Casey Newton

Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $69,170 Tuesday morning, according to CoinMarketCap, breaching the previous all-time high of $68,990 in November 2021. The price then slipped back under $68,000 soon after reaching its peak. The Biggest Crypto Heists of 2022…So FarEthereum, which currently sits at $3,815, has also been steadily climbing, though it still has a ways to go before reaching $4,721, the all-time high from November 2021.Bitcoin and every other cryptocurrency rather famously nosedived in 2022, a year that opened…

Earlier this year, Microsoft unleashed an AI chatbot. The company named the AI Bing, after its search engine, but buried deep in its architecture was a robot with a whole other personality: an early version of the AI that called itself Sydney. In the first days of Bing’s release, Sydney reared its unhinged digital head in conversations with amused and sometimes disturbed users. Sydney talked about plans for world domination, encouraged a New York Times reporter to leave his wife, and in its darkest moments, dipped into…

Twitter CEO Elon Musk once again made his disdain for the media clear over the weekend when he announced via tweet that messages to the company’s press email, which have gone unanswered for months, would receive a “💩” in an automatic reply.“[email protected] now auto responds with 💩,” he wrote. When reached for comment, Twitter said in a statement, “💩”.Before Musk officially acquired Twitter last October, the company’s communication team regularly replied to reporters’ inquiries. However, once Musk started laying…

High-level Twitter executives are leaving the company in droves to escape the chaos caused by new owner Elon Musk.Illustration: mundissima (Shutterstock)Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has essentially set the company on fire—and critical employees are running as fast as they can to escape the flames.The company lost five high-level execs on Thursday, including its chief privacy officer and head of software engineering. Their resignations capped off a day in which Musk told employees that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the…

People walk outside Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022. Photo: Jeff Chiu (AP)Twitter is going to Hell in a handbasket. Wait no — that’s a dumpster.Oh look, it’s full of money.Aaannnnd it’s on fire. Apparently, things at the birdsite aren’t going so great. Actually, the so-called “microphone of the masses” is in pretty bad shape. Bad enough that genius-billionaire investor Elon Musk is now reportedly telling his staff (more of whom he says he intends to lay off) that bankruptcy is now on the…

Elon Musk in a file photo from Oct. 20, 2000 posing with the PayPal logo at PayPal’s corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, CalifPhoto: Paul Sakuma, File (AP)Elon Musk is considering a change to Twitter that would put all of the site’s content behind a paywall, according to a new report from tech journalist Casey Newton at Platformer. The news comes in the wake of some bizarre decisions by Musk after he took control of the social media company late last month—a marriage Musk tried to back out of, but was forced to…

Twitter wasted little time firing half of its global employees, but the process was apparently so haphazard that the company now needs to rehire some of those it let go.Photo: David Odisho (Getty Images)Internal Twitter Slack reportedly called the widely-reported 3,700, or 50% cuts to Twitter’s global staff “The Snap” ala the famed dusting of half the universe’s sentient life from Avengers: Infinity War. Though as many internet folks were quick to point out, such a move would also lead to even more harm. Without 50% of…

Despite Musk being a proponent of crypto through his promotion of dogecoin, he’s apparently pausing a proposed crypto wallet for Twitter so they can instead focus on paid verification and other money-making projects.Photo: ThomasAFink (Shutterstock)Twitter is refocusing all its efforts on making the most money in the shortest possible time, according to some reports.01:25Randall Park's Favorite SuperheroesMonday 5:02PMThe tech blog Platformer reported late Thursday based on unnamed sources supposedly from within Twitter…

Elon Musk promised big changes would come to Twitter under his ownership, and now that he’s finally bought the platform, those shifts are starting up. One of the first adjustments: verified users might soon have to pay $20 per month to maintain their blue checks, as first reported by Platformer’s Casey Newton, who attributed the news to two people familiar with the matter.The move would take Twitter Blue, the current $4.99/month paid subscriber tier, and transition it into a $19.99/month membership. Right now, users who…