Elon Musk has been known to say a lot of things publicly on Twitter, and quite impulsively at that. Sometimes, this includes things that he doesn’t necessarily mean. Among other things, this has led to him being legally compelled to buy the bird social media for a share price that references a marijuana meme. More recently, Musk has threatened to sue Microsoft via a tweet, and it’s unclear if this is something that should be added to the list of things he has said but doesn’t mean.
The tweet in question was seemingly provoked, to use the word loosely, by Microsoft pulling support for Twitter. Which was, in turn, a response to the company dropping bird platform from its advertising after Musk said he will be charging corporations to access the platform’s API. The former’s advertising platform’s support page notes that it “will no longer support Twitter” starting 25 April 2023. And this is a date that coincides with the date that the latter intends to start paywalling its API. And for a company as large as Microsoft, this could go up to US$42000 a month.
They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023
While the whole thing looks like a strangely childish chain of corporate tit-for-tat, the tweet itself claims that Microsoft “trained illegally using Twitter data”. This is likely in reference to its Bing AI, which is based on work done by OpenAI. Musk has already showed pretty open animosity towards the AI company following its starting up its for-profit subsidiary, which got massive cash injections from Microsoft.
All that being said, it remains to be seen if Elon Musk truly intends to take Microsoft to court, or if this is another spur-of-the-moment tweet. Unlike publicly joking to buy a company for a certain share price, there’s probably no way to compel him to actually file the lawsuit.
