On Thursday, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a sternly-worded letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, accusing the tech giant of misusing Twitter’s data. According to The New York Times, who acquired a copy of the letter, Spiro alleges Microsoft was in breach of multiple provisions of the agreement in its use of the Twitter API, a programing tool that allows external parties to access the social platform’s data.
Microsoft operated eight apps, utilizing the API, and according to the letter, it retrieved over 26 billion tweets from just within a year. The API enables automated Twitter accounts, such as those issuing emergency alerts from transportation authorities and weather services, and can also be used to analyze the tweets. The letter then requests an audit of Microsoft’s API use, in order to determine the amount of content kept and how it was used.
Twitter disrupted the space in March when they announced their payment tier system for its API, which had previously been free across industries. New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority told Bloomberg that the new fees were forcing it to pay $50,000 per month, although the platform reversed its decision and returned earlier this month. Microsoft has since clarified via a spokesperson to The New York Times that it does not pay for Twitter’s data.
This isn’t the first encounter between Musk and Microsoft, as he has previously taken aim at the company for their collaboration with OpenAI, developed by ChatGPT, a company Musk co-founded. In May, Musk even tweeted that they “trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time”.
Twitter has additionally spent an undisclosed yet hefty amount of money on developing its own generative AI model, according to a recent report from Insider.
Microsoft is a technology giant and the world’s most valuable company, who offer an array of solutions ranging from cloud services, gaming, hardware, and other digital solutions. Founded in 1975, Microsoft has become the first American public company to bring in more than $1 trillion in four quarters.
Elon Musk is an inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur. He founded SpaceX and Tesla Motors, as well as Neuralink which focuses on the development of implantable brain-computer interfaces. He is passionate about environmental protection, and visioned Tesla as a way to bring sustainable transportation to the world. To date, Musk has revolutionized many different industries from technology to space exploration and transportation.
