Elon’s Two-Day War with Apple + How to Beat an A.I. Censor + S.B.F.’s ‘Bad Month’

12/02/22 • 51 min

7 Listeners

Elon Musk accuses Apple of trying to sabotage Twitter. But after his visit with Apple’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, things are ... good? Then, the New York Times reporter Paul Mozur on the tactics Chinese protesters are deploying to avoid the most sophisticated censorship apparatus in the world.

Plus: S.B.F. says it’s been a “bad month.”

Additional Reading:

Elon Musk accused Apple of threatening to pull Twitter from its App Store and tweeted about Apple’s “secret 30 percent tax” on developers for in-app purchases. The company has again delayed the launch of Twitter Blue as it seeks a way to avoid paying Apple’s 30 percent fee for the service.
Later, Musk said the “misunderstanding” with Apple had been resolved after he met with the company’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, at Apple’s headquarters.
Layoffs at Twitter gutted the company’s child safety team, which is responsible for removing child exploitation.
Musk offered a “general amnesty” for over 60,000 banned accounts on Twitter.
Protests in China rippled throughout the country, and citizens found ways to get around the Chinese censorship apparatus.
On Wednesday, Sam Bankman-Fried appeared for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit.

We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Follow “Hard Fork” on TikTok: @hardfork

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Plus: S.B.F. says it’s been a “bad month.”

Additional Reading:

Elon Musk accused Apple of threatening to pull Twitter from its App Store and tweeted about Apple’s “secret 30 percent tax” on developers for in-app purchases. The company has again delayed the launch of Twitter Blue as it seeks a way to avoid paying Apple’s 30 percent fee for the service.
Later, Musk said the “misunderstanding” with Apple had been resolved after he met with the company’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, at Apple’s headquarters.
Layoffs at Twitter gutted the company’s child safety team, which is responsible for removing child exploitation.
Musk offered a “general amnesty” for over 60,000 banned accounts on Twitter.
Protests in China rippled throughout the country, and citizens found ways to get around the Chinese censorship apparatus.
On Wednesday, Sam Bankman-Fried appeared for an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit.

We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Follow “Hard Fork” on TikTok: @hardfork

Previous Episode

A Hard Fork in the Road: FTX’s Unraveling and Elon’s Loyalty Oath

1 Recommendations

The balance sheet contains an apology, the in-house coach is concerned that company executives are “undersexed” and billions in customer funds remain in jeopardy. The wreckage at FTX goes from bad to worse.

Plus: Elon’s “extremely hardcore” plan for Twitter 2.0.

Additional Resources:

George K. Lerner, FTX’s in-house performance coach, said he was shocked by the collapse of FTX.
In an interview with Matt Levine, a Bloomberg columnist, Sam Bankman-Fried described his strategy to restore faith in the crypto ecosystem.
Bankman-Fried reflected on his actions as chief executive of FTX in a series of Twitter messages with Kelsey Piper, a Vox reporter.
Elon Musk told Twitter employees in an email that the company would become an “extremely hardcore” operation. Employees were asked to click yes to be part of the new Twitter or take severance.
Musk’s social calendar includes courting comedians and hopping on yachts.

We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Follow “Hard Fork” on TikTok: @hardfork

Next Episode

Can ChatGPT Make This Podcast?

1 Recommendations

It’s writing podcast scripts, finishing students’ homework and correcting mistakes in computer code: ChatGPT, the A.I. chatbot from OpenAI, is suddenly everywhere. Who should decide how it’s built? What could go wrong? And what could go right?

On today’s episode:

Aviv Ovadya, a technologist and affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a visiting scholar at Cambridge University Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence.

Additional reading:

ChatGPT is inspiring awe and fear among users.
Aviv Ovadya proposes governing tech platforms democratically through “platform democracy.”
Meta’s Cicero AI is getting good at negotiating with humans.
Researchers are diagnosing Parkinson’s using a phone, a patient’s voice and a machine learning model.