The Agence France-Presse reporting on the U.S. president’s social-media-and-cryptocurrency-and-maybe-nuclear-fusion operation:

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) reported revenue of less than US$1 million for the three months ending March 31, according to a company filing.

Under $4 million in annual revenue is less than how much Twitter was earning in 2009 — unadjusted for inflation — an amount Steven Levy described as “modest”.

Speaking of Twitter, let us check in on SpaceX which, after a series of totally normal business deals, now owns the company and is preparing to trade publicly. Mike Masnick, of Techdirt:

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion [in Twitter/X revenue] by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. […]

Earlier this year, a judge found against Elon Musk in a lawsuit filed by X against advertisers claiming they staged an illegal boycott.

The SpaceX prospectus, by the way, is one of the funniest documents to ever live on the sec.gov domain. It is lucky the business it is known for is so damn photogenic because it is, at present, a profitable satellite internet provider with side businesses of space exploration and artificial intelligence that each lose money. (How it internally accounts for the cost of sending Starlink satellites into orbit is a fantastic question.) And the present business model of the latter is something Patrick Boyle described as “renting GPUs to a competitor on terms that can vanish in a fiscal quarter”. Yet the company still claims the size of its total addressable market is over $28 trillion, or over one-fifth of the entire world’s GDP.

Even so, a $1.75–2 trillion valuation is plausible simply because of Musk. Similarly, and back to that AFP article:

According to its filing, TMTG generated US$900,000 in revenue during the first quarter, a paltry amount for a company valued at US$2.47 billion on the stock market.

That valuation is not much; at time of writing, it is worth about as much as Central Garden & Pet, owners of Nylabone and McKenzie plant seeds. That company last quarter posted revenues one thousand times greater than TMTG, with profit margins of over 12%. Nevertheless, TMTG has a connection to the U.S. president, so it is similarly valued. Lots of good, normal stuff happening in the world’s largest and most powerful economy.

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Germain Gauthier, et al., in a recent peer-reviewed paper in Nature:

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. […]

One can be pedantic about the use of “algorithmic” and “the algorithm” to describe a particular set of rules for recommending tweets, given that you could also say a reverse-chronological timeline is its own kind of algorithm. A simple one, to be sure, but an algorithm. I will not quibble with this.

Here is one thing I will be pedantic about, though: this study is not an examination of the “political effects of X’s feed algorithm”, as the title of the study suggests. It was conducted in 2023 — just a little bit after Elon Musk bought the platform and when it was still named Twitter. That is a long time ago in online platform terms, and the recommendations engine has probably changed a lot since — but almost certainly not in the direction of political even-handedness — even though the GitHub commit log suggests it has not been.

This study’s design seems better to me than a report published shortly after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which I found limited and unconvincing.

There should always be a way for users to set a reverse-chronological timeline, and to opt out of recommendations features. We should be suspicious of any platform that refuses to trust us with control over our own experience.

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I am not sure it is worth writing at length about Grokipedia, the Elon Musk-funded effort to quite literally rewrite history from the perspective of a robot taught to avoid facts upsetting to the U.S. far right. Perhaps it will be an unfortunate success — the Fox News of encyclopedias, giving ideologues comfortable information as they further isolate themselves.

It is less a Wikipedia competitor than it is a machine-generated alternative to Conservapedia. Founded by Andy Schlafly, an attorney and son of Phyllis Schlafly, the Wikipedia alternative was an attempt to make an online encyclopedia from a decidedly U.S. conservative and American exceptionalism perspective. Seventeen years ago, Schlafly’s effort was briefly profiled by Canadian television and, somehow, the site is still running. Perhaps that is the fate of Grokipedia: a brief curiosity, followed by traffic coming only from a self-selecting mix of weirdos and YouTubers needing material.

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Kurt Wagner and Katie Roof, Bloomberg:

Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup has acquired the X platform, which he also controls, at a valuation of $33 billion, marking a surprise twist for the social network formerly known as Twitter.

This feels like it has to be part of some kind of financial crime, right? Like, I am sure it is not; I am sure this is just a normal thing businesses do that only feels criminal, like how they move money around the world to avoid taxes.

Wagner and Roof:

The deal gives the new combined entity, called XAI Holdings, a value of more than $100 billion, not including the debt, according to a person familiar with the arrangement, who asked not to be identified because the terms weren’t public. Morgan Stanley was the sole banker on the deal, representing both sides, other people said.

For perspective, that is around about the current value of Lockheed Martin, Rio Tinto — one of the world’s largest mining businesses — and Starbucks. All of those companies make real products with real demand — unfortunately so, in the case of the first. xAI has exactly one external customer today. And it is not like unpleasant social media seems to be a booming business.

Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch, New York Times:

This month, X continued to struggle to hit its revenue targets, according to an internal email seen by The New York Times. As of March 3, X had served $91 million of ads this year, the message said, well below its first-quarter target of $153 million.

This is including the spending of several large advertisers. For comparison, in the same quarter in the pre-Musk era, Twitter generated over a billion dollars in advertising revenue.

I am begging for Matt Levine to explain this to me.

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Cade Metz, New York Times:

Mr. [Sam] Altman said he was “tremendously sad” about the rising tensions between the two one-time collaborators.

“I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero,” he said.

But he rejected suggestions that Mr. Musk could use his increasingly close relationship with President-elect Trump to harm OpenAI.

“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses,” he said.

Alex Heath, the Verge:

Jeff Bezos and President-elect Donald Trump famously didn’t get along the last time Trump was in the White House. This time, Bezos says he’s “very optimistic” and even wants to help out.

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”

Emily Swanson, the Guardian:

“Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing all around America,” Stephen Miller, a top Trump deputy, told Fox.

Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, agreed with Miller. Clegg said in a recent press call that Zuckerberg wanted to play an “active role” in the administration’s tech policy decisions and wanted to participate in “the debate that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere,” particularly on artificial intelligence. Meta declined to provide further comment.

There are two possibilities. The first is that these CEOs are all dummies with memory no more capacious than that of an earthworm. The second is that these people all recognize the transactional and mercurial nature of the incoming administration, and they have begun their ritualistic grovelling. Even though I do not think money and success is evidence of genius, I do not think these CEOs are so dumb they actually believe in the moral fortitude of these goons.

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Gian Volpicelli and Samuel Stolton, Bloomberg:

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. Regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

These are all businesses privately owned by Elon Musk; Tesla, as a publicly traded company, is reportedly not being factored into the calculation. According to a Bloomberg source, the Commission is trying to decide if they should be penalizing the owner of the business and not the business itself.

Matt Levine, in Bloomberg’s Money Stuff newsletter:

See, you’re not really supposed to do that: X is its own company, with its own corporate structure and owners; 6% of X’s revenue is 6% of X’s revenue, not 6% of the revenue of Musk’s other companies. But if everyone thinks of the Musk Mars Conglomerate as a single company, then there’s a risk that it will be treated that way.

I can see how the penalty formula should not be stymied by carefully structured corporations. There should be a way to fine businesses breaking the law, even if their ownership is obfuscated.

But that is not what is happening here. As reported, this seems like an overreach to me. Even though Musk himself disregards barriers between his companies, as Levine also documents, a penalty for the allegedly illegal behaviour of X should probably be levied only against X.

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Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica:

Last night, after a wait of roughly an hour after the official start time, Elon Musk spoke to a crowd of Tesla fans and some journalists on a film studio backlot in California to give us an update on the company’s much-talked-about pivot to robotics. […]

[…]

After promising that “unsupervised FSD” is coming to all of Tesla’s five models — “now’s not the time for nuance,” Musk told a fan — he showed off a driverless minibus and then a horde of humanoid robots, which apparently leverage the same technology that Tesla says will be ready for autonomous driving with no supervision. These robots — “your own personal R2-D2,” he said — will apparently cost less than “$30,000” “long-term,” Musk claimed, adding that these would be the biggest product of all time, as all 8 billion people on earth would want one, then two, he predicted.

These announcements are almost certainly bullshit, and correctly contextualized by Gitlin. Mix the axiom “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” with the boy who cried “wolf!”, and the result is this media event — and that is without factoring in the usual Tesla sloppiness. These are three brand new products, all of which are purportedly future-defining, rambled about in the span of about thirty minutes on a random Thursday in October. Nothing is finished. Musk called two of the products “Cybercab” and “Optimus Robots”, but the company’s website refers to them as “Robotaxi” and “Tesla Bot”. Everything is hypothetical until proven otherwise.

The robot is particularly galling. The automotive industry has a long history of building humanoid robots: Honda’s ASIMO, Toyota’s Partner series, and General Motors’ work on NASA’s Robonaut 2. Some of these perform more specialized tasks. All of them have been around for a while. None of them are in widespread use. Tesla’s should be treated as an elaborate fiction until anyone outside the company can confirm even the most fundamental qualities it is claimed to possess.

Oh, and speaking of claims on the website, I want to address this:

To create a sustainable future, we must democratize transportation. We do this by making driving more efficient, affordable and safe. Autonomy makes this future possible, today.

Musk — for the featherweight of his words — said the Robotaxi would cost “less than $30,000” and be available “before 2027” — that is, to be clear, not “today”. If this thing ever ships, it will still require car-like infrastructure and ample space, even though it carries only two people.

Public transit, which is available today, is the very definition of democratized transportation, especially if it has been carefully considered for the needs of people with disabilities. It is inexpensive for end users, requires less space per person than any car, and has a beneficial feedback loop of safety and usage. I am not arguing the two cannot coexist; perhaps some of this stuff makes sense in low-density sprawl. But I have little confidence the future will look like Musk’s vision, or that Tesla will be delivering it. Why would anyone still believe this too-rich carnival barker who lies all the time?

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Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Monday, Elon Musk tweeted a thing about Apple’s marketing event, an act that took Musk three seconds but then led to a large portion of the dwindling number of employed human tech journalists to spring into action and collectively spend many hours writing blogs about What This Thing That Probably Won’t Happen All Means.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Journalists are quick to insist that it’s their noble responsibility to cover the comments of important people. But journalism is about informing and educating the public, which isn’t accomplished by redirecting limited journalistic resources to cover platform bullshit that means nothing and will result in nothing meaningful. All you’ve done is made a little money wasting people’s time.

The speed at which some publishers insist these “articles” are posted combined with a lack of constraints in airtime or physical paper means the loudest people know they can draw attention by posting deranged nonsense. All those people who got into journalism because they thought they could make a difference are instead cajoled into adding something resembling substance to forty-four tweeted words from the fingers of a dipshit.

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