Cosmic Log
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep his Twitter habit in check — and feels comfortable enough with the arrangement to refer to it in a teasing tweet.
The April 26 settlement was a serious matter: Musk could have faced sanctions for contempt of court if he failed to patch up the rift with the SEC over whether he was following the terms of an earlier settlement.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is in trouble again with the Securities and Exchange Commission, this time over a 13-word tweet.
The SEC filed a motion in federal court on Feb. 25, claiming that a tweet that Musk sent out last week violated the terms of an agreement aimed at settling a securities fraud case brought last September. After the motion came to light, Tesla’s shares lost as much as 5 percent of their $298.77 market-close value in after-hours trading. The price crept back to somewhere around its previous level overnight, however, as traders digested the news.
It’s the latest in a series of ups and downs caused by Musk’s Twitter habit.
Today’s smashingly successful touchdown of NASA’s InSight lander on Mars was a cause for celebration on Twitter.
There was good-natured snark from SarcasticRover and from Matthew Inman, the Seattle cartoonist behind The Oatmeal (following up on his terrific preview of the landing). And there were heartfelt congratulations from the space community’s celebrities, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
A study published in the journal Science provides hard evidence that fake news — or, to use the researchers’ preferred term, false news — spreads via Twitter significantly more rapidly than verified news. What’s more, MIT scientists found that humans, not bots, are mostly to blame.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s corporate Twitter account has lain fallow like an Iowa farm field ever since he took over the top post in mid-2015, but now it’s time for @BoeingCEO to sing out.
Muilenburg, who also serves as Boeing’s chairman and president, will make his Twitter debut on Jan. 31 with the announcement of the company’s fourth-quarter financial results for 2017 and Boeing’s guidance for business in 2018.
“This new communications approach for our CEO will provide an effective platform for sharing company news and industry insight,” Phil Musser, Boeing senior vice president of communications, said today in a news release. “It also will help us highlight the inspirational, innovative work of our people, and better connect with customers, stakeholders and aerospace enthusiasts — where the conversations are taking place.”
Twitter says it has followed through on its commitment to Congress by identifying and suspending more than 50,000 automated accounts linked to Russian agents – and alerting 677,775 Twitter users in the U.S. who followed those accounts, or retweeted or liked their postings.
Thousands of those accounts have been found just in the past couple of months.
In today’s update, the company says it’ll enlist machine-learning tools to boost its ability to slap down fake accounts, coordinated tweet campaigns and bots.
The measures were taken to address concerns sparked by the 2016 presidential campaign, during which agents from Russia’s infamous Internet Research Agency and other Russia-linked entities mounted a propaganda effort that boosted GOP candidate Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump wasn’t the only one hitting the all-caps key after word got out that a federal appeals court refused to reinstate his executive order on an immigration crackdown.
“SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” Trump wrote on Twitter, just minutes after the ruling was released.
A bit later, he told reporters at the White House that the decision was “political.”
“This is just a decision that came down, but we’re going to win the case,” the president said.
Twitterers on both sides of the issue joined the fray.
Badlands National Park tweeted the inconvenient truth about climate change today, despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on environmental outreach. And the Twittersphere went wild.
The South Dakota park’s staff typically focuses its Twitter account on bighorn sheep and the like, but at least one of the account’s keepers delved into atmospheric carbon dioxide readings.
Rocket launches can sometimes turn into flame wars, as shown by last year’s Twitter tug of war between space-minded billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The rivalry behind Bezos’ Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX has been going on for years, flaring up over issues ranging from control of Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to the patent rights for rocket landings at sea. In both those cases, SpaceX prevailed at Blue Origin’s expense.
That rivalry crossed over into the Twittersphere in November, when the Amazon founder used his first tweet to tout the landing of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft after its first test flight to an outer-space altitude.
The flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed trip to space and back may be history-making, but here’s a first that’s almost as big for social media: Jeff Bezos’ maiden tweet.
One of Bezos’ biggest rivals in the space game is SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, who weighed in with an artful series of tweets that started out praising Blue Origin’s test flight but ended up downplaying it.