Elon Musk, businessman, speaks during a rally held for former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, at Madison Square Garden in New York, New York, USA, 27 October 2024.

(Sarah Yenesel/Shutterstock)

Twitter blues

A timeline of two years of chaos at Elon Musk’s X

The company has shed a jawdropping $35 billion in value in just two years. Let that sink in.

10/30/24 1:06PM

This week marks two years since Elon Musk closed on his court-ordered $44 billion purchase of Twitter. To say this has been a chaotic two years for the company is an understatement. Musk’s erratic leadership of the company during this period resulted in a flood of hate speech and misinformation on the platform, driving away major advertisers and millions of users as the platform became increasingly spammy and politicized.

During this time, Musk underwent a conversion to a full-on MAGA warrior, using his personal wealth and platform to help return Donald Trump to the White House in next week’s presidential election.

Lawsuits over unpaid bills, executive compensation for employees he fired, and regulatory scrutiny from the US and foreign governments find the platform worth a fraction of its value as CEO Linda Yaccarino struggles to turn X into Musk’s vision of an “everything app” for news, entertainment, banking, and even dating.

We’ve collected some of the major events during this period to try to understand all that has happened at the company, and created an interactive timeline to explore the highs and lows of the past two years.

Source data: Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s Platforms and Publishers Timeline; Sherwood research.

Jon Keegan3h

Meta strikes $30 billion deal with Blue Owl to finance Hyperion data center

Meta’s Hyperion mega data center site in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is currently under construction. The city-sized development will be the home to one of the largest data centers in the world, housing around 2 million pricey GPUs, and will scale up to an eventual 5.5 gigawatts.

So, how is Meta planning to pay for this expensive project?

Bloomberg reports that Meta has signed a deal with asset management company Blue Owl Capital to finance $30 billion to pay for the project, marking what could be the largest private capital deal ever.

According to the report, Blue Owl and Meta would co-own the site, with Meta retaining a 20% stake in the project. PIMCO is also part of the financing for the deal, as the anchor lender.

Raising the massive capital to fund all of these huge AI data center projects is pushing companies to use unusual financing arrangements. The Information reported that xAI made such a deal with Valor Equity Partners worth $20 billion to rent the GPUs needed for its Colossus 2 data center.

Blue Owl Seals Largest Private Capital Deal for Meta’s AI Growth

According to the report, Blue Owl and Meta would co-own the site, with Meta retaining a 20% stake in the project. PIMCO is also part of the financing for the deal, as the anchor lender.

Rani Molla6h

EssilorLuxottica surges to record high after saying Ray-Ban Meta glasses helped boost revenue growth

European eyewear company EssilorLuxottica said during its earnings call yesterday that its Ray-Ban Meta glasses helped boost its revenue growth, something that’s sent the ADR up to a record high.

“Clearly, there is a lift coming from Ray-Ban Meta wearables as a product category,” the company’s CFO, Stefano Grassi, said on the call Thursday. “The contribution from Ray-Ban Meta in wearables, as I mentioned before, is in excess of 4 percentage points overall for the group.”

EssilorLuxottica’s revenue was up 11.7% in the third quarter compared with a year ago.

Meta has a nearly 3% stake in the eyewear company, which it has partnered with on the smart glasses. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also claimed that its Ray-Ban Metas are a hit, saying that the “sales trajectory that we’ve seen is similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.” We looked at the numbers and aren’t so sure.

Tom Jones

ARR you watching?

The revenue race between Anthropic and OpenAI is getting more heated

Hey Claude, when do you think you’ll start making more money than ChatGPT?

44%

Matt Phillips23h

JPMorgan economists estimate that the basket of stocks they use as a rough gauge of AI’s market impact is now worth about 44% of the S&P 500’s total market cap, up from 26% in 2022.

Using a basket of 30 AI stocks picked by the bank’s equity analysts as a barometer of AI, the economists find that American households have seen their aggregate wealth go up by about $5 trillion over the last year as a result of AI, they reported in a note published Thursday.

They also estimate the surge in stock market wealth could raise annualized US consumer spending by some $180 billion, due to wealth effects.

JPM acknowledges some uncertainty around this estimate, noting that the spending impact could be lower “if the wealth gains are accruing disproportionately to upper income households with lower [marginal propensity to spend].”

Jon Keegan23h

Report: Apple’s next MacBook Pro will have a touch screen, a decade after everyone else

Steve Jobs would NEVER!

Apple’s next iteration of the MacBook Pro could have a touch screen, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Apple will be late to the party, as the rest of the industry adopted touch screens years ago. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs famously resisted the idea of a touch screen Mac, but over the years, the lines between Macs and iPads have been blurring.

The new high-end touch screen MacBook Pros are expected to have a slimmer design, run on Apple’s custom M6 chips, and feature a “hole-punch” at the top of the OLED display, matching the design of the iPhone, which allows the camera and sensors to be surrounded by screen at the top of the display.

This week, Apple released an updated MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro running on the M5 chip.

Apple Readies High-End MacBook Pro With Touch, Hole-Punch Screen