Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy and all-star panelist discuss Elon Musk’s response to Rachel Alexander of The Arizona Sun Times’ tweet which displayed a recent piece regarding Kari Lakes election lawsuit.
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Florida U.S. Sen. Rick Scott is giving kudos to new Twitter CEO Elon Musk after Musk and journalist Matt Taibbi released a flurry of “Twitter files” from the company’s archives.
The files documented a pattern of how the social media giant increasingly suppressed free speech over the past few years. This includes nixing the New York Post’s story in October 2020 that exposed Hunter Biden’s business dealings, along with compromising photographs of President Joe Biden’s son.
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They got the band back together—to the extent the original members ever broke up in the first place.
Recent disclosures by independent journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed what other reporters have been covering for the better part of two years: According to files obtained by Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media platform protected Joe Biden and his family from a major and potentially election-altering scandal as millions of Americans were voting early for president in October 2020. Years of denials and dismissals related to Hunter Biden’s lucrative shakedown of hostile nations, including Russia and China, were set to explode just a few weeks before Election Day.
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Late Friday, Matt Taibbi used the Twitter platform to publish numerous tweets devoted to the site’s internal deliberations regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story that most major media suppressed during the 2020 election.
The story, which is what it was, is based on documents obtained from the platform’s new owner and is a marketing coup that will drive traffic to the site. It confirms just how savvy Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk, through alternative journalist Matt Taibbi, released a series of internal documents on Friday suggesting that the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee were able to manipulate speech on the platform through tools that Twitter made available.
That manipulation included the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story first reported by the New York Post. The emails appear to cite requests from “the Biden team” and “DNC” and include confirmations that Twitter “handled” their requests to delete posts.
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Elon Musk says Twitter may now be removed from the Apple App store, prompting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to defend the social media company.
“Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter and Tesla, tweeted Monday. “Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why. Who else has Apple censored?”
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Aaron Gulbransen in studio to discuss freedom of speech, the press, and the battle for the public square.
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New Twitter owner Elon Musk declared Saturday night that former President Trump’s account will be reinstated.
Musk made the decision after polling Twitter users Friday. More than 15 million people responded, with nearly 52% supporting the return of the 45th president to the social platform.
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At an all hands meeting with Twitter employees following the departure of several top executives over user privacy concerns, CEO Elon Musk told employees that he was not sure of the company’s financial prospects, saying that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question,” according to multiple reports.
At the same meeting, Musk also told employees that if they can “physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted,” Zoë Schiffer, the managing editor of tech newsletter Platformer, alleged in a thread on Twitter Thursday afternoon. The news comes after reports that a variety of high-level executives, including Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran, Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner — who also confirmed her departure in a Thursday tweet — and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty all resigned Thursday in response to concerns that Musk was sacrificing user’s data security for profits, according to The Verge, citing anonymous sources and the company’s internal messages.
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Billionaire business magnate Elon Musk on Monday urged “independent-minded” Twitter followers to vote for Republicans in the midterm elections Tuesday, arguing that shared power between the two parties is better for the country.
“To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Twitter’s new CEO wrote.
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Twitter began laying staff off Friday, with up to half its workforce expected to be fired in a cost-cutting move by new owner and CEO Elon Musk.
The move comes eight days after Musk’s $44 billion deal to purchase the company, and after more than a week of conflicting reports about the extent and timing of layoffs that employees considered to be inevitable, Reuters reported. In addition to layoffs, Musk is having remaining Twitter staff work on a “Deep Cuts Plan,” designed to save $1 billion per year in infrastructure costs including server space and cloud computing services, Reuters reported.
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The Treasury Department is weighing whether or not it has the authority to launch an investigation into Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening.
Under the terms of the deal, foreign investors, including a member of the Saudi royal family, could potentially have access to confidential financial and user data, according to The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal. Treasury Department officials are examining their legal options to investigate the deal, but whether they were aware of this potential information sharing was unclear and the Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) typically investigates foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens like Musk.
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I have never considered that my patronage of a business, or the lack thereof, would make or break the enterprise. So, I find it amusing that D-list celebrities believe their threats to leave Twitter could make any difference when it comes to the company’s bottom line.
This week, stars who haven’t been relevant in years, such as Toni Braxton and Sara Bareilles, announced that they would leave Twitter in the wake of its purchase by SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Braxton, who last had a Billboard 100 hit in the 1990s, said she was leaving because she saw “hate speech” on the platform since the acquisition late last week. Bareilles, who I think had a hit with “Love Song” in the early 2000s, claims the platform is “just not for me” anymore.
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Twitter’s sole director Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that he will be charging verified accounts $8.00 a month to retain their blue checkmark status.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
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Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday said he would “look into” why a story from Just the News about election ballots was marked as “unsafe” on the social media platform.
“I will look into this. Twitter should be even-handed, favoring neither side,” Musk tweeted early Sunday morning in response to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who posted the Just the News article, “Election ‘misinformation’ policing returns as Twitter flags JTN ballot harvesting report.”
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“The Bird is Freed!”
That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”
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On the day Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media platform flagged a post by Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon aboutt Florida Gov. GOP Ron DeSantis’ administration asking for a police probe into a Democrat politician’s whistleblower complaint about voting irregularities.
Solomon argues Twitter action Thursday night unfairly flagged the post – with the note “Warning: this link may be unsafe” – and is asking Musk, who has vowed to stop the platform from unjustly censuring content, to intervene.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told potential investors that he will cut roughly three-quarters of Twitter’s workforce once he secures control of the company.
The firm currently employs roughly 7,500 people. Documents the Washington Post obtained indicate that Musk plans to operate the platform with approximately 2,000 employees. Musk’s purchase of Twitter could reportedly close as soon as next week.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is proposed to buy Twitter at the price he originally offered, according to letter from his attorneys to those representing the social media company.
The letter, obtained by NBC News, was date Monday and confirmed news reports early Tuesday that Musk had offered Monday evening to purchase Twitter at $54.20 per share, which amounts to $44 billion for the entire company.
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Twitter shareholders voted Tuesday in favor of Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform, despite his efforts to get out of the $44 billion deal.
Musk, the multi-billionaire owner of SpaceX and electric car company Telsa, has tried to terminate the deal on multiple occasions, citing the platform’s alleged security problems.
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Cell phone carrier T-Mobile and Elon Musk’s spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX announced a cooperative initiative Thursday, which the two organizations claim will end dead zones in cell phone coverage.
Over 20% of the U.S. by land area and 90% of the world remain uncovered by traditional wireless networks, which rely on terrestrial cell phone towers to connect users to networks, according to a SpaceX press release. The new plan, dubbed “Coverage Above and Beyond,” will leverage SpaceX’s low-earth satellite network, known as Starlink, to broadcast T-Mobile’s wireless network into places that are traditionally not covered by terrestrial networks, according to T-Mobile’s press release.
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Twitter sued Elon Musk to force him to purchase the social media giant for $44 billion after Musk stated last week that he plans to walk away from the deal.
Despite deflecting the company’s legal threat with humor on Monday, Musk now faces a lawsuit in Chancery Court in Delaware, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
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Claiming that Twitter was in “material breach” of its agreement to sell the microblogging platform to him, Elon Musk said in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that he does not intend to purchase Twitter, invoking a massive response in the tech space.
“Today’s announcement that Elon Musk is abandoning his takeover of Twitter comes as no surprise to those of us who predicted the implosion for months,” GETTER CEO Jason Miller said in a statement. “But the lasting result of the failed acquisition will be permanent, and Musk deserves credit for further exposing the incurable, rotting, politically discriminatory culture inside the Blue Bird.”
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday announced that he was canceling plans to purchase social media giant Twitter, citing the company’s failure to produce information on fake accounts.
Musk sent a letter to Twitter’s board of directors on Friday announcing he would not acquire the company. He told the Securities and Exchange Commission that Twitter has “not complied with its contractual obligation,” according to the Associated Press.
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The world’s first trillionaires could be from Texas, according to a new analysis of the 30 richest people in the world.
A new report published by the software company Tipalti Approve estimates that newly relocated Texas resident, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk, could become the world’s first trillionaire by 2024. Houston native and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell could become a trillionaire by 2033.
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Elon Musk recently tweeted, “population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization.”
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Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey has exited the social media company’s board of directors.
The planned departure comes as Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk continues his attempt to purchase the company. The company initially announced last November that Dorsey would leave the board when his term expired at the company’s 2022 shareholder meeting, which took place Wednesday.
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New research reveals that Microsoft founder Bill Gates, formerly the world’s wealthiest man, has been donating hundreds of millions of dollars to dark money groups that have been publicly attacking Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the current wealthiest man in the world.
As reported by Breitbart, Gates’ foundation donated to 11 of the 26 organizations that signed onto an open letter last month demanding a boycott of Twitter by its advertisers over Musk’s recent purchase of the company. The report comes from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), which traced the money from the signatories of the letter back to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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A few weeks ago, Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before.
Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came.
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Twitter is not in business to make a profit or to give people free speech, but to do “something that’s good for the planet,” a company employee can be heard saying in a secretly recorded video.
The new undercover footage from Project Veritas features Lead Client Partner Alex Martinez discussing the company’s authoritarian views on speech, and denigrating Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a “loony toon” with “special needs.”
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When Elon Musk created a small school for his children and some of his SpaceX employees on the company’s California campus, he created a spark that could just now be catching on in other workplaces across the country.
In a 2015 interview about the school, the billionaire inventor said: “The regular schools weren’t doing the things that I thought should be done. So I thought, well, let’s see what we can do.” A year earlier he had pulled his boys out of an elite private school in Los Angeles and launched Ad Astra, a project-based school with no grade levels, no mandatory classes, and an emergent curriculum.
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Two top officials at Twitter were fired on Thursday, signaling ongoing internal chaos at the tech giant as Elon Musk prepares to take over the company.
According to ABC News, one of Twitter’s general managers, Kayvon Beykpour, was fired after working at Twitter for seven years. The same day, revenue and product lead Bruce Falck announced his firing in a tweet that has since been deleted. Beykpour described his situation in several tweets, claiming that CEO Parag Agrawal “asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction.” Falck’s Twitter bio now simply reads “unemployed.”
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Incoming Twitter owner Elon Musk said Tuesday he would reverse the social media platform’s ban on former President Donald Trump.
The decision to ban Trump, said Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur, was “morally wrong and flat-out stupid.”
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Florida is once again at the center of a Twitter war, this time by an Orlando pension fund attempting to slow its purchase after Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state was looking into ways it can potentially “hold accountable” Twitter’s board of directors.
The city of Orlando’s Police Pension Fund filed a class action lawsuit May 6 in an attempt to block or slow the sale of Twitter. It argues Delaware law prevents billionaire Elon Musk from immediately purchasing Twitter because it alleges he’s “an invested stockholder.”
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Former U.S. Senator David Perdue made a surprise visit Wednesday to Habersham County Airport, where he criticized social media platforms run by the progressive-dominated tech companies of Silicon Valley for their silencing of conservative voices.
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No risk, no reward.
That’s the lesson official Washington, D.C. should now be learning from former President Donald Trump’s foray into running a social media company, TruthSocial.com, which is currently running a successful public beta that Apple customers can download in the App Store.
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After reporting a factual story about Gov. Bill Lee (R) signing a bill into law making anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin available over-the-counter, Twitter has locked The Tennessee Star out of its account.
The company said that The Star’s reporting might pose a risk to public health, and in response, The Star will not be able to make posts for several hours.
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Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out.
Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time?
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed New York City attorney Akiva Cohen to the newsmaker line to comment upon the Elon Musk, Twitter buy, next steps, and anti-trust law.
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The reaction among the press and tech communities to Elon Musk’s efforts to purchase Twitter has been nothing short of apocalyptic. A common theme has been that democracy itself would be under threat if unelected billionaire oligarchs controlled what was allowed online. Yet this is precisely how social media works today. The Musk controversy, like the Cambridge Analytica story before it, highlights the real issue: the fight over content moderation is less about online safety and more about who controls the digital public square.
Only a year ago, the media cheered the unilateral decisions by a handful of billionaires to effectively banish then-President Donald Trump from the digital public square. Lawmakers and media outlets alike proclaimed the societal benefits of private companies controlling the digital public square beyond the reach of government. In contrast, the possibility of a libertarian-leaning billionaire like Musk wielding that same power has been presented as nothing short of an attack on democracy itself.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed official guest host Grant Henry in studio for another edition of Grant’s Rants.
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Billionaire Elon Musk reached a deal Monday to purchase social media giant Twitter for a sum of $44 billion.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said, per Reuters.
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Here’s your first clue Twitter is not really a business with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value – when Elon Musk made a public offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share (roughly $40 billion) the company’s management not only turned down the offer, but began to work on a poison pill defense aimed solely at Mr. Musk, who is already Twitter’s largest shareholder.
According to reporting by the New York Times, some investors and Wall Street analysts said that Mr. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share was too low, and that he would need to go to at least $60 a share to appeal to shareholders. That would be 25 percent higher than the share price when Mr. Musk announced this month that he had acquired a 9 percent stake in Twitter.
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Twitter’s board of directors on Friday unanimously adopted a plan to stop Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s plan to take private the social media company.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Ben Cunningham to discuss the tyranny of social media companies and their censorship of conservative voices.
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In a move that has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who became Twitter’s largest shareholder Monday, will now be a member of the company’s board of directors.
“I’m excited to share that we’re appointing [Musk] to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said Tuesday.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has questioned Twitter’s commitment to free speech, has taken a 9% stake in the social media platform, making him its largest shareholder.
Musk bought 73.5 million shares worth $2.9 billion, based on the closing price Friday, the Associated Press reported Monday.
However, what Musk intends to do as a result of the purchase remains unclear.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband purchased 2,500 shares of Tesla stock amid Democrats’ push for increased green energy spending.
Paul Pelosi, the Democratic House leader’s millionaire husband, purchased the tranche of Tesla stock on Thursday, when the company’s share price reached about $872 per share by the end of day, according to congressional filings published Monday. Pelosi bought the shares, worth roughly $2.18 million at the time, at a strike price of $500 per share.
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A recent report claims that the world’s top 10 richest men all saw their wealth double over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, while 99 percent of global income dropped dramatically during the same period.
As reported by ABC News, a study published on Monday by the group Oxfam showed that the collective wealth of the top 10 doubled from approximately $700 billion to over $1.5 trillion between March of 2020 and November of 2021. During that same time, over 160 million people fell into poverty as incomes plummeted. The increase for the top 10 in less than two years represented a greater increase for their wealth than their growth over the previous 14 years combined.
The 10 men who were the focus of Oxfam’s study were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffett. The data for the study was gathered from the World Bank.
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Investment bank JP Morgan filed a complaint against Tesla late Monday alleging the electric car company owes the firm over $162 million.
The complaint centers on stock warrants, financial instruments allowing a buyer to purchase shares at a set price within a certain length of time, that JP Morgan bought from Tesla in 2014. The two firms agreed to a “strike price” at the time of purchase, and they agreed that if Tesla’s share price exceeded the strike price within the agreed-upon length of time, the electric car company would have to give JP Morgan stock or cash equivalent to the difference in prices, JP Morgan said in the complaint.
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