It has been an eventful few days. Like it or not, we talk about Elon Musk and Twitter. Google is cracking down on play store billing, Windows 11 is getting new features, and other news over the last few days.
Elon Musk Becomes Twitter’s Largest Shareholder, Gets Seat on Board
A bombshell dropped this week with the news of Elon Musk purchasing a 9.2% stake in Twitter (worth about $2.9 Billion USD at the time of the announcement), becoming the company’s largest individual shareholder. On Tuesday more news came out of this, with regulatory filings revealing that Musk will be offered a two year term on Twitter’s board of directors for a two year term. In exchange for a seat on the board Musk will not be able to increase his stake in Twitter to greater than 14%, and he has agreed to not take any actions that could result in a sale or purchase of the company, or other financial decisions and direction.
Musk has been a vocal critic of Twitter, so it remains to be seen what kind of influence he will have on the company’s direction.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/5/23011810/elon-musk-twitter-sec-board-member-moderation
Twitter Will Introduce an Edit Button
On April 1st, Twitter’s official account tweeted that the company was working on an edit button. Seeing as it was April 1, no one believed the company. This week, Twitter has clarified that it is, in fact, working on an edit tweet button, and that it will begin testing it with Twitter Blue subscribers “in the coming months.”
Twitter has desperately needed an edit button for years. Other social platforms have figured out how to allow people to edit posts while still maintaining an edit history, and it is puzzling as to why it is taking Twitter so long to figure this out. Hopefully the time means the feature will be well thought out, and eventually rolls out to all users, not just paying subscribers.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/5/23011327/twitter-edit-button-blue-test
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Threatens EV Battery Supply and Pricing
One of the key components of prices of electric vehicles coming down has been the rapid decline of the huge batteries needed to power them. In 2013 the price for the battery in an EV was about $684 USD per KWh of capacity. In 2021, that number had fallen to $131. That price was expected to keep falling, with automakers believing that a price of $100/KWh would allow price parity between comparable gas vehicles and EV’s.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has threatened that trend however. Ukraine mines some of the material needed to produce EV batteries, and supply chain issues across Europe caused by this invasion threaten many aspects of the world economy, EV batteries among them.
Google Cracks Down on 3rd Party Billing
In the face of anti-trust lawsuits against Google and Apple against their respective app stores, Google has decided that it is going to become even more restrictive on its platform. As of March 31, the company has started enforcing an existing rule that no app or service may use its own billing system in an Android App, and must use Google Play Billing, with Google taking a 30% cut. Technically this rule has always existed, but Google has been lax in enforcement, with certain companies and apps like Amazon, Netflix, and Barnes and Noble using their own billing system.
Today, none of those apps allow content to be purchased through them. This may seem backwards, and it is, but Google is just enforcing existing rules, as strange as it may seem.