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      Banks Sell $4.7 Billion of X’s Debt, in a Sign of Investor Demand

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      The social media company is attracting investor interest because of Elon Musk’s close ties to President Trump and a recent jump in revenue.When Elon Musk bought X for $44 billion in 2022, more than a quarter of that was financed by loans from banks including Morgan Stanley. Banks normally quickly sell off such loans, but in this case they kept much of that debt because investors were reluctant to bet on the social media company’s floundering business.Mr. Musk’s newfound power in President Trump’s administration has helped change investors’ minds.On Thursday, the banks sold roughly $4.7 billion of X’s debt, according to two people familiar with the transaction, more than the $3 billion that they had originally intended to sell. Mr. Musk, who has become a close adviser to the president and is running a government efficiency initiative, has faced increasing questions about whether the companies he leads — including the electric automaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX — are benefiting from his position as Mr. Trump’s right-hand man.X has become a go-to platform for information on the administration’s plans, which Mr. Musk broadcasts to his account’s more than 217 million followers. Advertisers have returned in droves to X, people familiar with the deals said, fueling a boost in revenue. The company told investors that its revenue in December jumped 21 percent from a month earlier, a person with knowledge of the finances said.An X spokesman and Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Bloomberg previously reported the jump in revenue and details of the transaction.Selling the debt — which totaled $12.5 billion at the time of the acquisition — helps Mr. Musk and the banks, which have been saddled with it for two years. Just two months ago, investors were negotiating to buy that debt at a loss of 10 percent to 20 percent for the banks, one person involved in the discussions said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Apple and Google Restore TikTok to App Stores in the U.S.

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      The popular social media app was removed to comply with a new law that banned it in the United States.Apple and Google restored TikTok to their app stores in the United States on Thursday evening, several weeks after they removed the short-form video platform in compliance with a new law that banned it in the country.President Trump tried to pause enforcement of the TikTok ban with an executive order, but the companies were reluctant to bring TikTok back until they were certain they were not breaking the law.The law, signed last year, had called for ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19. The law targeted app store operators and internet hosting companies with steep financial penalties if they distributed or maintained TikTok.Mr. Trump’s executive order prompted confusion among technology companies. While Apple and Google kept TikTok out of their app stores, companies like Oracle, which provided back-end technology support for the app, resumed working with it after a brief shutdown in January.While Apple and Google blocked new downloads of TikTok, the app was largely unaffected if it was already downloaded on American phones. TikTok claims 170 million U.S. users.The return of the app to the stores is a positive sign for TikTok, which now has until early April to find a buyer. It’s also a remarkable turnabout for the company. Just a month ago, it was facing down a ban with wide bipartisan support in Congress. The law was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court — only to be upended by Mr. Trump.TikTok executives told video creators in a briefing call on Tuesday that it was optimistic that Apple and Google would soon reinstate the app, said H. Lee Justine, a TikTok creator and author, who was on the call.“They said that the administration had given them a lot of information that they wouldn’t be penalized and that they were really hopeful that any day now they would put it back in the app stores,” she said in an interview. “It makes me very hopeful that they felt that they could do this because hopefully this means that long term there’s not going to be issues and this will work out.”TikTok declined to comment on its return to the app stores or the briefing.This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More

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      Elon Musk’s X Settles Trump Lawsuit

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      X has agreed to pay in the range of $10 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump over the 2021 suspension of his account on the social media platform, according to a person briefed on the matter.The company, then known as Twitter, removed Mr. Trump from its platform after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, citing his inflammatory posts and arguing they could lead to more violence. Mr. Trump sued, claiming Twitter and other tech firms that removed his accounts had wrongfully censored him.Elon Musk, now X’s owner and a close adviser to the president, reinstated Mr. Trump’s account shortly after acquiring the company in 2022. Mr. Musk has thrown his support behind Mr. Trump, donating more than $250 million to his campaign, and is now running a government cost-cutting initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency.The settlement further cements the relationship between Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump. Details of the agreement were not made public in court filings, but X and Mr. Trump notified the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday that they had agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. Both parties agreed to pay their own costs, according to a court filing.The settlement amount was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. A spokesman for X did not respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear what entity would receive the money.Mr. Trump sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, the parent company of YouTube, after the platforms suspended his accounts in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. After the riot, Mr. Trump had used his Twitter account to praise his supporters, calling them “patriots.”Mr. Trump also posted that he would not attend the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., which Twitter’s safety teams said at the time could have signaled his supporters to stage another attack on that event. Twitter said it suspended Mr. Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, settled its lawsuit last month, agreeing to pay the president $25 million. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has also courted Mr. Trump in recent months, donating to his inauguration fund and making sweeping changes to Meta’s policies to allow for more types of speech across the company’s apps.In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit by Mr. Trump. ABC News said it would donate the money to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum.Meta agreed to similar terms in its settlement with Mr. Trump. About $22 million will finance Mr. Trump’s presidential library, with the remaining $3 million set aside to for Mr. Trump’s legal fees and other plaintiffs who joined the lawsuit. More

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      Digital Estate Planning: How to Prepare Your Social Media Accounts

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      When planning your estate, leave instructions for handling your online accounts, data and other electronic affairs.How do you want your social media pages, smartphone photos and computer files handled after you die? While property and money distribution are usually at the top of the estate-planning list, don’t forget to leave instructions regarding your digital accounts and assets — so your survivors are left with more than just random bits and pixels from your online presence.Here’s a short guide to getting your digital material in order, as well as advice for dealing with the accounts of those who departed without leaving directions.Create a Digital DirectiveA law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, enacted by most states, gives a chosen representative (like your estate’s executor) the authority to manage your electronic affairs. For specific instructions, create a document stipulating how you want your online accounts and all digital content handled when you die or become incapacitated, and keep it with your other estate papers.Giving access to your account user names and passwords will greatly help your representative, but proceed carefully. You will need a safe place to list the credentials for all your financial institutions, as well as for any e-commerce stores, insurance policies, online storage, email, social media platforms, cable and wireless carriers, medical apps, and media subscriptions.The 1Password app can hold all kinds of confidential information.1PasswordOne way to encrypt and store this sensitive information is to enter it all into a password-manager app. Wirecutter, the product review site owned by The New York Times, recommends 1Password ($3 a month for an individual plan, $5 a month for the shared family plan) or Bitwarden (free, with in-app upgrades). Apple and Google have their own free apps, which save and store passwords on devices running their software.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vance, in First Foreign Speech, Tells Europe That U.S. Will Dominate A.I.

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      Speaking in Paris at an artificial intelligence summit, the vice president gave an America First vision of the technology — with the U.S. dominating the chips, the software and the rules.Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.”But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly envisions as a junior partner, it must eliminate much of its digital regulatory structure — and much of its policing of the internet for what its governments define as disinformation.For Mr. Vance, who is on a weeklong tour that will take him next to the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s premier meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly intended as a warning shot. It largely silenced the hall in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “equity” to assure the technology is available and comfortable for underserved populations heard none of those phrases from Mr. Vance.He spoke only hours after President Trump put new 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, essentially negating trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed an indicator of the tone Mr. Trump’s national security leaders plan to take to Europe this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      While Trump blathers about tariffs and Gaza, Musk is executing a coup d’état | John Naughton

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      Way back in 2019, Steve Bannon, then a Trump consigliere, outlined in a TV interview a strategy for managing information. “The opposition party is the media,” he said, “And because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time… All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.”Since his re-election, Donald Trump has been following this script to the letter, and the media, not to mention the entire world, are feeling punch-drunk. Which is, as Bannon pointed out, enabling other members of the Trump crew to get their stuff done. Really bad stuff too, to which the world has not been paying enough attention.Prime suspect in this respect is Elon Musk, whom Trump has chosen to slash $2tn off US government spending. Late on Friday 31 January, he and a few of his goons gained access to the Department of Treasury payments system – the system that processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the US economy. More importantly, Musk and a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who has previously worked for two of his companies, were given the ability to make changes to the payments system, thereby enabling them to stop disbursements of taxpayers’ dollars to recipients that the Trump crowd decide are illegitimate – for example a $367m payment to an outfit called Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Inc.It’s conceivable, of course, that this payment was an example of the wasteful federal spending that Musk and co are pledged to root out and eliminate. But that is not the point. The point is that all the spending passing through the system constitutes expenditure that has been authorised by Congress. Traditionally, the system was run by apolitical civil servants who had no authority to decide whether a particular payment was unwise or unacceptable. Now, suddenly, that power has been appropriated by an unelected billionaire who spent a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that Trump was elected.But the Treasury coup is just one part of a bigger story. Musk is not just going after payments, he’s also going after jobs, salaries and the employment status of federal employees. And his strategy mirrors what he did to Twitter after being forced to buy it. At around 5pm on 28 January, millions of US government employees received an email from Musk with the subject line “Fork in the Road”. The message in the email was stark: accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign within nine days. It was more or less a replica of the email that Twitter employees received in November 2022 and it signals an intention to do to the federal bureaucracy what he did to Twitter in 2022: hollow it out and subject it to intensive personal control.It’s worth pondering the immensity of what’s happening while Trump blathers on about tariffs, acquiring Gaza, buying Greenland, trolling Justin Trudeau and generally “flooding the zone” with crap. As Mike Masnick, a distinguished tech commentator, puts it: “A private citizen with zero constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power – a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.”Musk’s arrival at the heart of American power signals a new, sinister kind of technocracy – an obnoxious blend of obscene wealth, narcissism, arrogance, determination, IQ and the kind of “solutionism” that believes there is no problem that cannot be solved by technology. He reminds Masnick of “a toddler ‘fixing’ a grandfather clock by removing its pendulum. Yes, the clock needed maintenance – but now it can’t tell time at all. The federal government absolutely needs reform, but what we’re seeing isn’t reform – it’s vandalism dressed up as innovation.”The strange thing is that what most people expected from Trump 2.0 was his usual performative chaos: perhaps a bit less than last time, but chaos nonetheless. What no one saw coming was a tech bro who spotted an opportunity to use AI to re-engineer the US government in the name of the “efficiency” that Silicon Valley worships, and was able to pay hundreds of millions to get into the driving seat. In the bad old days, insurgent colonels would surround the presidential palace with tanks and capture the radio station. Thanks to Trump, Musk didn’t have to worry about the palace, and he already had his own radio station (X), so he went straight to the heart of the matter – the Treasury. What we’re watching is nothing less than a thoroughly modern coup d’état.What I’ve been readingLLMs and a flawed paradigm
      An astute essay by Erik J Larsen on his Substack, Colligo, about the large language models that the tech industry calls “AIs”.How to raise your artificial intelligence
      A fascinating conversation with psychologist Alison Gopnik and AI scientist Melanie Mitchell in the LA Review of Books.The Musk junta Nice satirical piece by Garrett Graff on Doomsday Scenario, imagining how foreign correspondents would report on current events in Washington DC.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Trump and Musk Attack Journalists by Name in Social Media Posts

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      Since his inauguration, the president has been quick to demonize what he calls “the fake news media.” On Friday, both men demanded that individuals be fired.President Trump has made clear his animus toward mainstream media organizations. Now he’s getting more personal.Mr. Trump and his key lieutenant, Elon Musk, who has been empowered to run what they call the Department of Government Efficiency as a “special government employee,” have attacked journalists by name in recent days on the social media platforms they own: Truth Social and X.On his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump called for The Washington Post to fire Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and labeled him “incompetent.” Mr. Trump frequently posts on the account to his millions of followers and regularly condemns perceived enemies.Mr. Robinson had written in an opinion column on Thursday that top Republican senators “should be ashamed of themselves” for not standing up to Mr. Trump during the confirmation process for some of his cabinet picks and for not protesting Mr. Musk’s taking an ax to government departments like the United States Agency for International Development, which administers foreign aid programs. Mr. Robinson also appeared on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Friday to discuss his column.“So sad to see him trying to justify the waste, fraud, and corruption at USAID with his pathetic Radical Left SPIN,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He should be fired immediately!!!”In an email, a spokeswoman for The Post said: “Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with a 45-year record of integrity, professionalism and scrupulous reporting and commentary. The Washington Post stands behind Gene — just as it stands behind all journalists and news organizations dedicated to independent coverage and a free press.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Pauses Online Tirade to Preach Unity

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      Of all the many forms Donald J. Trump can take, maybe the most perplexing one is Pious Trump.It is a shape he shifted into shortly after 8 o’clock on Thursday morning to deliver a sermon of sorts on Capitol Hill for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. In the grand amphitheater of National Statuary Hall, members of Congress sat before him. There were leaders of the Republican Party, never so in thrall to him as they are now. There were Democrats, never so lost and powerless in their struggle against him as they are now.“Look at each other,” he urged. He said they were a “great group of people” and beseeched them to come together. “We have to make life better for everyone,” he said.President Trump, appealing to the better angels?Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle filled Statuary Hall on Thursday morning.Eric Lee/The New York TimesThis was somewhat amazing, since the various other forms of Mr. Trump happened to be running around with flamethrowers earlier that morning, torching the federal bureaucracy, the global order, the media, the opposition party in the room and even the messaging coming out of his own White House.Just before his arrival at the Capitol to preach unity, he had gone on a fiery posting spree. He demanded that CBS lose its broadcasting license. He trumpeted a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats had “STOLLEN” billions of dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development to pay off media outlets for slanted coverage. “DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE,” he wrote. “TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!” In another post a few minutes before that one, he elaborated upon his desire to grab the Gaza Strip, an idea that drew bipartisan condemnation and shocked even his own staff, who tried to clean it up yesterday, evidently to no avail. He described Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, pejoratively as a Palestinian.This was all difficult to square with the version of Mr. Trump who arrived at the Capitol a little over an hour later and had only warm words to say about Mr. Schumer. “Chuck, thank you very much,” Mr. Trump said as he read out a list of names of lawmakers he believed were present, “thank you.” (In fact, Mr. Schumer had skipped the ceremony to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More