Tech
All in one: Twitter is now X, as Musk looks to build a "super-app"

All in one: Twitter is now X, as Musk looks to build a "super-app"

David Crowther

NeXt chapter

Twitter is dead, and an X marks the spot where its iconic blue bird once perched. While Elon Musk’s latest change may have taken some by surprise, with “X” users rushing to “X” their views about the “X” redesign, his preoccupation with (and plans around) the 24th letter actually go way back.

In 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity to become PayPal just a year later. Now, his biographer Walter Isaacson says, the Tesla CEO is ready to complete his original vision from nearly 25 years ago — turning X into a one-stop everything platform.

Everything, everywhere, all in one app

Everything apps, or “super-apps”, are platforms where the user can fulfill a variety of tasks from one centralized hub. That means playing minigames in the same place you message your loved ones, or reading the latest news on the app that you transfer a friend the $10 you owe them. Super-apps are huge in Asia and Musk’s goal will be to try and replicate the biggest of them all — WeChat.

Indeed, in a town hall event for Twitter employees back in June 2022, Musk explained that people in China “basically live on WeChat because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life”. The app’s 1.32 billion monthly active users — who can hail taxis, order food, pay their bills, read books, message people, post pictures, and much more — would likely agree with Musk on that point too.

Apparently, the mogul wants X to be even bigger, though. Axios observed that Musk’s tellings herald the app as “Twitter + Substack + YouTube + PayPal + Amazon + TikTok + WeChat + Baidu” rolled into one. The everything app for everything apps, then.

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42
Rani Molla

Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s also the number of unsupervised Robotaxis Tesla has on the road in Texas, the only state where it’s operating autonomous service, according to records from a newly required government database in the state.

That’s much lower than CEO Elon Musk had hoped, as the company struggles to ready its camera-only autonomous vehicles for commercial scale. In 2025, Musk said that the service would be available to “half the population of the US by the end of the year.”

Even smaller competition has more: Avride has 317 and Nuro has 47. Meanwhile, Tesla’s chief rival, Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, has 577 in operation in the state. Nationwide, Waymo’s fleet currently numbers more than 3,000.

Unfortunately for Tesla, figuring out how to actually scale its robotaxi fleet remains the ultimate question.

INDIA-TECHNOLOGY-AI-DIPLOMACY

Anthropic raises $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, releases a more “honest” Claude Opus 4.8

Anthropic’s monster $965 billion valuation puts it firmly ahead of OpenAI’s $850 billion valuation as the rivals head toward expected IPOs later this year.

Jon Keegan22h
tech
Jon Keegan

Report: Microsoft tries to get back in the AI coding game with new model

Microsoft wants to fight its way back into the AI coding field by releasing a new model next week at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference, The Information reports.

The company is expected to announce a new family of models as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman seeks to shore up the company’s own AI offerings and gradually wean it off OpenAI’s technology over the remainder of their $13 billion partnership.

Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

Microsoft to Release New Coding Model Next Week in Comeback Attempt

Microsoft to Release New Coding Model Next Week in Comeback Attempt

Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

Ojai outside

Waymo to launch free robotaxi rides in its new Ojai vans

The new vehicles are less expensive — which is important for the service to really scale.

Rani Molla5/28/26
tech
Rani Molla

Report: Tesla’s Robotaxi trainers don’t think it’s ready for prime time

If you listen to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, you might think rapid expansion of the company’s Robotaxi service is right around the corner. If you listen to the people tasked with reviewing the footage and training its AI, that future is a long way off.

An in-depth report from Reuters that interviewed nine former “data labelers” and a former Tesla self-driving engineer paints a picture of highly massaged safety stats, vehicles failing to execute basic driving functions, and a behind-the-scenes reality where the supposedly “autonomous” tech relies heavily on the exact kind of localized, labor-intensive mapping and training Musk has publicly mocked. The skepticism runs so deep that one former insider told reporters they wouldn’t ride in a Robotaxi “if you f---ing paid me.”

Currently, the service is operating about 30 unsupervised vehicles across three Texas cities — a much more circumscribed execution than Musk had initially planned. The problem, for Tesla, is that the success of its Robotaxi business is now integral to the company’s value proposition.

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Why Tesla’s AI trainers don’t trust its self-driving tech – or its safety stats

Why Tesla’s AI trainers don’t trust its self-driving tech – or its safety stats

An in-depth report from Reuters that interviewed nine former “data labelers” and a former Tesla self-driving engineer paints a picture of highly massaged safety stats, vehicles failing to execute basic driving functions, and a behind-the-scenes reality where the supposedly “autonomous” tech relies heavily on the exact kind of localized, labor-intensive mapping and training Musk has publicly mocked. The skepticism runs so deep that one former insider told reporters they wouldn’t ride in a Robotaxi “if you f---ing paid me.”

Currently, the service is operating about 30 unsupervised vehicles across three Texas cities — a much more circumscribed execution than Musk had initially planned. The problem, for Tesla, is that the success of its Robotaxi business is now integral to the company’s value proposition.

Read more

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