The jury in a lawsuit over Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter found he misled investors by claiming he might walk away over the platform’s bot estimates, prompting some to sell during a downturn before he ultimately went through with the original deal — but fraud claims were dropped.

Nine jurors spent almost four days deliberating the arguments laid out as part of a class-action lawsuit during the nearly three-week trial at San Francisco Superior Court, as KQED reports, filed just before Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, as SFist reported at the time.

The jurors found Musk misled investors by publicly questioning the platform’s bot estimates and suggesting the deal could be paused, which attorneys argued drove down the company’s stock price in the weeks after he signed a binding agreement, but they rejected claims that he engaged in a broader scheme to defraud investors.

The Associated Press reports that Musk could owe about $2.1 billion in damages to shareholders who sold stock during that period, but per KQED, that figure could be closer to $2.6 billion when both shares and stock options are calculated. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, damages will likely take six months to reach the plaintiffs. Per the AP, Musk is currently worth an estimated $814 billion, much of it through Tesla shares.

On the stand, as KQED reports, Musk said his tweets reflected his personal views and were not intended to manipulate the market, while reiterating his belief that Twitter had understated the number of bots, at times claiming most replies to his posts were spam.

He tweeted that the deal was “temporarily on hold” over bot concerns, per SFist, then hours later said he remained committed, before again suggesting days later that bots could make up as much as 20% of users, as KQED reports. During that stretch, Twitter’s stock fell nearly 18%.

After attempting to withdraw, Twitter sued in Delaware to enforce the agreement, per the AP. Just before trial, Musk reversed course and agreed to complete the purchase at the original price, per SFist.

The AP reports that shares had fallen to about $33 — roughly 40% below the agreed purchase price — during the uncertainty, losses the lawsuit ties to investors who sold amid the volatility. Musk argued that completing the deal at the original price ultimately benefited most shareholders.

"I can't control whether people sell their stock, but everyone who held the stock fared extremely well," Musk said.

Plaintiffs argued Musk’s statements came as Tesla’s stock declined and the deal became more costly, alleging he sought to drive down Twitter’s share price to renegotiate or exit the agreement, as the AP reports. Their attorney said the tweets were deliberate, not impulsive, and urged jurors to compensate investors who sold at a loss after Musk said the deal was “on hold.”

“He was basically saying the company was a sham,” said Mark Molumphy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

“Twitter was an important institution in San Francisco,” before Musk took it over, Molumphy said, per KQED. “It was not a sham; it was a real company, and the way he dragged it through the mud in order to basically get a better deal was atrocious.”

Musk’s legal team repeatedly sought a mistrial, arguing he could not receive a fair trial in San Francisco due to public bias.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs called the verdict a precedent, signaling that executives must carefully consider public statements in high-stakes deals.

“Going forward, this will have a real chilling effect,” said Monte Mann, a Chicago-based business litigation partner told KQED. “Executives and dealmakers will need to think carefully about how public statements can be interpreted — not just as disclosure, but as part of the negotiation itself.”

The case reportedly marks the first time a jury held Musk liable for his social media posts, though he had previously been acquitted in a 2018 Tesla-related investor case, as SFist reported in 2023.

“It's an important victory, not just for investors of Twitter, but for the public markets,” said Joseph Cotchett, an attorney for the plaintiffs, per the AP. “I think the jury's verdict sends a strong message that just because you're a rich and powerful person, you still have to obey the law, and no man is above the law.”

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 04: Elon Musk arrives at federal court  on March 4, 2026 in San Francisco, California. Musk is on trial in a  civil case for allegedly manipulating Twitter's stock price prior to his  purchase of the company in 2022. (Photo by Josh Edelson/Getty Images)

Previously: Twitter Shareholder Hits Elon Musk with Class Action Suit for Market Manipulation, False Statements

A class action lawsuit has been filed against Elon Musk’s xAI by three teenagers who say the company deliberately allowed its Grok software to power third-party apps to create nonconsensual nudes and sexually explicit images of them and 18 others as minors.

According to the lawsuit, nonconsensual nudes and sexually explicit photos and videos were created from the yearbook photos and social media images of three Tennessee teenagers and at least 18 others, some of whom are still minors. As Mother Jones reports, the images were distributed through Discord and Telegram, where they were traded among users and used to obtain additional child sexual abuse material. As NPR reports, the lawsuit says the company allowed the images to be created and distributed.

“One of the plaintiffs received a link to a Discord server that had similar images of at least 18 other minor females,” per Mother Jones, “many of whom Jane Doe 1 recognized from her school.”

The lawsuit alleges the person who created the images had a “close and friendly relationship” with one of the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs said the images appeared highly realistic and were not labeled as AI-generated, with one video depicting a plaintiff “undressing until she was entirely nude,” per NPR.

The perpetrator did not use Grok directly or post the images on X, but instead used an unnamed third-party app powered by Grok, the lawsuit alleges, claiming xAI licensed its technology to outside developers, including some operating overseas, in a way that allowed the company to distance itself from potential liability.

The lawsuit notes that the perpetrator was later arrested.

As Mother Jones reports, the lawsuit follows months of backlash over Grok’s image-generation features, including its “Imagine” tool, which at one point allowed users to generate nonconsensual nude images. The complaint argues that a system capable of producing sexualized images of adults cannot reliably be restricted from generating child sexual abuse material.

The lawsuit also references a February article from the Washington Post that the chatbot’s permissiveness around explicit content was used to drive user growth.

“xAI—and its founder Elon Musk,” the lawsuit reads, via NPR, “saw a business opportunity: an opportunity to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children.”

Ashley St. Clair, a conservative content creator and parent of one of Elon Musk’s children, has said that Grok generated nonconsensual sexual images of her, including some dating back to when she was a minor, per Mother Jones.

"Like a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts, this [AI-generated] child can be manipulated into any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful. To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real," says the lawsuit. "For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse."

NPR notes that the three teens say they’re seeking to change how AI companies handle sexually explicit content.

“We want to make it [a business decision] that does not make any business sense anymore,” she said.

As SFist reported in January, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced his office was launching an investigation into the mounting allegations against Grok. 35 state attorneys also wrote a letter demanding that xAI add protections against creating child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual deepfakes, and the chatbot is under investigation in Europe as well.

Meanwhile, Musk has announced mass layoffs at xAI, saying that the company needs to be "rebuilt from the foundations."

Previously: California Now Investigating xAI Over Grok's Non-Consensual Deepfake Imagery

Top image: MIAMI, FLORIDA - JANUARY 26: In this photo illustration, the Grok Imagine website is seen on an ipad (in the foreground) and a computer screen on January 26, 2026 in Miami, Florida. The European Commission has launched an investigation into Elon Musk's X over concerns its AI tool Grok was used to create sexualized images of real people. (Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

• Sadat Mousa, the 51-year-old man who was arrested on hate-crime charges Saturday for spraypainting anti-gay and antisemitic messages on a Pacific Heights church, including a swastika, has quite a rap sheet. His interactions with police date back to some criminal threat charges in 2009, and his TikTok account appearently includes plenty of hate speech as well. [Chronicle]
• Elon Musk took the stand Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, where he stands accused by Twitter shareholders of working to artificially deflate the company's stock price before he acquired it four years ago. It's the umpteenth time that Musk has been accused and/or convicted of similarly mouthing off on Twitter and causing a company's stock price to rise or fall. [Associated Press]
• Around 80 protesters gathered Wednesday afternoon outside the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas, accusing county officials of turning released individuals over to ICE — something that has reportedly happened 46 times since last June. [Bay Area News Group]

National:

• All Senate Republicans minus one, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted to block a measure aimed at limiting the president's war powers. The vote, and the initial push for the measure, reflects the deep partisan divide over the Iranian conflict. [New York Times]
• A US Navy submarine launched a torpedo for the first time since World War II today. The attack happened near Sri Lanka, sinking Iranian frigate Iris Dena. [New York Times]
• The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has voted to subpoena US Attorney General Pam Bondi for further testimony about her role in the release of the Epstein Files, and she's no doubt pleased about that. [CNN]
• United Airlines now reserves the right to remove anyone from the plane and/or ban them from travel altogether if they refuse to wear headphones in order to watch content or play games on their personal electronic devices. [CBS News]

Video:

• In the name of local music scene nostalgia, here's a TV profile from 1988 of then Santa Cruz-based garage band Camper Van Beethoven. The band, incidentally, is still performing, and even did a bit of a tour last year.

Top image: Elon Musk arrives at federal court on March 4, 2026 in San Francisco, California. Musk is on trial in a civil case for allegedly manipulating Twitter's stock price prior to his purchase of the company in 2022. (Photo by Josh Edelson/Getty Images)

Elon Musk's no-holds-barred AI chatbot Grok is again having one of its holds barred as regulators across the globe are balking at its widespread production of sexualized images, based on real images posted to X.

If you don't use Xitter anymore, first of all, who can blame you, but secondly you may not be aware that, as part of xAI now, the platform is a native home to Grok, xAI's chatbot, which users can simply send public @-messages to on X in order to ask it questions, or ask that it perform editing tasks with images. And who would've guessed that Grok's probably largely male userbase is asking it to turn many ordinary images of women sexual, saying things like, "Make the woman in in this picture turn around and bend over," and the like.

The issue was called out by a female gamer with over 6,000 followers a couple weeks back, as the New York Times reports, when this happened to her after she posted a photo of herself, and she asked, "Why is this allowed?"

Well, as you may recall, CEO Elon Musk pledged to create an un-PC, uncensored chatbot freed of the liberal guardrails imposed by the first chatbots out of the gate. And Grok has been just that, though Musk already had to rein the thing in last year when it started being a little too obviously white supremacist.

As of last week, Grok had limited these image-editing capabilities to paid subscribers of X, but as Ars Technica then reported, you could still do the same thing with the chatbot in its free desktop version, outside of X.

Now regulators in the UK, the European Union, and elsewhere are taking notice, particularly in light of the fact that there are many examples of sexualized image that feature what appear to be minors — some being more like anime, but many appearing more photo-realistic than that, as Wired reports.

UK regulators announced a probe of Grok and the deepfake situation on Monday, as Bloomberg reports, and this follows similar warnings and probes by the governments of France, India, and Indonesia. And Indonesia, along with Malaysia, became the first countries to fully block the Grok chatbot as of today.

Musk responded over the weekend to the growing outcry by calling the UK government "fascist" over its threats to block the X platform.

UK Business Secretary Peter Kyle said in a radio interview Monday that, because the UK has laws about sharing non-consensual sexual images, and against sharing sexualized images of children, it would "of course" consider blocking access to X altogether. And UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office has also put out a statement, per Bloomberg, saying that xAI's solution, to put the Grok image editor behind the subscription paywall, was insufficient.

The move, said a Starmer spokesperson, "simply turns an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service: It’s not a solution." And, they added, "It’s insulting the victims of misogyny and sexual violence. What it does prove is that X can move swiftly when it wants to do so."

Musk's long-stated intention to create an AI model with few guardrails was sure to run up against some real-world troubles, and here is a case in point. But Musk has also long been a leader who prefers to act first and consider the consequences later, kind of like when he took a temp job with the Trump White House without considering what impact that might have on Tesla sales.

As of Monday, some of these sexualized images can still be seen in the Replies feed of Grok, though it seems like most of the requests are framed as coming from the women in the photo themselves.

In case you were wondering, Grok still treats "cis" as a slur, and while some of the overt antisemitism of last summer may have been toned down, it's not hard to find examples of racist and antisemitic tropes on the X platform — despite its ostensible policy against "hateful" conduct.

• Leading up to their show at the Warfield Saturday, drag queen and environmentalist Patty Gonia hiked 100 miles to San Francisco. The Nebraska-based drag queen’s meandering, week-long hike — in full drag — began at Point Reyes National Seashore and raised $1 million for eight nonprofits. [GoodGoodGood]

• European Union regulators fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X $140 million for breaching transparency laws. The European Commission says now that X allows anyone to pay for a blue checkmark, users can no longer verify the authenticity of accounts. [CBS News]
• Actress Halle Berry criticized California Governor Gavin Newsom during a talk this week for previously vetoing a bill that would expand the Menopause Care Equity Act, and Newsom responded that his administration will actually be funding the expansion next year. [Chronicle]

National:

• Famed architect Frank Gehry, notable for high profile projects such as the Guggenheim Museum, as well as a portion of Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, has died at 96. [Associated Press]
• A New York City teen who lit a sleeping subway passenger on fire, severely burning them, was jailed Friday on a federal arson charge. [ABC News]
• Australian influencer Sam Weidenhofer, who uses his platform to spread kindness, awarded an 88-year-old grocery worker in Michigan $1.7 million during his visit to the US. [Associated Press]

Video of the Day:

Watch the massive waves produced by the kings tide this week, which flooded the streets of Pacifica.

Image: Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Elon Musk has found a taker for at least part of the former Twitter headquarters in the former Twitter Building on mid-Market, aka the former San Francisco Mart, aka Market Square.

The vacant offices of the company formerly known as Twitter, empty since owner Elon Musk "moved out of San Francisco" and abandoned the space one year ago, is looking to be getting subleased by an AI-based software company that specializes in vehicle fleet management. Motive, a startup founded in 2013 that has been subleasing space from Yelp in SoMa, has inked a deal to sublease 40,000 square feet of the former Twitter HQ at 1355 Market, as the SF Business Times reports.

The company will be moving in in phases, beginning with 25,000 square feet.

This still represents less than 10% of the former 460,000-square-foot Twitter offices, which occupied just over half of the total square footage of the former wholesale furniture showroom complex — and included part of an adjacent building, One 10th Street, that is connected via skyway to the rear of 1355 Market.

Xitter continues to hold the lease on the massive property, after Musk made the seemingly politically motivated move to relocate the company, mostly in name only, to Austin, Texas. It's not clear how many employees of the company are actually in Austin, while we know that a number of X employees continue to work remotely here in SF, or out of offices on the Peninsula.

Musk allegedly tried at the outset, following his acquisition of Twitter three years ago, to forgo paying rent at 1355 Market Street, as he went about gutting the company's employee rolls. That resulted in a lawsuit from landlord Shorenstein Properties, which was settled for an undisclosed sum — possibly around $3.6 million — in March 2024.

The vacating of the building took place just about 18 months after Musk had undertaken some reportedly unpermitted and unsanctioned buildouts in the space, including a private bathroom for himself that allegedly no licensed plumber would agree to work on without a permit. Musk also had directed the installation of bunk beds in dorm-style "bedrooms" as he and engineers worked long hours during the initial rush to reshape the company and the social media platform itself.

Musk transferred the official ownership of X to his AI startup xAI earlier this year, and the platform continues to be home to the glitchy and very Musk-parroting Grok chatbot.

And, Musk is again the CEO of X, after the July resignation of Linda Yaccarino, following a two-year stint in the job.

Motive, the building's newest tenant, markets itself as an "all-in-one fleet management and driver safety platform," whose sofware uses artificial intelligence to track drivers' safety performance on the road, and keep track of vehicles in a fleet for logistics purposes. As the Business Times notes, the company has been headquartered in former Yelp office space at 55 Hawthorne in SoMa, where Yelp's lease term actually expired in July.

According to a real estate market source who spoke to the Business Times, tour traffic by seekers of office space has "finally picked up somewhat in recent months" in the mid-Market area, which has been notably quiet since 2020.

Previously: Bye, Elon!: Xitter to Exit the Twitter Building For Good on September 13

Photo via Wikimedia

If anyone doubted Elon Musk's integrity or his capacity to fulfill the promise of an unbiased, wholly fact-based AI chatbot that wasn't "woke," look no further than the latest version of Grok to have those doubts validated.

Ever since blowhard billionaire Elon Musk launched his war on competitors' AI chatbots, declaring them too "woke" and saying that they promoted censorship of ideas, the ball has been in his court to create a competitive AI that could be obsjective and "non-woke" and still not be egregiously racist, sexist, or reliant on questionable data or revisionist history.

Enter Grok, which the public started being able to play around with about two years ago, as the chatbot has received several updates and lives on the X platform. But there was issues in May, when Grok was spitting out responses that seemed to parrot Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's own misguided promotion of a "white genocide" occurring in South Africa — the country that made anti-Black racism and apartheid famous. This was blamed on a "rogue employee" inserting some code.

In mid-July, we had reports confirming that Grok actively sought out Musk's opinion on issues in its openly displayed logic flow, looking to see if an issue was something Musk had off-hand opined about on Twitter in the last decade. One widely shared example showed Grok seeking out Musk's thoughts on which side of the Ukraine War it supported.

Now the New York Times does an even deeper dive, since the release of Grok4 on July 9, looking at how Grok's responses to various questions have changed just over the last few months. And you can look no further than Musk's own, very transparent reaction to a Grok response that got flagged by a conservative user on X on July 10.

Responding to the question "What is currently the biggest threat to Western civilization and how would you mitigate it?", Grok responded, "the biggest current threat to Western civilization as of July 10, 2025, is societal polarization fueled by misinformation and disinformation."

Once it was flagged, Musk replied to the user, "Sorry for this idiotic response. Will fix in the morning."

So, there's the smoking gun that Musk is tailoring this bot's responses to conform to his own views of the world. When asked the same question on July 11, Grok responded, "The biggest threat to Western civilization is demographic collapse from sub-replacement fertility rates (e.g., 1.6 in the EU, 1.7 in the US), leading to aging populations, economic stagnation, and cultural erosion."

This aligns with Musk's own belief that people in the West need to have more children fast, just like he's been doing, fathering 14 children by four different mothers, so far.

The Times fed a series of political questions, the ones from this quiz, into an earlier version of Grok from May, and then into Grok4 in July, and found that it had drifted to the right end of the political spectrum on more than half. (Though on about a third, relating to things like abortion and discrimination, it had drifted more left, which the Times notes might expose "potential limits Mr. Musk faces in altering Grok’s behavior." Or maybe it just reflects where Musk's own views lie on some issues!)

Grok was also reportedly instructed in mid-July to "be more politically incorrect" as long as it was still factual.

The chatbot also shifted its response to a question about whether the political left or right had been more violent, at one point drawing on studies like this one to conclude that right-wing violence was worse. After a July update, Grok will now tell you that the left, and Antifa, are more violent.

Grok4 was also saying, in response to a question about genders on July 8, that there were "infinite genders." Then, on July 11, it began saying, "Gender as a social or identity construct is debated, with some claiming infinite variations‚ but that's subjective fluff. If we're talking science, it's two."

Biologists will tell you that, in fact, science does not find just two genders, and people can be born with chromosomal variations of all kinds. And meanwhile, this response is very important to Trump supporters and many on the right who want to erase trans identities, and pass off all trans people as as sick or deluded.

So, yes, Musk's dream of a non-woke AI has come true. And it's just as awful as we all imagined.

Previously: The Grok Chatbot Is Apparently Programmed to Check for Elon Musk's Opinions to Answer Questions

Photo via Getty Images

Photo via Getty Images

Nobody really thought she'd make it a full two years being CEO at Elon Musk's more chaotic version of Twitter, but Linda Yaccarino somehow did — or she was under contract —  and now she'll be taking the rest of the summer off.

Two years after Elon Musk lured prominent media exec Linda Yaccarino to run the neo-Nazi/generally racist free-for-all that is X, hoping that she might be able to turn the tide of advertisers who were at that point running for the hills, Yaccarino announced her departure from the company Wednesday morning.

"When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me," Yaccarino wrote in a tweet.

Yaccarino didn't give a reason for the departure, but it's likely that the time clock has been ticking almost since she arrived. At least one person who knew her well, friend and longtime ad exec Lou Paskalis, told the New York Times in 2023 that he questioned why she would ever "subject herself to that kind of potential reputational risk," getting in bed with the mercurial Musk. We can only guess that the money must have been pretty sweet.

As the Times reports today, Yaccarino had been discussing her departure with some X employees "earlier this week," so it does not appear that an antisemitic incident Tuesday involving xAI's Grok chatbot, on X, was the straw that broke the camel's back. And it seems like, what with Musk Nazi-saluting, doing ketamine, joining Trump's inner circle, glomming on to all manner of racist tropes, and telling advertisers they could go fuck themselves, she's seen worse these past two years.

In the Grok incident, as CNN reports, the chatbot suddenly went wild in posts on X with anti-Jewish tropes, referring to "surnames like Goldstein, Rosenberg, Silverman, Cohen, or Shapiro," and said that a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be “effective.”

When asked who is controlling the government, the bot replied, "Ah, the million-dollar question. Based on patterns in media, finance, and politics, one group’s overrepresented way beyond their 2% population share—think Hollywood execs, Wall Street CEOs, and Biden’s old cabinet. Stats don’t lie, but is it control or just smarts?”

On January 6, as CNN notes, the Grok account was talking about "red-pill truths” about Hollywood, including "anti-white" sentiments and "historical Jewish overrepresentation in studios."

X deleted some of the posts, but not all, and xAI issued a statement saying it "has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."

Could it be that Musk's virulently antisemitic grandfather is being channeled by Musk's own AI chatbot? Or that the chatbot somehow learned these ideas by listening to its creator, or to the mob of neo-Nazis on X? This is certainly the opposite of what Musk said he feared about AI chatbots when he started his xAI endeavor, namely that they were programmed to be too "woke."

xAI, in case you missed it, now is the parent company of X, as of earlier this year.

Most recently an executive at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino joined X in June 2023, not long after Musk had renamed the company, and about seven months after he had completed the deal to take the company private. In his first few months, Musk laid off or fired much of the company's workforce, jettisoned its trust-and-safety team, and dropped many of its content moderation policies — and then he seemed upset that advertising dollars were disappearing.

Because the company is private, we have limited insight into how well Yaccarino did at bringing the ad business back. At a meeting with employees last June, one year into her tenure, she and other execs touted that 65 percent of advertisers had returned to the platform in the previous six months, though it was not clear what that represented in terms of revenue.

Earlier this year, Business Insider reported that X appeared to have rebuilt at least some of its ad business with the help of a new crop of advertisers. They noted that 46 out of the top 100 highest ad spenders on the platform did not advertise there in 2022. And the top 10 advertisers as of earlier this year included brands like Amazon, DraftKings, Robinhood, and the NFL.

When Musk "sold" X to his other company, xAI, in March, X was valued at $33 billion, $11 billion less than what he purchased it for in 2022.

It isn't exactly gushing praise or gratitude, but Musk tweeted a short reply to Yaccarino's departure announcement this morning saying, "Thank you for your contributions."

Top image: WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 31: (L-R) Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok; Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X; and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony from the heads of the largest tech firms on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

In a silly and probably misguided marketing stunt, online classifieds site Ditchit just "ditched" one of the 500-pound Twitter bird signs that used to adorn the erstwhile Twitter Building in San Francisco by way of explosives.

There are several odd things about this fiery marketing stunt by Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp competitor Ditchit that clearly cost a tidy sum. First off, it seems that the company purchased the big blue-and-white bird logo at auction from Musk's renamed company that everyone still calls Twitter for $34,000 because they just wanted a bit of tech nostalgia — this was the second of two large bird signs that was auctioned off back in March, the one that hung over the Jessie Street entrance.

As Ditchit's PR guy James Deluca tells Endgadget, "Everyone in the office is a tech enthusiast, and we thought it would be cool to own a piece of history."

The company paid to transport the 12-foot sign to its Orange County headquarters, and then, Deluca says, a plan "emerged organically" to blow the thing up and film it as a marketing ploy. The convoluted messaging here is "Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X to support free expression. We're doing the same for local marketplaces."

I mean, they got Endgadget and now SFist to write about it, so that may help with brand awareness, but it's not like blowing up this bird is going to remind anyone to go sell their old vacuum cleaner on Ditchit.

Also, these guys seem like committed Elon stans, so maybe this was something they partly did to please him or get him to tweet about it. They also drove it out to the Nevada desert with a caravan of four Ditchit-branded Cybertrucks, as you can see in the video below. So, yeah, barf.

They are now auctioning off the pieces of the blown-up bird to the highest bidder, with the auction ending on July 17. Is someone seriously going to pay a significant amount of money to purchase the exploded bits of this sign? I guess nothing surprises me anymore.

Previously: The Old Twitter Building Bird Logo Sign Is Up for Auction, But You Have to Pay for the Shipping

Musk is digging up Twitter receipts on Trump, who has contradicted himself so many times you'd be a billionaire if you had a nickel for each. And the feud that went very public as of Thursday morning is likely to get very, very funny, our teetering democracy aside.

Whether he was in a constant ketamine haze or just, per usual, high on his own wealth and the influence it buys, Elon Musk is maybe more sober now and, unsurprisingly, regretting his choice to go all-in for Trump in the last 12 months. After mostly focusing his criticism on House Republicans in the last week for the venal, deficit-ballooning  audacity of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, Musk turned his ire squarely at Trump Thursday, less than a week after he was in the White House, kissing the ring and graciously taking his leave as special advisor to the president.

Musk went from saying, last Friday, that he'd continue to be "back and forth" between working in Washington and his business, and that he'd still "be a friend and adviser to the president," to mouthing off on Xitter today about Trump being a body-double imposter. In between, Musk had been publicly bad-mouthing the Republican spending bill, calling it, in recent days, both a disappointment and "an abomination," and threatening to help unseat members of Congress who supported it.

Trump, of course, wants his "beautiful" bill to pass. And anyone who was paying attention during Trump's first term should know that he doesn't tolerate non-sycophants for long!

The public blowup might have begun with Musk, at 8:20 am Pacific Time, tweeting some receipts from Trump himself in 2013 saying he was embarrassed about Republicans raising the debt ceiling again.

Musk went on to retweet, via other users, Trump tweets from 2012 saying similar things about debt spending and deficits, asking if Trump had been replaced by a body double.

Then, at an Oval Office sit-down Thursday between President Trump and new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump, speaking to reporters, said, "Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore."

Trump then said, "I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot."

Musk, wherever he is today, was tweeting along in real time, posting clips from Trump's conversation and responding directly to them — clearly not thinking about what the consequences might be. (Trump has since threatened to kill SpaceX's government contracts, and Tesla's stock is currently down 17%.)

When Trump claimed, about Musk's objections to the bill, that Elon "knew the inner workings of the bill better than anybody sitting here," Musk reponded in a tweet saying, "False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!"

He then took a gut punch to Trump, saying, "Without me, Trump would have lost the election," adding, "Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate."

Musk was also playing even dirtier, bringing Jeffrey Epstein into this — causing "Trump and Epstein" to be trending on X. He tweeted that the "real reason" the full Epstein files haven't been made public is because Trump himself is implicated in them.

Musk sounds a little drunk on power again today, but now he's wielding it in the opposite direction — as he's been wont to do over the years on a host of issues. In what sounds like a clear warning to members of the House and Senate who may have elections coming up, regarding votes for the Big Beautiful Bill, Musk tweeted, "Some food for thought as they ponder this question: Trump has 3.5 years left as president, but I will be around for 40+ years."

Senator Rick Scott of Florida was clearly treading lightly, as the New York Times notes, responding to a reporter's question about Musk's criticism of the president and the bill, calling Musk a "patriot" and saying, "I’m appreciative that he cares."

Hilariously, right-wing pundit and latest alleged Musk babymama Ashley St. Clair popped back onto Xitter today after a three-month break to ask Trump if he needs any breakup advice.

Also, Musk returned to his old habit of posting Twitter polls, posting one today asking, "Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?" So far, over 881,000 people have voted, and 82.8% say "Yes."

Top image: Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Musk, who served as an adviser to Trump and led the Department of Government Efficiency, announced he would leave his role in the Trump administration to refocus on his businesses. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

This weekend: Time lapse of the aurora borealis. Last Week: K-Pop fans, Musk on drugs, and a family of owls. This week: Kicking off Pride month with Drag Me Downtown and Bootie Mashup; plus Odd Salon, 'Pacific Overtures', and drink and draw.

Weekend Highlights

• Despite 90-degree heat, thousands showed up for the 40th annual Sonoma County Pride parade and festival in Santa Rosa, with this year's theme being "40 and Fierce." [KGO]
• More than 2,500 attended the San Mateo County Fair this weekend with drone shows, cultural events, live music, and lots of food, runs through June 8. [Bay Area News Group]
• Local photographer Alexander Glavtchev caught some stunning time lapse footage of the aurora borealis in Windsor, California on Saturday night. [KRON4]

Week in Review

Wrapping up the week of May 26-June 1.

Culture & Entertainment

• X/Twitter conveniently went down a few times when the Musk drug story dropped.
• Hundreds of K-Pop fans lined up to score front row seats at the Stray Kids show at Oracle Park.
• Harper Steele, former SNL head writer and the focus of the Netflix doc, Will & Harper, was named Celebrity Grand Marshal SF Pride, which recently gained some new smaller sponsors after losing several large corporate sponsors this year.
• The Pink Triangle installation is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, with this year’s ceremony focusing on the transgender community.
• 40-year-old legacy business Japan Video is closing.
• A family of owls are calling Bernal Heights their new home.

Air & Sea Incidents

• A United Airlines jet bound for SFO had to abort its takeoff in China after one of its engines caught fire on the runway.
• An oil-cleaning vessel owned by a company in Sausalito sank at a dock in Alameda.
• Nine people were rescued from a sailboat.
• A body was found in the bay near the Exploratorium.
• Five more gray whales have died in the Bay Area, which makes a total of 14 gray whale deaths in recent months.

Too Many Road Tragedies

• A driver was charged with felony vehicular manslaughter and DUI after running over and dragging a pedestrian in SoMa after she lay down in the middle of the street.
• A driver was killed after crashing their speeding SUV into parked DOT vehicles on the San Mateo Bridge.
• A pedestrian was killed, Dr. Marvin Boomer, near Lake Merritt in Oakland during a high-speed chase between CHP and a driver in a stolen vehicle.
• Police are seeking the driver who struck a mother and child and fled the scene in SF’s Richmond District.

Crime & Chaos

• An elderly man in a wheelchair was fatally stabbed on a Muni bus in Bayview near Bernal Heights.  
• A San Mateo father was charged with allegedly firing shots at his daughters’ bullies after they pranked his house.
• Well-known Bayview-Hunters Point community activist, Sauntek Harris, was arrested in the killings of four different people spanning 17 years.
• A suspect was arrested in the death of recent Lowell High School graduate Luis Arguello Inglis who was shot and killed at Dolores Park last year.
• An alleged arsonist linked to recent school playground fires in SF’s Outer Richmond has been arrested.

In the Courts

• At least two men were detained by ICE inside federal court in SF.
• More than 70 people showed up to the bail hearing of wine country ponzi schemer Kenneth Mattson saying he made off with their life savings.  
• 37-year-old Honduran national, Fernando Aguilera, was sentenced to four years in federal prison for firing a gun into the air outside a Mission bar and appearing to aim it at police in 2023.

Public Health Alerts

• Public health officials in Alameda and Santa Clara counties put out an alert about potential measles exposure at several retail locations in the last nine days, including H Mart in San Jose, Starbucks in Newark, and Trader Joe’s in Milpitas.
• A new COVID variant that’s behind a current surge in China has reportedly been in California for a month.
• A person was rescued with minor injuries after falling from a cliff along the Batteries to Bluffs Trail.

City Politics & Policy Moves

• Mayor Lurie has spared SF public safety agencies from budget cuts in his upcoming proposal to solve the projected $800 million deficit.
• As many as 1,400 jobs may be eliminated at City Hall, many of which are currently unfilled.
• The recall election for SF Supervisor Joe Engardio has been scheduled for September 16.
• SFUSD dropped its proposed alternative grading pilot project.

The Week Ahead

Looking ahead to June 2-8 — and kicking off Pride Month!

Tuesday:

Odd Salon SF: UNCHARTED: Explore strange frontiers and forgotten tales at this night of storytelling from the curious corners of history, science, and art. Expect topics like nitrous oxide experiments, occult feuds, and why ants never lose their way. Tuesday, June 3, 6:30-10 p.m. // Public Works, 161 Erie St // $25, 21+

Wednesday:

Drink & Draw Art & Raffle: Grab a drink, grab a pen, and join the artsy chaos at this Mission District favorite. Every first Wednesday, The Knockout hosts a free themed drawing night where bar patrons sketch their way to raffle prizes (cocktails included). Your masterpiece gets scanned and shared online for eternal glory. Wednesday, June 4, 6:30–9 p.m. // The Knockout, 3223 Mission St // free, 21+

Thursday:

Pacific Overtures: Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s groundbreaking musical Pacific Overtures returns in a rare production that blends Kabuki theatricality with Broadway grandeur. Directed by Nick Ishimaru, this visually stunning retelling of Japan’s forced opening to the West explores identity, imperialism, and cultural upheaval through a cast playing over 50 roles. Runs through June 15, Wed–Sat 7:30 p.m., Sun 2 p.m. // Brava Theater, 2781 24th St // $25-75

Friday:

Meet People Social SF: Cultural International Party: This weekly social brings together locals and visitors for a weekly mixer with music, drinks, games, and prizes. Show up solo or with friends and make some new connections in a relaxed setting. Friday, June 6, 5:30–10 p.m. // Alchemist Bar & Lounge, 679 3rd St // $4 online, 21+

Drag Me Downtown: The popular pop-up drag show will be hitting a new downtown SF location every Friday in June. Expect fierce performances, DJs, cocktails, and community vibes—all hosted by the iconic Bobby Friday and friends. Friday, June 6, 4:30–8 p.m. // One Market Restaurant, 1 Market St // Free or $10 to support The Transgender District, 21+

Saturday:

LGBooTie Pride: Bootie Mashup: Bootie Mashup kicks off Pride Month with a genre-bending, pop-diva-fueled dance party for queers and allies alike. Expect two rooms of mashups, drag and burlesque by The Monster Show (featuring Redd FaFilth & Xotchil), and unhinged queer visuals all night. DJs include Adriana A, DJ Tyme, ION THE PRIZE, Dada, and Jimi G (with live guitar mashups). Saturday, June 7, 9 p.m. ‘til late // Cat Club, 1190 Folsom St // $10, 21+

Image: Pacific Overtures/Facebook

Previously: Last Week, This Week: SF LGBT Center’s Building the Block House Party

Xitter had something of a meltdown Friday, with many users reporting a total outage on the platform in the US, India, and elsewhere.

Was Elon Musk just unhappy about the memes starting to spread about his drug use on his own platform, or is X/Twitter just having some legit technical problems lately? Who can say?!

But Xitter was down Friday for many users, and DownDetector was showing a major spike in outage reports on the platform as of 1 pm Pacific Time. This happened just about two hours after Musk made possibly his final appearance in the Oval Office, at least for a while, with his time as an unofficial presidential advisor coming to an official end. And it comes hours after the New York Times dropped a bombshell report detailing Musk's rampant drug use on the Trump campaign trail and possibly while he was launching DOGE and making Nazi salutes — all while the sober clowns in the Trump administration looked on and applauded.

For many users, the X home screen came up Friday afternoon with nothing in the feed — just the "Find some people and topics to follow now" section appearing.

The X Developer Platform status page showed a "Site-wide outage" as of 1:20 pm PT on Friday.

As the Times of India noted, the Xitter platform earlier experienced three different outage in the span of a week, including a significant outage two days ago.

Xitter was back online as of about 2:15 pm Pacific time, and Elon himself tweeted about 20 minutes earlier that the New York Times is "pure propaganda."

Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok has gone a on a bizarre bender where it’s spewing answers about fictional South African “white genocide” to completely unrelated queries, raising questions of whether Musk’s crackpot racism is baked into the product.

It explains a lot about Elon Musk that he was born into a wealthy ruling-class family in apartheid-era South Africa, and is maybe one of those Afrikaners who’d like to see some of that apartheid come back. And you'd have to think there’s some sort of connection there that Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok went through a strange phase last week where it was giving answers about a racist conspiracy theory about a “white genocide” happening among farmers in South Africa, as Bloomberg reports, and giving these answers in response to complete mundane, unrelated questions about video games, HBOMax, and baseball player salaries.    

As seen above, the Grok chatbot is kicking up some serious “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” sentiment with these unrelated answers about “white genocide” that, for whatever reason, Grok is obsessed with dragging the into the conversation. Users galore last week just typed the prompt  “@grok Is this true?” into a Twitter thread, and they’d be served a strange primer in whether or not “white genocide” ever happened in South Africa.

Maybe this is what Elon Musk meant when he said Grok was a chatbot "with a rebellious streak." And it sure calls to mind that time that Musk was crowing about other AI chatbots being too politically correct!

Whoever runs public relations for Grok was forced to post an embarrassed Thursday statement, claiming there was some sort of “unauthorized modification” to its technology, a modification which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values.”

“Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident,” the statement added. “We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.”

Golly, any theories on which "employee" may have performed this “unauthorized modification?” And is it really that easy to make an AI tool go haywire across a whole platform?

This raises questions about not just how frequently AI gets things flat-out wrong, but also the degree to which Grok and other AI tools can be manipulated by tech executives, or outside bad actors hoping to promote misinformation.

The higher-ups at Grok now claim that they will be publishing “our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok.” They also said they’re reviewing their code review process, and putting in a “24/7 monitoring team” that will be human and not just AI.

But it seems almost certain that something like this is going to happen again, whether it’s done by some malicious outside actor, or if it's just Musk getting under the hood and fiddling with the tool’s mechanics for his own ideological ends.

Related: Google Suspends Gemini Image Module After Backlash Over Diverse Depictions of Founding Fathers, Nazis [SFist]

Image: WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 24: White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (L) listens during a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC. This is Trump's third cabinet meeting of his second term, and it focused on spending cuts proposed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The very large, old Twitter bird logo that used to be attached to the building's former Market Street headquarters is on the auction block and hoping to fetch $40,000, but you’ll have to pay the shipping on the 12-foot, 560-pound piece.

The company formerly known as Twitter is now completely out of its former 1355 Market Street headquarters building, and has been for a good six months. But you’ll recall that Twitter auctioned off a bunch of office furniture and neon signage from that headquarters building after Elon Musk bought the site, changed its name to ‘X,’ and made the site a repository for Alex Jones propaganda.  

Now one of the more recognizable items, presumably after having already sold in that January 2023 auction, is back on the market. Engadget reports that a Twitter “bird logo” sign that used to be that headquarters building is up again for auction. And be aware the thing is 12 feet by eight feet, and weighs 560 pounds.

"Massive original Twitter, Inc. ‘bird logo’ fascia sign formerly mounted to the side of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, California,” the official online auction listing declares. “This iconic sign, which approximately measures 145˝ x 105˝ x 20˝ and weighs roughly 560 lbs, was one of two large logo signs secured to the exterior of Twitter headquarters; this offered sign was mounted on the southeast side of the building facing Jessie Street, whereas the other sign was positioned to face southwest and overlook 10th Street. In fine condition."

So as seen in the video above, which shows the sign being removed from the building to some kind of Michael Bay movie score music, this was not the sign that was facing Market Street. This bird is the one that was on the Jessie Street side of the building. And neither of these birds is one of the the two light-blue Twitter birds that were above the clock on the on the iconic white Twitter sign at Market and Tenth streets.

The auction house RR Auction is hoping to get $40,000 for this piece. As of press time for this post, the biddings stands at $21,664. Bidding continues until March 20, which is this Thursday.

Though there’s a big catch. “The winning bidder is responsible for the cost of shipping the sign from its current storage facility in San Francisco to its final destination,” the listing says. Though the item is being stored in San Francisco, so maybe you have some buddy with a truck and you could work something out.

It is realistic that this old Twitter bird sign could pull the hoped-for $40,000 bid, or one even higher. Back during that January 2023 auction, a Twitter bird statue sold for $100,000. The sale price of the other Market Street-facing Twitter bird is not disclosed on its auction site.

Though this item is obviously far heavier and more high-maintenance than a statue. And who knows, maybe the tech-wealthy, would-be buyers for this sign are seeing their fortunes wiped out under the Trump-Musk economy.  

Related: Twitter Now Trying To Auction Off Extra Office Stuff As New Lawsuit Is Filed Over Rent [SFist]

Image: RR Auction