Carbon Chemist

Tag: x

  • Trump Fans Spread Debate Conspiracy About Microphone Earrings

    Trump Fans Spread Debate Conspiracy About Microphone Earrings

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    In the wake of a debate performance that has been widely panned as disastrous, former president Donald Trump and his supporters have tried to explain the evening away by posting conspiracies about a “rigged” event, deeply misogynistic attacks on vice president Kamala Harris, and wild claims about the vice president’s earrings.

    Within minutes of the debate ending, a brand new conspiracy emerged on X, focusing not on the content of what was said but on the earrings that Harris was wearing.

    “It appears Kamala Harris was being coached by using earphones embedded in her earrings during the ABC presidential debate against President Trump,” one pro-Trump disinformation account with over half a million followers posted on X. Another major pro-Trump account also shared the conspiracy while the debate was still going on, and that post has been viewed over 5 millions times.

    The claim is based on the fact that the earrings Harris was wearing bear a passing resemblance to a pair of so-called “audio earrings” that were sold on Kickstarter last year. “NOVA H1 Audio Earrings—the first and only wireless earphones embedded in a pair of pearl earrings,” the product description reads.

    This conspiracy quickly gained traction among Trump supporters on Tuesday night as they grasped to excuse his poor performance. Numerous pro-Trump clickbait accounts on X and other supporters reshared the conspiracy, including Laura Loomer, a failed Florida congressional candidate and Trump acolyte who traveled with the former president to the debate.

    Throughout the debate, Harris deftly attacked Trump’s weak spots—the size of the crowds at his rallies, his inherited wealth—and the former president reacted angrily, lashing out with nonsensical answers and outright lies.

    Trump’s answers were filled with disinformation, including lies about abortion, elections and the Capitol riots. He even resorted to pushing the false conspiracy about illegal Haitian immigrants eating the pets of people in Springfield, Ohio.

    “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump claimed, repeating a baseless conspiracy that has been trending on social media platforms like X in recent days and promoted by vice presidential candidate and Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.

    This claim and many others were quickly fact-checked and debunked by ABC News hosts and debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, a fact that clearly further incensed Trump.

    Almost immediately after the debate finished, Trump reiterated the conspiracy about a “rigged” debate from ABC News that he has been promoting for the last week.

    “I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, where he tried to defend his claim about migrants eating pets by sharing links to unsubstantiated rumors.

    This line of attack was echoed by Trump’s biggest supporters. “Weird how the hack moderators at [ABC News] are only ‘Fact checking’ Trump and allowing Kamala to lie nonstop,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X. “The Fake News is the enemy of the people!”

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  • What You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your Privacy

    What You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your Privacy

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    But X also makes it clear the onus is on the user to judge the AI’s accuracy. “This is an early version of Grok,” xAI says on its help page. Therefore chatbot may “confidently provide factually incorrect information, missummarize, or miss some context,” xAI warns.

    “We encourage you to independently verify any information you receive,” xAI adds. “Please do not share personal data or any sensitive and confidential information in your conversations with Grok.”

    Grok Data Collection

    Vast amounts of data collection are another area of concern—especially since you are automatically opted in to sharing your X data with Grok, whether you use the AI assistant or not.

    The xAI’s Grok Help Center page describes how xAI “may utilize your X posts as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes.”

    Grok’s training strategy carries “significant privacy implications,” says Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN. Beyond the AI tool’s “ability to access and analyze potentially private or sensitive information,” Briedis adds, there are additional concerns “given the AI’s capability to generate images and content with minimal moderation.”

    While Grok-1 was trained on “publicly available data up to Q3 2023” but was not “pre-trained on X data (including public X posts),” according to the company, Grok-2 has been explicitly trained on all “posts, interactions, inputs, and results” of X users, with everyone being automatically opted in, says Angus Allan, senior product manager at CreateFuture, a digital consultancy specializing in AI deployment.

    The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is explicit about obtaining consent to use personal data. In this case, xAI may have “ignored this for Grok,” says Allan.

    This led to regulators in the EU pressuring X to suspend training on EU users within days of the launch of Grok-2 last month.

    Failure to abide by user privacy laws could lead to regulatory scrutiny in other countries. While the US doesn’t have a similar regime, the Federal Trade Commission has previously fined Twitter for not respecting users’ privacy preferences, Allan points out.

    Opting Out

    One way to prevent your posts from being used for training Grok is by making your account private. You can also use X privacy settings to opt out of future model training.

    To do so select Privacy & Safety > Data sharing and Personalization > Grok. In Data Sharing, uncheck the option that reads, “Allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning.”

    Even if you no longer use X, it’s still worth logging in and opting out. X can use all of your past posts—including images—for training future models unless you explicitly tell it not to, Allan warns.

    It’s possible to delete all of your conversation history at once, xAI says. Deleted conversations are removed from its systems within 30 days, unless the firm has to keep them for security or legal reasons.

    No one knows how Grok will evolve, but judging by its actions so far, Musk’s AI assistant is worth monitoring. To keep your data safe, be mindful of the content you share on X and stay informed about any updates in its privacy policies or terms of service, Briedis says. “Engaging with these settings allows you to better control how your information is handled and potentially used by technologies like Grok.”

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  • X Is Working With a GOP Consulting Firm

    X Is Working With a GOP Consulting Firm

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    X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, seemingly to handle the messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.

    When WIRED emailed X for comment about the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, a reply came from Michael Abboud, the managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm, Targeted Victory. According to his LinkedIn, Abboud worked for the State Department in the last year of the Trump administration and as press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

    Targeted Victory has had contracts with several Republican campaigns and political action committees (PACs) this election season to the tune of over $75 million, according to OpenSecrets. The group’s largest client is the Republican National Committee, which spent $11,128,739 on the firm between January 2023 and May 2024.

    In his emailed reply, Abboud referred WIRED to a company statement from X about the suspension of the platform in Brazil, and said to reach out with further questions.

    Elon Musk, X’s owner, has become more overt about his personal political views in recent months. In July, shortly following the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, Musk said he would be backing his candidacy for president. He then said he’d establish a PAC to support Trump to the tune of $45 million per month (he later backpedaled on the exact amount).

    WIRED reached out to Targeted Victory and Abboud directly, and neither immediately responded to a request for comment.

    X would not be the first tech company to work with the group. In 2022, reporting from the Washington Post found that Meta had hired Targeted Victory to run a campaign to sour public opinion on TikTok. The messaging campaign focused on framing TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, as a threat to Americans’ privacy and to the mental health of teens and children.

    An emailed response from Targeted Victory on behalf of X is particularly notable; when journalists contact the press team at X, they rarely receive a reply. When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, one of his first moves as CEO was to lay off a substantial number of the company’s 6,000 employees. That move not only included the vast majority of the platform’s trust and safety team, the people who keep hate speech and disinformation off the platform, but also the company’s communications team.

    For nearly a year, the auto response to the press email returned the poop emoji. More recently, the auto-response says “Busy now, please check back later.”

    But X and Musk have been having an unusually rough time in the public eye over the past few weeks. After X violated an April court order from the Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) requiring the company to remove certain accounts and content that the court said spread disinformation about the integrity of the country’s elections, Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered access to the platform blocked in Brazil. The country is X’s third largest market, and for months, Musk has railed against Moraes online, calling him a dictator, accusing the court of censorship, and even comparing him to the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.

    Meanwhile, Nick Pickles, the company’s head of global affairs, announced on Thursday that he was resigning, and investors are saying that their investments in the company are performing substantially worse than any had predicted.

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  • Why It’s So Hard to Fully Block X in Brazil

    Why It’s So Hard to Fully Block X in Brazil

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    The social network X has been largely inaccessible in Brazil since Saturday, after the country’s Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over the company’s misinformation, hate speech, and moderation policies.

    With Brazil’s population of 215 million people, a mature democracy, a sprawling land mass, and more than 20,000 internet service providers, it isn’t straightforward to block a web platform in the South American nation. And while the biggest ISPs have implemented the ban, many are still scrambling to comply with the order, leaving a patchwork of access to the site.

    “Brazil has made headway blocking X on the main internet providers, but our telemetry indicates there’s a long tail of local and regional ISPs where the service is still available,” says Isik Mater, director of research at the internet censorship analysis group NetBlocks.

    The Open Observatory of Network Interference reported that a similar progression played out in when Brazil’s Federal Police obtained a court order in April 2023 for ISPs to block the communication platform Telegram because it would not fully share information about users involved in neo-Nazi group chats. Some large ISPs began blocking Telegram immediately; “however, the block was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor was it implemented in the same way,” the group wrote. “This suggests lack of coordination between providers, and that each ISP implemented the block autonomously.”

    A similar progression has been playing out with the X ban. Brazil’s 20,000 ISPs produce a notably competitive market, but only a few have infrastructure nationwide. About 40 percent are tiny regional providers with 5,000 customers or fewer. The human and digital rights watchdog Freedom House rates Brazil’s internet freedom as “partly free” and trending to be more restrictive, because of the country’s far reaching efforts to crack down on political misinformation in recent years and its three-day ban on Telegram. Brazil also blocked the secure communication platform WhatsApp in December 2015 and again in May 2016 because it did not respond to similar data requests.

    Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency ANATEL did not respond to WIRED’s multiple requests for comment.

    Unlike in countries including Russia, Iran, and China, there is currently no legal apparatus or technical infrastructure by which the Brazilian government can systematically and comprehensively restrict access to particular websites or online platforms or impose connectivity blackouts on its citizens.

    Reports indicate that many Brazilian ISPs that have implemented the ban are using the technique known as “DNS filtering” to block access to X. The Domain Name System is the internet’s phonebook for looking up the IP addresses associated with URLs like www.wired.com. DNS queries are sent to a DNS “resolver” that does the IP address lookups, and ISPs can configure their resolvers to filter or block requests for particular websites.

    Mobile apps like X’s Android and iOS apps don’t rely on DNS, though, so DNS filtering alone is not enough to block all connections to a web platform. Some Brazilian ISPs seem to also be using IP address “sinkholing”—redirecting online traffic to a different server than the users intended to visit—as a way to send traffic meant for X into the abyss.

    “We’re seeing variation by provider in Brazil and right now it looks they’re each trying their own thing to see what works,” NetBlocks’ Mater says. “Brazil has a diverse network infrastructure with lots of ways for data to enter and leave the country, so there isn’t that centralized choke point and ‘kill switch’ we see in [some] authoritarian-leaning countries.”

    VPN usage has surged in Brazil this week under the ban as a way around ISP attempts to block X, but the court order ban includes a provision that people could be charged a fine of 50,000 reais—about $8,900—per day for using circumvention tools like VPNs.

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  • Elon Musk’s Standoff With Brazil Reaches a Tipping Point

    Elon Musk’s Standoff With Brazil Reaches a Tipping Point

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    Brazil’s top court is expected to block access to X in the country of more than 200 million people as a prominent judge locks horns with site owner Elon Musk.

    Musk has been engaged in a months-long feud with Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes over X’s moderation policies. Earlier this year, Moraes opened an inquiry against X after Musk rebuffed a court order to block accounts supporting former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro that allegedly spread fake news and hate speech.

    Internet firms must have a legal representative in Brazil who can act as a go-between for the government and the corporation. X currently doesn’t have one, because the site shut down its offices in Brazil earlier this year after it said Moraes threatened the legal representative with arrest as part of the inquiry. A Supreme Court-imposed deadline for X to install a new representative passed on Thursday night.

    “Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil—simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents,” X’s global affairs account claimed in a post on Thursday night. “These enemies include a duly elected Senator and a 16-year-old girl, among others.”

    Musk quoted that post and alleged that Moraes is “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge.”

    In its statement, X framed the court’s decisions as breaking Brazil’s own laws, alleging they are “illegal” and saying it would publish all related court documents.

    Moraes’ office did not immediately return a request for comment.

    On Friday morning, X appeared to still be available in Brazil, with users posting from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

    Still, it appears the wheels are turning. Moraes already froze bank accounts belonging to Starlink, the satellite internet firm that Musk owns a portion of, this week. A statement from Starlink posted to X said that the company has a quarter-million customers in Brazil and that the action was an “unfounded” attempt to hold Starlink responsible for fines levied against X for failing to turn over documents. The company said it would seek a legal remedy.

    A nation as large as Brazil blocking X would be a significant event regardless of the circumstances, but it’s worth noting that it comes amid a global push to reign in large platforms and their billionaire owners.

    This week, billionaire Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France and charged with “complicity” in a raft of serious crimes occurring on the app, which has gained a reputation for being lightly moderated over the years. The arrest sent shockwaves through the global tech industry, with Musk commenting, “dangerous times.”

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  • ‘Unprecedented Times’ Is the New Normal

    ‘Unprecedented Times’ Is the New Normal

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    The afternoon Joe Biden announced his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, eight days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and well into a year of axis-tilting events, @DifficultPatty posted a question on X, thirsty for an answer: “Which wine pairs best with unprecedented times?”

    “All of them,” replied one user.

    “Apocalypse IPA,” said another. “It’s a real thing.”

    Also real are the times we continually find ourselves. All devastation and disquiet. That’s the vibe of late, anyway. New historical benchmarks sprout with wild surprise on what feels like a weekly basis, and a collective mood has developed across social media that we live in a constant state of “unprecedented times.”

    The phrase, now a fixture of the zeitgeist, initially shot into pop discourse around 2015 during Trump’s first presidential campaign, a campaign, you’ll remember, that fed on a specific American lust for political agitprop. It has since become shorthand for the continuous spiral of everyday reality. Not long after, as the spread of Covid-19 reengineered work and home life, the phrase further lodged itself into our shared vocabulary, recast as a convenient descriptor for an increasingly inconvenient future.

    A study conducted in 2020 by The New York Times and research firm Sentieo found that the phrase saw a 70,830 percent increase in usage in corporate presentations from the previous year (outpacing du jour expressions like “new normal” and “you’re on mute”). In an article published by MIT, titled “Surviving and thriving in unprecedented times,” Christa Babcock, a CEO and alum on the business school, advised entrepreneurs to embrace the difficulty in front of them: “Expect that things will not return to the way they were and be thrilled about it.”

    Only, for the rest of us, the constant, uncomfortable change was the problem.

    The phrase was gaining traction offline and on. “Only difference between millennials and gen z is how many ‘unprecedented times’ u live thru before climate change swallows ur house,” @bocxtop tweeted in February 2022 when X was still called Twitter. That same year, 19 students were gunned down at an elementary school in rural Texas and California was hit with record unemployment . In grocery stories across the country, food prices steadily climbed as a result of the war in Ukraine.

    Today, the phrase has magnified beyond actual meaning, a cheap emblem of our erratic cultural mood. It is uniformly used to describe just about every fresh hell that emerges, from the US election and the conflict in Gaza to the menacing threat of climate catastrophe. Living through “unprecedented times” is our new normal on social media.

    Congestion pricing in New York City? “More unprecedented times is all,” Jared of @TransitTalks said on TikTok. The same went for giant spiders, a canceled Tenacious D tour, relationship break-ups, and the unraveling social unrest in the UK. Unprecedented—all of it.



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  • Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero

    Elon Musk Is No Climate Hero

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    WIRED has been writing about Elon Musk—he of the electric cars, space rockets, tunnel-boring machines, implantable brain interfaces, Mars mission, and internet shitposting—for a long time. He’s always been unpredictable. And yet the most shocking part of his two-hour interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, broadcast live on X earlier this week, may just have been what Musk didn’t say.

    It happened around the 50-minute mark, during a very Trumpian discussion of gas and electricity prices. They were up nationally, Trump said, but “when that comes down and [sic] we’re going to drill, baby, drill.”

    The siren song of the oil and gas industry! Literally: Drill, baby, drill! And Musk, he of the—I’m going to say it again—electric cars and “saving the world” schtick, didn’t pipe up until a full two minutes later, when he suggested that Trump set up a “government efficiency commission” to curb government spending. Later, he and Trump did have a brief exchange on the science of climate change. But Musk took pains to emphasize that the oil and gas industry isn’t the problem. “I’m pro-environment, but … I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry, because they’re keeping civilization going right now,” he said.

    This felt like a departure. Musk has spent a large chunk of his career casting himself as an environmental champion, sometimes going so far as to paint himself as the one man standing between the world and disaster. He has told the story of Tesla, in particular, as a hero’s journey to save the world through a transition to a sustainable energy economy. “I think I am objectively one of the world’s leading environmentalists in terms of doing things,” he said at an Italian political event last December.

    In 2017, Musk told Rolling Stone about the clear existential threat of climate change with a flair that still feels familiar. “Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” he said. “I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.” Musk has also regularly accused critics of carrying water for “fossil fuel companies.”

    Oh, and remember that time (June 2017) that Musk quit three of Trump’s presidential councils after the US pulled out of the Paris climate accords? “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

    Musk’s newer and wishy-washy approach to climate also reflects not only his very vocal embrace of far-right politics but also a new story he’s telling about Tesla. For the past few years, and especially as the chatter around artificial intelligence has hit a fever pitch, Musk has positioned his electric-auto maker as a path-breaker in robotic intelligence, too. In 2019, Musk announced that Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by the end of the year. (It didn’t). More recently, Tesla reportedly shifted resources from building a more affordable electric car, the mythical Model 2, to releasing a purpose-built robotaxi, even though the company has yet to reveal any true self-driving technology. (An unveiling event is scheduled for October.) Musk has said repeatedly that Tesla is an AI and robotics company and should be valued by investors as such. If Musk is backing off his endorsement of climate change science, it’s reasonable to ask if that relates to his marketing pivot for the most valuable car company in the world.

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  • The Who’s Who of Political Influencers

    The Who’s Who of Political Influencers

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    This is a very exciting day! In addition to a fresh makeover for this newsletter, I just published a new project today outlining some of the biggest names in online political influencing from both the right and the left.

    Over the past week, I crowdsourced the names of some of the top meme accounts, TikTokkers, and podcasters from across the political spectrum, and we built this interactive list. You’ll probably see some faces you recognize from your own social media feeds, but with how fragmented and personalized social media has become in recent years, it’s nearly impossible for the average internet user to keep up with everyone. This list can serve as a sampling for what’s out there in the world of digital politics, from micro influencers to mega celebrities.

    This is an edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. Sign up now to get it in your inbox every week.

    Politics has never been stranger—or more online. WIRED Politics Lab is your guide through the vortex of extremism, conspiracies, and disinformation.

    A Political Who’s Who Online

    In 2024, influencer marketing became a mainstay in US politics. The White House, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, former president Donald Trump’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Republican National Committee have all built out vast networks of influencers and content creators. For the presidential candidates, their influencers follow them around the country for rallies and fundraisers, providing them with access to their massive followings. A whole political-creator cottage industry has boomed, with companies like Good Influence working to directly connect creators with the campaigns and issues they care about.

    What I love about this list is that it recognizes how impossible it is to account for everyone in the digital political space. Instead, think of this project like a chocolate sampler that includes the best examples of all the flavors of political creators that exist online this cycle. Some are much smaller, focusing on specific state legislatures. Others are billionaires, like Elon Musk. If you hover over someone’s name, you’ll see what their primary platform is, how many followers they have, a description of what they do, and how they’re connected to one another,and to the presidential campaigns.

    While building this out, I noticed a handful of significant differences between the types of creators Democrats and Republicans sought to collaborate with online. Specifically, right-leaning creators tended to have much larger audiences than those who worked with left-leaning campaigns and organizations. To me, that showed that Democrats are spending a lot more time scouting out individuals who reach specific demographic groups that could prove important for their electoral outcomes.

    Interestingly, that finding corresponds with how the parties have been spending money on digital ads for years. Since I started covering this beat, I’ve spoken with a number of digital advertising experts who often remark that Republicans tend to target their ads statewide, while Democrats like to hypertarget theirs at specific zip codes. This is just a general trend, and not necessarily a rule (remember Cambridge Analytica?), but it would explain the size difference among the creators’ followings. In November, I guess we’ll see whether bigger really is better in this regard!

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  • Elon Musk’s X Sues Advertisers Over Alleged Conspiracy to Boycott the Platform

    Elon Musk’s X Sues Advertisers Over Alleged Conspiracy to Boycott the Platform

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    X today filed a lawsuit against a group of major advertisers for allegedly conspiring to withhold advertising dollars from the social media platform, which, since Elon Musk’s takeover, has been seen as more amenable to hosting controversial content.

    The suit, filed in federal court in Texas, says dozens of advertisers followed the recommendation of a key advertising coalition, Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), to boycott buying ads on X since Musk bought the company. The suit says this turn of events cost the company billions of dollars in revenue. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for violation of US antitrust law.

    The right-wing video site Rumble, founded more than 10 years ago as an alternative to YouTube and positioned as a platform “immune to cancel culture,” announced on Tuesday that it had filed a similar lawsuit. “GARM was a conspiracy to perpetrate an advertiser boycott of Rumble and others, and that’s illegal,” the company posted on its X account.

    The US House Judiciary Committee, which is controlled by Republicans and has expressed concern about censorship of right-wing views on social media, has been investigating GARM. In a preliminary report in July, the committee found that “the extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms.” X’s lawsuit draws heavily from internal GARM emails reviewed by the congressional panel.

    In a video shared to X, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said she was “shocked” by the evidence uncovered by the House Judiciary Committee that there had been a “systematic illegal boycott against X.” Yaccarino attempted to rally X users with references to free speech in her statement. While pointing directly at the camera, she alleged that the advertisers were “targeting our company, and you, our users,” and “threatening your global town square.”

    “People are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is constricted,” Yaccarino said.

    The Brussels-based World Federation of Advertisers, which oversees GARM, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuits. X’s lawsuit also names Unilever, Mars, CVS, and a Danish energy company as defendants, while Rumble’s suit additionally targets the ad agency WPP. None of the companies immediately responded to requests for comment.

    X’s lawsuit contends that advertisers in the past had to individually strike deals with social media companies to set boundaries around what types of content they would sponsor. Through GARM, advertisers have been able to aggregate their power, establish industry standards for content moderation, and enforce them. In X’s view, GARM now has too much say over the content social media platforms may allow.

    “In a competitive market, each social media platform would set the brand safety standards that are optimal for that platform and for its users, and advertisers would unilaterally select the platforms on which they advertise,” the complaint states. “But collective action among competing advertisers to dictate brand safety standards to be applied by social media platforms shortcuts the competitive process and allows the collective views of a group of advertisers with market power to override the interests of consumers.”

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  • Elon Musk’s X Is Leaving San Francisco

    Elon Musk’s X Is Leaving San Francisco

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    The social media company X is closing its San Francisco office “over the next few weeks,” according to an internal email sent out by CEO Linda Yaccarino earlier today. “This is an important decision that impacts many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term,” Yaccarino wrote in the email, first reported by The New York Times.

    Employees in San Francisco reportedly will be moved to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the existing office in San Jose and a new engineering focused shared space with [xAI, Musk’s AI startup] in Palo Alto,” the note said. The company’s executive team is said to be working on “transportation options” for staff. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

    The official announcement comes a few weeks after Musk said in a post on X that he planned to move X and SpaceX headquarters to Texas. X would move to Austin, specifically, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X had already been staffing up a trust and safety team for X based in Austin.

    While the state of Texas is known to be more business-friendly than California—it has one of the lowest tax burdens in the US—Musk’s publicly stated reasoning for the move to Texas was more ideological than financial. He said at the time that the “final straw” was a new California law that aims to protect the privacy of transgender children, which he perceived to be “attacking both families and companies.” He also said that he’s “had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”

    The latest update from Yaccarino suggests it’s the San Francisco office, specifically, that is the thorn in X’s side. And it’s an about-face for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that, despite incentives to move out of San Francisco, X would not move its HQ out of the city. “You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down,” he waxed poetically on X. “San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend.”

    The shuttering of the X office marks the end of an era for the company formerly known as Twitter, and for the historic Mid-Market neighborhood that in the 2010s managed to lure in burgeoning tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify, and Square.

    Twitter’s earliest offices were in SoMa, or the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, until 2011, when then mayor Ed Lee instituted a controversial tax break for tech companies. The ruling erased the 1.5 percent payroll tax for companies that moved into certain Mid-Market buildings. Twitter jumped at the opportunity.

    The company was considered an anchor tenant in a densely populated neighborhood marked by homelessness and open drug use. Suddenly an airy, high-end food market, a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, and tech workers with MacBooks and overpriced sneakers dotted Market Street, alongside people in various states of distress camped out in front of still-vacant storefronts.



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