Elon Musk is asking Twitter investors to dig deeper into their pockets, as he seeks to make the social media company financially viable.

Driving the news: Musk, via his family office, this week privately offered to sell additional equity at the same $44 billion valuation that he's essentially admitted was an overpay.

The news was first reported by Semafor and confirmed to Axios by an investor who received the letter.
Musk has not said how much new capital he's seeking to raise, nor provided investors with financial updates on the company.
His original takeover was partially funded by outside investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Several large Twitter investors also rolled over their equity stakes, including company co-founder Jack Dorsey and Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding Company.
Twitter no longer has a communications team or other spokespeople for Axios to contact for comment.

Flashback: Earlier this week, Musk sold around $3.58 billion of Tesla stock, despite having repeatedly pledged earlier this year not to do so.

The Biden administration is planning to begin refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a senior administration official said Friday, marking the end to the massive supply releases that the White House ordered to tame the sharp price spikes earlier this year.

President Joe Biden had ordered the Energy Department to begin releases from the reserve last year, and he sharply ramped up those sales after Russia invaded Ukraine in February — sending crude oil prices soaring and driving up gasoline to record levels. Total releases from the reserve this year totaled more than 211 million barrels, putting the inventories at their lowest levels since 1984.

Republicans had accused Biden of misusing the SPR for political purposes, but voters backed the measures by a clear majority, and retail gasoline prices retreated sharply as crude oil markets calmed. U.S. benchmark WTI crude futures jumped nearly $2 on the announcement and were trading at $75 per barrel early Friday afternoon. That’s well below the peak of over $120 a barrel earlier this year.

Average retail gasoline price stood at $3.178 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association — down from the record high at $5.02 in June and nearly 15 cents under the year ago level.

The Energy Department will start with an initial request for 3 million barrels, asking companies for the barrels to be delivered in February, the administration official said on a call with reporters. Companies participating in the process must submit their offers by Dec. 28 and will offer oil at a fixed price.

Now, some Tesla investors are calling for Musk to hand over the reins at one of his companies as the electric vehicle company’s stock plummets — raising concerns that the billionaire is stretched too thin. Tesla closed Wednesday at $156.80 per share, with an overall valuation of less than $500 billion, sharply down from when Musk signaled his interest in Twitter over the spring and Tesla was valued at over $1 trillion.

Contributing to the losses, Musk sold about $3.5 billion worth of Tesla stock in recent days, according to a financial filing Wednesday night. That added to another more than $3.9 billion in Tesla shares sold by Musk in early November, according to the filings.

Shares of Tesla plunged again Friday, falling more than 4 percent by midday as Musk faced backlash online after Twitter suspended several journalists’ accounts.

“Wake up tesla [board] — what is the plan? Who is running tesla and when is Elon coming back?” tweeted Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor who supported Musk’s Twitter bid, earlier in the week.

He added in a tweet late Wednesday that Tesla needed to buy back shares “to take advantage [of] the low share price Elon has created,” as investors anticipated a potential further blow to the company’s value on Thursday

Stephen Miller was one of the most strident anti-immigrant, white-nationalist sympathizers in former President Donald Trump’s administration. And, believe me, sticking out for that reason in that administration is really saying something.

After spending his time in Trump's administration maligning foreigners who want to come to America and promoting a zero-tolerance policy that ripped children from the arms of undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border, Miller is now on a mission to use the courts to eradicate what he says is bigotry targeting white men.

“I think that it is inescapably true that there is insidious and explicit discrimination against White Americans, Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Jewish Americans based on their skin color and their ancestry,” he told The Washington Post. Note the people he included on his list of people he says are being discriminated against, and the people he excluded.

His list makes clear the groups he’s targeting: African Americans and Hispanics and the laws that were crafted to help them overcome racism.

As for white people being discriminated against, data shows this is laughable. White men are wildly overrepresented in elected office and as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and have the lowest unemployment rate of anybody in the country. But the facts don’t matter. Miller’s mission is likely to hit a nerve with white people, as polls show more and more of them believe that white men are the victims in today’s society. According to a University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll in May, nearly a third of white Americans insist that they have seen “a lot more” discrimination against white people in the past five years.

A war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Friday sentenced a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army to 26 years in prison for the war crimes of arbitrary detention, torture and murder.

The Salih Mustafa case was one overseen in part by now-special counsel Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor appointed last month by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee investigations in the US involving former President Donald Trump.

The panel of judges in the tribunal found Mustafa guilty of crimes that occurred in April 1999 in a village in Kosovo used as a base by a KLA unit that Mustafa led during the conflict with Serbian government forces.,,,,

Smith participated in the Mustafa trial before stepping down last month from his role as specialist prosecutor in the Kosovo tribunal after being tapped to oversee the Trump-related investigations in the US.

He remains in the Netherlands while he recovers from a bike injury and is expected to return to the US in the coming weeks.

Twitter is banning the “free promotion” of specific third-party social media platforms through link sharing as well as social media link aggregators, the company announced Sunday.

“We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter,” the platform’s Twitter Support account tweeted out. “Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.”
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817

Social platforms prohibited as of Sunday include Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr, along with link aggregators linktr.ee and lnk.bio. The current approach to banning does not prohibit paid advertisement and promotions from the identified competitors, cross-posting from sites not listed on the policy page or “cross-posting content from any social media platform.”

Violations include using URLs that link to the identified platforms, providing your social handle without a URL and the inclusion of third-party platform usernames in your Twitter bio or account name. But it will also ban users from spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use the punctuation mark and screenshots of your handle from any of the prohibited platforms.

Users in violation of the policy may be required to delete one or more flagged Tweets or see their account temporarily locked, followed by permanent platform suspension for subsequent violations.