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Good morning!
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In the olden days, when powerful men disagree and reputations are bruised, to settle their squabble they challenge each other to a duel to the death, which takes place typically in the public square.
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Well, this is the age of social media and such practices as a duel to death have been abolished long ago. These days what we have is cancel culture.
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You might have heard of the story of the media baron, Elon Musk who wants Twitter for himself, who then pulled out from buying Twitter citing alarming numbers of bots. Last weekend, he challenged Twitter's CEO to a public debate. It might not be the same as way back when, but reputations are surely at stake.
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Below are the tech stories and news you need to know to start your day, carefully curated by Technext.
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Summary of the news
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- Elon Musk has challenged Twitter's CEO to a ‘public debate’ about bots
- A new report shows that crypto enthusiasts are promoting BitCoin more as a stable crypto
- Demands for plug-in hybrids cars are overtaking electric cars, a new report shows
- Binance and WazirX have disagreed over who owns who, two years after announcing a deal
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Elon Musk challenges Twitter CEO
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Centi-billionaire Elon Musk provoked Twitter and challenged the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal to a “public debate” about fake accounts and spam in the midst of a contentious legal battle over a $44 billion acquisition.
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CNBC reports that in a series of tweets that Musk began posting over the weekend, Musk interacted with a fan who had summarized his accusations about Twitter including that it was stonewalling him and giving him, “outdated data,” and “a fake data set” when he asked the company for details about how it tabulates mDAU, and estimates for spam and bot accounts.
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The Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote, “Good summary of the problem. If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms. However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.”
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By just after 9 a.m. Saturday morning, Musk started a Twitter poll asking his followers to vote on whether ”[l]ess than 5% of Twitter daily users are fake/spam.”
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Respondents to the informal poll could choose one of Musk’s provided answers which read either “Yes” followed by three robot emoji, or “Lmaooo no.” (The slang abbreviation “lmao” stands for “laughing my a-- off.)
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Musk also wrote Saturday morning: “I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!>
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Crypto Market VS BitCoin
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Cory Klippsten started issuing warnings about the cryptocurrency market in March. The digital coin Luna, Mr. Klippsten tweeted, was a scam, run by an entrepreneur with “major Elizabeth Holmes vibes.” The newfangled crypto bank Celsius Network was a “massive blowup risk,” he said.
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According to the New York Times, when those crypto projects collapsed a few weeks later, causing a crash that has wiped out about $1 trillion in value, Mr. Klippsten became a fixture on news shows, where he cast the industry as a morass of hucksters and hypocrites. “Crypto is a scam,” he declared last month.
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But Mr. Klippsten differs from most crypto haters in one crucial respect: He runs a Bitcoin company.
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“Bitcoin is decentralized, digitally scarce money. Everything else is centralized,” said Jimmy Song, a crypto podcaster and an outspoken Bitcoin maxi. “There’s a world of difference between a censorship-resistant, self-sovereign money versus a gambling vehicle.”
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Plug-in hybrids cars rise again
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In late 2010, General Motors sought to seize the high ground from Toyota’s successful Prius hybrid with the Volt plug-in hybrid — a car that could drive short distances on only electricity and fire up a gasoline engine for long trips.
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But the Volt and other cars like it struggled to win over drivers as many early adopters opted for fully electric cars like Tesla’s Model S and the Nissan Leaf. G.M.
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quietly did away with the Volt in 2019 as it trained its sights on all-electric cars.
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But a funny thing happened on the way to obsolescence: Plug-in hybrid sales are climbing in the United States, in part because of the recent surge in gasoline prices. Automakers sold a record 176,000 such cars last year, according to Wards Intelligence, up from 69,000 in 2020.
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Binance and WazirX disagree over deal
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Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, said on Friday it doesn’t own India-based platform WazirX despite disclosing the acquisition two and a half years ago in a move that has baffled industry players, including the Indian firm that insists the purchase did take place.
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Changpeng Zhao, founder and chief executive of Binance, said in a series of tweets that the company has been “trying to conclude the deal for the past few years,” but hasn’t completed the transaction yet citing “a few issues” that he declined to elaborate, TechCrunch reports.
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Binance announced the acquisition of WazirX in late 2019 in a blog post. The official blog post, which carried a picture of Zhao and WazirX founders, also featured the Binance executive’s enthusiasm about the deal.
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“The acquisition of WazirX shows our commitment and dedication to the Indian people and strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in India as well as another step forward in achieving the freedom of money,” the 2019 post cited him as saying.
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Latest in funding
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Other stories we are following
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