ShinyShiny snippets: Elon Musk spends $3 billion on 9.2% Twitter stake

Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter, according to a US securities filing. The news sent Twitter shares soaring about 25% in pre-market trading. The Tesla founder bought 73,486,938 Twitter shares on 14 March, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The stake is worth $2.89bn (£2.20bn), based on Twitter’s closing price on Friday. The stake makes him the largest shareholder in the company and is more than four times the 2.25% holding of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Musk is a regular Twitter user with more than 80 million followers, although recently he said he is giving “serious thought” to building a new social media platform because he believed Twitter was failing to adhere to free speech principles. Tech Digest 

Ministers have given video games companies an ultimatum to restrict the sale of so-called “loot boxes” to children, warning it will otherwise bring in legislation limiting their use. Julia Lopez, the minister for media, data and digital infrastructure, hosted a group of games companies, technology firms and industry representatives last week, urging them to crack down on the controversial paid-for items. She is understood to have told the companies that failure to self-regulate, potentially by making loot boxes unavailable to under-18s, would mean new laws to tackle them, either through gambling legislation or the Government’s online harms bill. Telegraph 

Tesla says it delivered a record number of its cars in the first quarter, despite supply chain challenges. The electric carmaker says it delivered more than 310,000 vehicles in the first three months of this year. That was almost 70% higher than for the same time last year. Chief executive Elon Musk says the improvement came despite an “extremely difficult quarter”, including strict coronavirus policies in China, where Tesla has a so-called ‘giga factory’. Tesla delivered 310,048 cars from the start of this year to the end of March, up from 184,800 a year earlier, according to figures released over the weekend. BBC

Donald Trump’s social media platform has been dubbed a “disaster” by critiques as daily downloads declined nearly 95 per cent since its February launch, new reports suggested. After the former US president was banned from most social media networks, including Twitter and Facebook, in the aftermath of the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021, he announced the launch of Truth Social as a new platform where he would engage with his supporters. Even following its launch in February, Truth Social has remained an app most people could not use due to its long waiting list, according to reports. Nearly 1.5 million people were reportedly unable to use it. Independent 

I am becoming a better person against my will. I was in no mood to change or grow. I had not reached a turning point and I have never declared that enough is enough. I was in the process of having a delightful nap right on my laurels. If anything, I was actively trying to waste my time. But sadly, sickeningly, I have undergone self-improvement. Worst of all, I know where the blame lies – TikTok. TikTok was the first app that really made me feel old. Or, worse, realise that I am not young any more. I did not understand it, I did not have the energy to engage with it, and I had no desire to ever post on it. Starting a TikTok account in your 30s felt like investing in a toupee. Just let it go, dude, it’s over. The Guardian