Elon Musk news - live: Musk dumps $4bn worth of shares in Tesla shares as personal wealth drops below $200bn

Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk has reportedly discussed the possibility of eventually putting all of Twitter behind a paywall.

Platformer reported citing sources familiar with the matter that the Tesla chief and investor David Sacks discussed the idea of charging most, or all users, a subscription fee to use Twitter.

Under one such plan that was reportedly discussed, Twitter might allow everyone to use the microblogging platform for a limited amount of time every month but require a subscription for continued browsing.

One amazing nugget from early Twitter investor Chris Sacca: Elon Musk is a skilled magician.

While criticising Mr Musk’s decisions so far, and arguing that the Tesla and SpaceX mogul needs people around him who are willing to tell him the truth, Mr Sacca paused to express his overall admiration for Mr Musk.

“I've known Elon a long time... I've had fun nights out with him (did you know he is a skilled close-up magician?), and I've learned a lot from him. He's given me solid advice multiple times, and he has personally accelerated my ambitions to unf*** the planet.”

A skilled close-up magician? I’m not sure why, but somehow this makes complete sense.

Here’s my full story on Daniel Radcliffe’s non-suspension from Twitter.

Numerous Twitter users and some news outlets shared claims on Monday that the 33-year-old actor was among the celebrities who had their accounts suspended for impersonating Mr Musk.

The rumour appeared to have begun with a tweet from ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic, the musical parody artist whom Radcliffe is portraying in a new Hollywood biopic, who said: “Oh no, they suspended @danielradcliffe’s Twitter account! Wasn’t it obvious he was doing a PARODY???”

But according to the Internet Archive, the account @danielradcliffe had already become inactive some time between September 2009 and August 201.

Perhaps now is a good time to consider the exact nature of Elon Musk’s political beliefs.

The 51-year-old mogul has often been coy and contradictory about his politics, donating to both Republicans and Democrats while variously declaring himself a “moderate”, a “socialist”, and “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”.

His recent support for Republican candidates marks his most forthright political messaging so far, but he stopped short of presenting himself as a doctrinaire conservative.

And, if you dig deeply enough, you can find a clear strain of technocratic utopianism – apparently influenced by his famous love of science fiction – running through his statements.

Check out my long read about Elon Musk’s political beliefs here.

In his lengthy Twitter thread, early investor Chris Sacca issued a stark warning to Elon Musk about his massive layoffs, which have reportedly cut around 50 per cent of Twitter’s 7,400-strong staff.

”Every day it's looking more like an uphill battle,” he said. “So much product and policy talent was pushed out the company door, and, my god, you just can't fire that many engineers, operations [staff], and SREs and expect the site to stay healthy.”

”SREs” refers to “site reliability engineers”, a specialised cadre of employees that keep online services ticking away even under sustained high traffic or unusual circumstances.

Last week, the cloud computing economist Corey Quinn raised similar fears, saying Mr Musk’s reported plans to cut cloud spending by $1bn could lead Twitter to suffer outages or even permanent data loss.

“Most client requests are of the form ’help us predict and control our spend’,” he said. “Occasionally it's ’lower the bill.’ Almost never is it ’lower the bill by X dollars.’

“That happens as a side-effect of the others; pursuing it as the defined goal is courting disaster... very quickly you're not cutting fat, but muscle and bone.”

One of Twitter’s earliest investors has said that Elon Musk needs people around him to “speak some truth to power” and say no to his worst ideas.

Chris Sacca, who invested $25,000 in Twitter back in 2006 and was its 102nd ever user, said on Monday that he feared Mr Musk was “straight-up alone right now and winging this” due to being surrounded by yes-men.

“I've known Elon a long time. I've admired his thinking and ambition. His ability to note and question the assumptions implicit in the rest of our thinking is a rare type of genius I've only seen in the greatest minds. His success to date is not an accident,” Mr Sacca said.

”But I've recently watched those around him become increasingly sycophantic and opportunistic. Simply put, agreeing with him is easier...

“This guy is alone. He has plenty of ’pals’ and is the life of parties and dinners. But the hard truth is that he is straight-up alone right now and winging this. If you're trying to make sense of anything, that context might help...

“Yet, I really want this thing to work. The only way I see that happening is if anyone around Elon can speak some truth to power and complement his bold and ambitious instincts with desperately needed nuance.”

The rapper and movie star Ice T is unimpressed by Mr Musk’s takeover.

“Musk spent $44bn and I can still block him... lol... I'll probably get banned for that tweet,” he said on Monday afternoon.

You can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

Even as he fends off lawsuits over his firing of Twitter employees, Mr Musk is facing a separate legal challenge in his role as chief executive of Tesla.

According to Reuters, a Tesla shareholder named Richard Tornetta is seeking to rescind Mr Musk’s record 2018 pay package, which awarded him a combined $56bn.

The suit accuses Mr Musk of being a “part-time CEO”, noting that he only worked for the electric car maker on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while working for his rocket company SpaceX on Mondays and Thursdays.

That was before Mr Musk also became chief executive of Twitter, a major social network with around 450 monthly users that has made an overall loss in all but two of the last 11 years.

The trial begins on Monday 14 November.

Reports that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe was banned from Twitter under Elon Musk’s new rules appear to be false.

Numerous Twitter users appeared to take it literally when ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic, the musical parody artist whom Mr Radcliffe is portraying in a new Hollywood biopic, tweeted on Monday: “Oh no, they suspended @danielradcliffe's Twitter account! Wasn't it obvious he was doing a PARODY???”

It is true that there is an account on Twitter called @danielradcliffe, which has been suspended.

But Mr Radcliffe is well-known for never using social media, including Twitter. “I considered getting a Twitter,” he said in 2020, “and I 100 per cent know that if I did, you all would be waking up to stories of, like, ‘Dan Radcliffe gets into fight with random person on Twitter’.”

Moreover, according to the Internet Archive, the @danielradcliffe account became inactive some time between September 2009 and August 2011, when the Archive’s automated web checks began redirecting to Twitter’s “account suspended” page.

In other words, @danielradcliffe never was the real Mr Radcliffe and was probably suspended years ago, while Mr Yankovic appears to have been making a joke.

All of this could have been avoided if Twitter, at any point in the last 16 years, had been transparent enough to add information to suspended users' profiles showing how and why they were banned. Alas, it’s hard to imagine such a feature being prioritised now that half the company’s employees have been laid off.

Here’s my full story on Mr Musk’s odd meme featuring a Nazi soldier.

This is actually not the only time in the last few days when Mr Musk received Nazi-related criticism. He also appears to have deleted a tweet in which he responded positively to a user who posted an apparent quote by Voltaire.

As it turns out, this quote actually originated with an American neo-Nazi and convicted possessor of child sexual abuse images, who has written of his frustration that Voltaire gets credit for his views.