risk of fraud and market manipulation, set the stage for the bitcoin ETF debate in the years to come.
Even in the early days, when bitcoin was notorious for its extreme volatility and anti-establishment roots and shunned by Wall Street, the Winklevoss brothers were outspoken about the need for smart regulation that would establish rules for the crypto-led financial revolution.
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