Elon Musk takes witness stand in trial over Twitter takeover
Elon Musk testified Wednesday in a trial brought by Twitter investors, who allege the billionaire committed securities fraud as he was buying the social media company in 2022.The class-action lawsuit alleges Musk agreed to buy Twitter but then waffled for months, attacking the company with the goal of bringing down the stock price to get a better bargain.After contentious legal wrangling, Musk did eventually buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, his original offer, totalling around $44bn.His lawyers have argued that he did not aim to lower Twitter’s stock price or hurt its investors.
Monday’s proceedings began with the investors’ attorney questioning Musk about whether he was aware that his public broadsides against Twitter would sway stock prices, according to CNBC,Musk responded, saying the “stock market is like a manic depressive”,“My tweets have sometimes the opposite effect of what one would expect on stock prices,” he said, per CNBC,“Sometimes they have the expected effect,”Throughout 2022, Musk posted constantly to his millions of Twitter followers that the social network was rife with bots that produced spam and created fake accounts.
At one point, he tweeted that at least 20% of the accounts of Twitter were fake or spam, and if the company couldn’t prove otherwise, the “deal cannot move forward”.The trial is taking place in federal court in San Francisco under Judge Charles Breyer.During jury selection, nearly half of the prospective jurors were dismissed because they held strong negative opinions of Musk.Opening statements began Monday.“We’re here today because Elon Musk cheated investors,” Mark Molumphy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said during opening statements, according to Bloomberg.
“The evidence will show Mr Musk knew exactly what he was doing.”Musk’s lawyer, Michael Lifrak, shot back, saying the billionaire’s complaints about Twitter were legitimate and his concerns “were real and weren’t a fraud”.During the six months under scrutiny for the investor trial, roughly from April to October 2022, plaintiffs allege Musk aimed to pressure the board so that it would sell Twitter for a lower price than his initial offer.When Musk indicated he was backing out of the purchase in May 2022 and putting the buyout “temporarily on hold”, Twitter’s shares dropped precipitously, at times falling by 20%.The stock continued to be unstable for months.
Investors involved in the lawsuit say they sold their shares at prices below $54.20 when they thought Musk’s buyout offer was dissolving.After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he took it private and changed its name to X.Last year, he merged the business with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, and then brought both of those businesses under SpaceX, his rocket company.Musk, the richest person in the world with a net worth estimated above $800bn, is expected to take SpaceX public sometime this year in what is projected to be a record IPO.
Private investors have valued his conglomeration of businesses at $1,25tn,If the jury rules in favor of the Twitter investors, Musk could be required to pay them back for their reported losses,The decision could also influence other upcoming lawsuits against the billionaire, including one brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that alleges Musk violated the law by not disclosing his stake in Twitter in the requisite time period,Musk has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Now, the onus is on the investors’ lawyers to prove that Musk intentionally tried to manipulate Twitter’s share prices.The trial is expected to last two to three weeks.
Europe’s next-generation fighter jet project may collapse if row continues, says warplane maker
France and Germany’s next-generation fighter jet project could soon be “dead”, one of the two companies tasked with delivering it has warned, amid a worsening corporate rift over who gets to build the aircraft.Dassault Aviation, France’s leading warplane maker, said Airbus’s defence arm – which represents Germany and Spain – needed to cooperate on the €100bn programme otherwise it would collapse.“Airbus doesn’t want to work with Dassault, full stop. I take note. I never said I didn’t want to work with Airbus or with the Germans,” said Éric Trappier, Dassault’s chief executive, via an interpreter while presenting the company’s financial results on Wednesday
Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself
Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. The 36-year-old Florida resident had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. Then Google introduced its Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way.“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” Gavalas told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real
X to ban users from earning revenue if they post unlabelled AI-generated war videos
Elon Musk’s X will ban users from making money on the platform if they repeatedly post unlabelled AI-generated war videos, after social media feeds were flooded with fake battle scenes from the Iran conflict.The social media platform, which has about half a billion monthly active users, will suspend people from earning revenue from posts for 90 days if they put up AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI. A second infraction wouldlead to a permanent ban, it said on Tuesday night, after the first days of the conflict in Iran were marked by a torrent of bogus online footage.Timelines on X, as well as Instagram and Facebook, which are run by Meta, have carried numerous faked battle scenes, including Iranian rockets pursuing and shooting down a US jet – which was viewed 70m times, according to checks by BBC Verify – and another clip that used AI to replace smoke rising from the site of a real missile strike with a fake fireball several times bigger.Users can make hundreds of dollars a month on X as part of the platform’s advertising model if they build substantial followings approaching 100,000 people, which incentivises the production of shocking viral posts
Nvidia and UK Wealth Fund invest in British autonomous driving startup Oxa
Nvidia is investing in the British autonomous driving startup Oxa, alongside backing from the UK’s National Wealth Fund, in a boost to the country’s technology sector.The Oxford-based company, which has developed software for self-driving industrial vehicles, said it had raised $103m (£77m) from investors to focus on commercial solutions for that software, as well as its physical AI and robotics technology, and to push on with its global expansion plans.The fundraising includes $50m from the National Wealth Fund, owned by the Treasury, and backing from the US tech company Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures.Founded in 2014, Oxa now focuses on the automation of repetitive industrial driving tasks, such as the towing and carrying of goods in ports, airports and factories.The latest investor round also includes capital from existing shareholders the London-listed IP Group, which invests in British tech companies, the Australian superannuation (pension) fund Hostplus and BP Ventures, the UK oil company’s arm that backs innovative technologies
What was really behind Jack Dorsey laying off nearly half of Block’s staff?
Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better
OpenAI amends Pentagon deal as Sam Altman admits it looks ‘sloppy’
OpenAI is amending its hastily arranged deal to supply artificial intelligence to the US Department of War (DoW) after the ChatGPT owner’s chief executive admitted it looked “opportunistic and sloppy”.The contract prompted fears the San Francisco startup’s AI could be used for domestic mass surveillance but its boss, Sam Altman, said on Monday night the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for that purpose or being deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon’s existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped.Anthropic had insisted “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values”, leading the US president, Donald Trump, to call Anthropic “leftwing nut jobs” and directing the federal government to stop using its technology.Despite denials from OpenAI that the agreement allowed for surveillance use, commentators raised the spectre of the Snowden scandal, which broke in 2013, when it emerged the NSA was engaged in mass harvesting of phone and internet communications
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