Elon Musk is a popular, successful, and polarizing figure. While some of his business ideas and projects have been well-received, his tweets and comments are often deemed controversial. Over the past couple of months, he has been creating headlines for his Twitter acquisition.
Recently, the 51-year-old billionaire threatened to make some changes to the Twitter handle of news outlet NPR. Musk has had a dislike for various news outlets including BBC, which he labeled “government funded.” So let’s find out why he is threatening to reassign the company’s Twitter account.
Elon Musk Threatens News Outlet NPR
Elon Musk-led Twitter rolled out the Twitter Blue feature last month. While the company was giving blue, grey, and golden check marks to users, they were also labeling some media outlets as “government-funded“.
One of them was NPR. A month later, Musk reportedly mailed its journalists, threatening to reassign the company’s Twitter account if they don’t start tweeting again. “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?”, he wrote.
Musk has asked media outlets to pay for the verification badge in order to avoid confusion with imposter accounts. But, several companies like ‘The New York Times’ and ‘Washington Post’ have decided not to pay.
NPR, which has over eight million followers on the platform, was given the label of “government-funded”. But it has since been removed. BBC, another company critical of Musk, was also given the same label.
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Twitter Has Changed Its Parental Leave Policy
Ever since Musk took over Twitter, he has been making several drastic or rather bizarre changes in the company. The recent in the list is the change in their parental leave policy which has been deducted from 20 weeks (which is approximately 140 days) to just 14 days.
Kate Conger, a New York Times journalist, tweeted about this, “New: Twitter used to offer employees 20 weeks of paid parental leave. That’s being changed to whatever is required by law in the region where the employees work, along with a “top up” of two weeks of leave, per internal docs.”
Musk fired nearly half of the company’s workforce last year after he took over and has stopped paying rent for its office spaces in San Francisco, London, and Singapore.
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