Twitter grants UK far-right party Britain First ‘official organization’ label
Britain First leader Paul Golding leads an anti-Islam march on April 1, 2017 in London, England.
Wiktor Szymanowicz | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Twitter labeled the British far-right political party Britain First an “official organization,” raising questions about the direction in which Elon Musk has taken the platform after its content moderation and verification overhaul.
Britain First now gets a gold checkmark on the social media site — a symbol that costs $1,000 a month and is reserved for businesses and non-profit organizations. When clicking on the checkmark, a textbox shows the message: “This account is verified because it’s an official organization on Twitter.”
Britain First is a nationalist political party in the U.K. that campaigns against multiculturalism and what it sees as the Islamification of the U.K. Its leader Paul Golding, who was previously a member of the neo-Nazi National First party, has been involved in numerous controversies over the years, including provocative behavior at several mosques.
Britain First, Gold and Deputy Leader Jada Fransen were suspended by Twitter in 2017 for violating its rules against hate speech. All three have since had their accounts reinstated.
CNBC has reached out to Britain First for comment.
On April 20, about 400,000 legacy-verified Twitter accounts lost their blue checkmarks as part of Musk’s drive to gain the platform more money from subscriptions. Individual users must pay $8 for a membership with Twitter Blue, which gives them features such as the blue tick and the ability to edit tweets. Meanwhile, organizations can pay north of $1,000 per month for verifying their accounts and individual accounts affiliated with them with the gold tick.
In a surprise reversal from Twitter’s legacy verified purge, multiple celebrities had their blue checks restored over the weekend. Musk revealed that he personally paid for some, including for writer Stephen King, actor William Shatner and basketball star LeBron James.
Twitter also has a separate, grey checkmark for government accounts — U.S. President Joe Biden, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and French President Emmanuel Macron each have grey checkmarks. This feature is unpaid.
Brands fled Twitter advertising en masse in the wake of Musk’s $44 billion deal, which was completed in October 2022, expressing concern about the app failing to tackle hateful posts. Musk styles himself as a “free speech absolutist” and says that he wants to encourage free expression on Twitter.
News organizations have also quit the platform over concerns that it is undermining their credibility. Musk’s Twitter had marked the accounts of several media outlets, including NPR, the BBC and CBC as “state-affiliated,” a designation that alarmed executives and journalists at the organizations.
In response to those labels, NPR and CBC announced they would stop using Twitter in an official capacity to disseminate reporting. Twitter quietly dropped those government-funded media labels on Friday.
– CNBC’s Rohan Goswami contributed to this report
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Charles Liang, chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, June 5, 2024. The trade show runs through June 7.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Embattled server maker Super Micro Computer said on Monday that it’s hired BDO as its new auditor and submitted a plan to Nasdaq detailing its efforts to regain compliance with the exchange. The shares jumped 23% in extended trading.
“This is an important next step to bring our financial statements current, an effort we are pursuing with both diligence and urgency,” Super Micro CEO Charles Liang said in a statement.
Super Micro is late in filing its 2024 year-end report with the SEC, and said earlier this month that it was looking for a new accountant after its previous auditor, Ernst & Young, stepped down in October. Ernst & Young was new to the job, having just replaced Deloitte & Touche as Super Micro’s accounting firm in March 2023.
Super Micro said it told Nasdaq that it believes it will be able to file its annual report for the year ended June 30, and quarterly report for the period ended Sept. 30. The company said it will remain listed on the Nasdaq pending the exchange’s “review of the compliance plan.”
Shares of Super Micro soared more than twentyfold over a two year period from early 2022 until their peak in March of this year. But the stock has been hammered on troubling news about its compliance with Nasdaq. Once valued at about $70 billion, the company’s market cap was at $12.6 billion at the close on Monday, following a 16% rally during regular trading.
Super Micro has been one of the primary beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence boom, due to its relationship with Nvidia. Sales last fiscal year more than doubled to $15 billion.
On Monday, Super Micro announced that it was selling products featuring Nvidia’s next-generation AI chip called Blackwell. The company competes with vendors like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise in packaging up Nvidia AI chips for other companies to access.
Super Micro was added to the S&P 500 in March, reflecting its rapidly growing business and then-soaring stock price. Less than two weeks after the index changes were announced, Super Micro reached its closing high of $118.81.
The troubles began within months. In August, Super Micro said it wouldn’t file its annual report with the SEC on time. Noted short seller Hindenburg Research then disclosed a short position in the company, and said in a report that it identified “fresh evidence of accounting manipulation.” The Wall Street Journal later reported that the Department of Justice was at the early stages of a probe into the company.
The month after announcing its report delay, Super Micro said it had received a notification from the Nasdaq, indicating that the delay in the filing of its annual report meant the company wasn’t in compliance with the exchange’s listing rules. Super Micro said the Nasdaq’s rules allowed the company 60 days to file its report or submit a plan to regain compliance. Based on that timeframe, the deadline was Monday.
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Kelly Steckelberg attends an Evening from the Heart LA 2022 Gala hosted by the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health at Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, California, on May 5, 2022.
Araya Doheny | Getty Images
Canva, a high-valued design software startup that competes with Adobe, said Monday that it hired Kelly Steckelberg as its chief financial officer, five years after she helped take Zoom public and then guided the company through its Covid-19 pandemic surge.
Founded in 2013, Canva was valued recently at $32 billion, a drop from its peak of $40 billion in 2021.
“Kelly’s impressive track record as a strong leader and strategic thinker, combined with her proven expertise in scaling enterprise companies, make her the perfect addition to our leadership bench,” Canva said in an emailed statement.
Canva is generating about $2.5 billion in annualized revenue and boasts 220 million monthly users. The company is widely viewed as a top initial public offering candidate for venture-backed tech companies after a historically slow period for new offerings dating back to early 2022.
On Monday, ServiceTitan, which sells software for the trades, filed to list on the Nasdaq. Cerebras, a maker of artificial intelligence chips, has been on file since late September, and online lender Klarna said last week that it has confidentially filed its IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
A Canva spokesperson declined to comment on the startup’s timeline for an IPO.
Steckelberg held financial positions at Cisco and was CEO of online dating company Zoosk before joining Zoom in 2017. Steckelberg is based in Austin, Texas, while Canva has its headquarters in Sydney, Australia.
Zoom went public with Steckelberg’s help in 2019. The video-chat company saw its market cap soar to upward of $160 billion in October 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic, as users working from home swarmed to the app. Zoom has since lost more than 85% of its value.
Steckelberg announced her departure from Zoom in August after seven years at the company. Last month, former Microsoft executive Michelle Chang replaced Steckelberg as Zoom’s CFO.
Canva’s previous finance chief Damien Singh resigned in February after the company said it was conducting an internal investigation surrounding inappropriate behavior.
ServiceTitan offices in Draper, Utah.
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ServiceTitan, a company that sells software to contractors such as plumbers and roofers, on Monday filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TTAN.”
The filing suggests that investors could be getting more interested in next-generation software companies. Just a few, including Reddit and Rubrik, debuted on public markets in the U.S. this year, and chipmaker Cerebras filed for an initial public offering. There were basically no tech initial public offerings in 2021 or 2022 as central bankers pushed up interest rates to flight inflation, making investors less willing to bet on money-losing challengers.
Based in Glendale, California, ServiceTitan offers cloud software for advertising, scheduling jobs, dispatching, producing invoices and taking payments. It had a $35.7 million net loss on $193 million in revenue in the quarter that ended on July 31, according to the filing. Revenue was up about 24% year over year, and the quarterly loss had narrowed from almost $52 million.
ServiceTitan’s revenue growth rate will stand out for people investing in cloud stocks, who have seen rates sag with few new public companies in the sector. The average growth rate for Bessemer’s Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, the basis for the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, is 16.6%.
The company was originally founded in 2007 by Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan, whose fathers were both residential contractors. While most ServiceTitan customers are small and medium-sized businesses, it has started focusing more on selling products to big companies and construction customers, according to the filing.
ServiceTitan plans to keep up to 5% of shares in the IPO for eligible clients, the founders’ friends and family members and others through a directed share program.
Investors include Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Iconiq and TPG. Iconiq on its own controlled 24% of the compan’s Class A shares.
Competitors include Salesforce and SAP, along with specialty companies such as HouseCall Pro, Jobber and Workwave.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup are among the company’s IPO underwriters.
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