Many people dream of becoming a billionaire, but it's a world so beyond the imagination of most that we can’t begin to guess how people gained so much wealth.
Many people dream of becoming a billionaire, but it's a world so beyond the imagination of most that we can’t begin to guess how people gained so much wealth.
Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, but which companies has he earned his fortune from? According to this chart created by the team at Madison Trust Company, Elon’s road to billionaire status began back in 1995 when he started online business directory, Zip2, with funding from his father. Just four years later he sold Zip2 to Compaq Computer Corporation for $307 million. After selling Zip2, Elon Musk started X.com which merged with Confinity after a year to create PayPal. Just two years later PayPal was sold to eBay for a whopping $1.5 billion, and Elon used the money to invest in other companies that have since helped him earn his many billions.
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Twitter is undergoing a major change: the platform will soon
be known as “X,” as confirmed by the CEO Elon Musk himself. When you visit X.com,
you will be redirected to Twitter.com, and will also see a new “interim X logo”
in place of the iconic bird logo for Twitter.
The day before, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces session where after an hour of silence, he finally confirmed that the new Twitter logo would be out the next day. While Twitter’s business has already been renamed as X corp, it’s the first time that the platform’s logo will become a symbol for the change.
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As of March 2023, the richest person in the world is Bernard Arnault, as he and his family have a net worth of $214.4 billion. As the CEO, founder, and chairman of beauty empire LVMH, his has amassed his fortune after originally buying Christian Dior in 1985 for $15 million, and maximizing his profits.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently announced in his tweet that
Twitter will begin prioritizing replies in a new way in the coming weeks. Replies
will be prioritized in the following order: from people one follows, from verified
accounts and lastly from unverified accounts.
In January, it was observed that Twitter was going through significant
declines in tweet engagement, which was later found to be a result of
difficulties with implementation of new code changes, including re-ranking of
tweets.
While the new ranking method is limited to replies only, it could hopefully bring some exposure to tweets that deserve more engagement. However, this could also result in exposure given to the “wrong” verified accounts, such as spammers and attention seekers that intend to newsjack viral tweets.
Starting next
month, Twitter is taking away the SMS two factor authentication option away
from Twitter users except subscribers of Twitter Blue, hence making it a
Twitter Blue exclusive feature.
This means that only those who are willing to pay Twitter $8 a month will be able to keep their account safe from hacking. Explaining the reason behind its decision, Twitter says that it has “seen phone-number based 2FA be used - and abused - by bad actors.”
Tesla made quite a surprising announcement in January this
year, that it would be cutting prices on its vehicles by as much as 20%.
Even though price cuts are not new in the automotive world,
they surely are for Tesla. The company, which generally has been unable to keep
up with demand, has seen its order backlog shrink from 476,000 units in July
2022, to 74,000 in December 2022.
This has been attributed to robust production growth of
Tesla, which saw 2022 production increase 41% over 2021 (from 930,422 to
1,313,851 units).
Apparently, the days of “endless” demand of Tesla are over, Tesla
is going on the offensive by reducing its prices. This is a step that puts
pressure on competitors, but has also annoyed existing owners of this brand.
On Elon Musk’s demand to add a Bookmark UI to tweets,
Twitter has finally launched the functionality. The new Bookmark button can be
seen within the lower function display when a tweet is expanded.
Bookmarking tweets means saving them for later, which could lead to more engagement with tweets. Any time a user bookmarks a tweet, they will
be able to instantly access all their saved Bookmarks.
What’s interesting is that the Bookmarking button isn’t a brand
new addition to the app. It has actually always existed, but as Musk stated,
was hidden by “obscure UI.”
Bookmarking tweets can also be seen as another way of interacting with tweets that you don’t necessarily like. It is likely that people will be using the functionality to show their interest in tweets without having to tap the heart icon.
Twitter’s chief executive Elon Musk wants to bring users’
attention to an existing, underused feature in the app: tweet bookmarks. By bookmarking
tweets, the option of which currently lies within the share button, users can save
tweets that may be important to them.
To bring the bookmarking option out more in the open, as per Musk’s demand, Twitter is experimenting with a new display for the feature. In a preview shared by the company, the bookmark functionality can be seen in the top right of the tweet detail display.
Although the current position of Tesla in the Electric Vehicles market is at stake, because of all the negative headlines surrounding the company and the increasingly controversial CEO Elon Musk in recent weeks, it is not to forget the fact that the company’s cars are still very popular. Despite Musk’s Twitter takeover and the instability that came with it, it is still very early to determine if these factors will have a significant negative impact on demand for Tesla’s cars. Also, because Tesla very clearly currently positions as the maker of the most popular electric cars in the United States and in many parts of the world.
Elon Musk has suspended several personal accounts belonging
to journalists on Twitter, for allegedly sharing information regarding the whereabouts
of his private jet. The Twitter chief executive first suspended the @ElonJet
account belonging to Jack Sweeney and other accounts managed by him that were using
publicly accessible data to track locations of private jets. Musk later
expanded the suspensions to accounts owned by journalists who began sharing
tweets of the situation.
Musk even started a poll where he asked Twitter users when he should unsuspend the accounts. He later joined a Spaces chat with some of the journalists involved in the situation, as well as the @ElonJet account, where he informed them about the reasons that led him to his decision.
Here is Elon’s full appearance in @katienotopoulos’ spaces with banned journalists tonight pic.twitter.com/1xPFtrVjf6
— Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) December 16, 2022
Elon Musk
decided to bring a major change to how people use Twitter by announcing that users
will soon be allowed to post longer tweets containing up to 4000 characters. In addition to that, Musk also plans to enable
sharing of longer videos, so users would spend more time engaging with videos on Twitter instead of
switching to other video focused platforms, particularly YouTube. The integration would also open up monetization opportunities for creators.
Twitter has
already shared a preview of what longer tweets in text would look like and how
the process would work.
Elon Musk has filed a
motion with the SEC to put an end to the $44 billion takeover deal
that he had signed with Twitter, because of the company’s inability to provide
accurate information on the number of fake accounts on the platform.
According to Musk’s team, they made repeated requests to Twitter
for access to accurate information, but the company failed to comply with the
contractual requirements and offered only limited access to the required data, which
resulted in violation of the terms.
As per Musk’s filing, the information was meant to be
provided by Twitter for business purpose related to the consummation of the
transaction. However, Twitter made multiple moves to keep the information to
itself, such as by ignoring Musk’s requests, rejecting them for unjustified
reasons, and other times, even claiming to comply, but actually providing incomplete
or unusable information.
After having acquired Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed
last week that as part of the additional funding commitments, he had secured
around $7 billion to solidify his $44 billion Twitter takeover bid.
The Twitter-Musk deal included several financial partners, including
Sequoia Capital, Binance, Oracle chief Larry Ellison and Saudi Prince Alwaleed,
which will all now become minor shareholders of the social company, as the
previous shareholders will be bought out by Musk. This points in the direction
of Musk’s intentions regarding turning Twitter into a money-making machine.
The New York Times recently obtained a pitch deck that had been presented to the new shareholders. Some key points were found in the deck, which included: Musk’s plans to increase Twitter’s active user count to 600 million by 2025 and to 931 million by 2028, to increase revenue by five times by 2028, to reduce advertising income to around 45% of the company’s revenue, and lastly, to cut around 1,000 Twitter employees over the next year, before adding around 2,700 new employees by 2025.
Twitter has
confirmed that the company is being acquired by its latest, most significant board
member, Elon Musk, after Musk made a $44 billion offer to purchase the
company.
As far as Musk’s vision for Twitter goes, he plans to “privatize”
Twitter, reduce its reliance on ads, and make it a platform for free speech. This
means that Twitter could soon go through some major transformation under Musk’s
reign.
Will endeavor to keep as many shareholders in privatized Twitter as allowed by law
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022
Elon Musk bought
up a 9% stake in Twitter late last week and was immediately appointed to the company’s
board. It is expected that Musk will likely have a significant impact on how
the platform functions from now on.
It is important
to note that previously, Investment firm Elliott Management purchased a
4% stake in Twitter in an attempt to replace the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey with
a more business-focused leader. In a peace deal of sorts between Twitter and the
Elliott group, Elliott and Silver Lake Partners both gained a seat each on
Twitter’s board. As a result, Twitter established new growth targets: 315
million monetizable daily active users by Q4 2023 and $7.5 billion annual
revenue in 2023.
The targets were not as easy to achieve, and therefore led to pressure on the company, as a result of which, Dorsey was compelled to step down as Twitter’s CEO in November. Even though Dorsey was then replaced by CTO Parag Argrawal, Agrawal announced that Twitter would maintain its growth targets in Dorsey’s wake.
CEO of Tesla, Elo Musk just announced that people can now
use bitcoin for payment of the cars in the US. The company’s US website now
shows the option of paying using cryptocurrency. Musk added that the option
will become available to more users in other countries later this year.
You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2021
In addition to this news, Musk also shared the details about
the way Tesla is going to handle this new payment option. “Bitcoin paid to
Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency,” he
explained in a tweet.
Details about the bitcoin payment process are shared on Tesla’s website in the FAQ section. Users are given two options to initiate payment: by scanning a QR code or copying and pasting its bitcoin wallet address. Moreover, trying to send any other form of cryptocurrency to its wallet would likely result in a loss of funds as the transaction will not be received.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, just became the richest
person on Earth, a title that was previously owned by Jeff Bezos, CEO of
Amazon. This happened as Tesla’s stock price continued to rise, leading to Musk’s
net worth of about $188 billion.
.@elonmusk is now the richest person in the world at $190 billion.
— Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) January 7, 2021
Musk and Bezos’ rivalry in terms of personal wealth is
something that has been going on for years. It was reported that Bezos became
so envious of Musk’s success at one point, that it was Musk’s $1.3 billion
incentive package for Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada that became the reason for
the development of Amazon’s beauty pageant-style search for its second
headquarters.
The competition between Musk and Bezos doesn’t just end
here, but the two tech lords also own their own spaceflight companies; Bezos owns
his in Blue Origin, while Musk has his in SpaceX. They have also traded barbs about their
rockets and even fought over hallowed NASA real estate, with SpaceX eventually
gaining victory and becoming the only one of both the companies to successfully
reach orbit.
Technology has come a long way in the past decade. Ten years
have made a lot of difference in the technological world. We now have faster
internet, better smartphones, and more social platforms to use. Technology has
become a part of our everyday lives now more so than it was a decade ago.
From Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, we have seen a swift change in
areas of focus in terms of technology. Previously it was all about technology
to become compact, but now we are seeing automation and AI technology rising,
which makes us wonder what technology will look like in the next decade.
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