this is all about with the best man we know, nbc tech correspondent jake ward. jake, i want you to explain all of this to us. first, re-branding the company as the letter x. you have wall street analysts who believe the company could use billion dollars of brand value, not to mention the letter x on the internet is going to fast-track you to a porn haven. i know, i don t know stephanie. elon musk is so exhausting to cover because he is so indomitable about these ideas which, to any sensible wall street analyst or tech journalists, don t make any sense. the thing we have come to understand in the last few days about is mania for this idea is that he has had it for a long time. it turns out that, back in the year 2000 during his short-lived tenure as the head of paypal, elon musk went after the same concept. but an all in one, online banking and everything app that was going to be cold x at the
wall street analyst or tech journalists, don t make any sense. the thing we have come to understand in the last few days about his mania for this idea is that he s had it for a long time. it turns out that back in the year 2000, during his short-lived tenure as the head of paypal, who elon musk went after the same concept of an all in one online banking and everything app that was going to be called x at the time. he was so slavery devoted to this idea that in fact, it seemed to have got him ousted from that job. that s why, peter peter thiel wound up the head of paypal. so this seems to be something like a kind of maniacal return to something that is really, really devoted to in a kind of former life, but it is driving him to, as you say, erase billions of dollars in value. wipe out a company whose name has become a verb, tweeting has become a verb. there are whole movie blocks built on it. people would die for the kind of brand value that twitter
to react as things evolve. for clients such as the bbc, bfm, clients all over the world. and the levels of precaution that we were talking about, filming on iphones, security guards, is that also the kind of thing afp would implement? absolutely. we would certainly film with iphones. since the yellow vests, which boris mentioned, we have seen that real anger towards the media on the streets, especially television. i would say our tech journalists and photographers have been able to work relatively easily on demonstrations. text. there is a huge sensitivity about tv and a huge sensitivity about live tv. that is really raising the stakes. what i would say over the last
for this year s final installment, we are going ahead early and picking the winner or loser, if you will. quote unquote, free speech warrior elon musk. this week, the new twitter ceo banned multiple tech journalists, including cnn s donie o sullivan, and the washington post drew her well. musk accused the journalists of doxxing his location. but in reality, the journalists were merely reporting on musk s banning of twitter accounts that tracked and share the location of his private jet. information, by the way, that is publicly available following massive backlash from media outlets and twitter users of all political stripes, musk set up a twitter poll to ask when the journalists should be reinstated on the platform. when a majority voted for their immediate return, musk, in what you can only call as a republican move, wanted to do over. once again, the majority voted
knowing that he embraced the sort of hateful language. and that is the serious part of this. and we, as a people, have to figure out how we are going to deal with billionaires buying up the public domains for exchange and using them to embolden and lift up the worst impulses of the american people. so, david, musk briefly spoke with several tech journalists on a twitter spaces stream before abruptly leaving. he just got up and left after being revealed grilled on the reporter bans. twitter spaces was lever later shut down for several hours after that. it kind of feels like there was an obvious trump comparison going on here. what are your thoughts? i think that he does not quite understand. we are sitting here we are lucky to be speaking to a large audience of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. i work at the new yorker. when we publish a story, all of us faced the challenge of defamation lawsuits. and if we smear someone and defame them, they can file