The Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile show, is a place where device makers show off some of their latest innovations.

And there was quite a lot on display in Barcelona, Spain, this year.

Artificial intelligence took center stage, but there was also plenty of experimentation with different types of screens and first looks at some devices from some of the world’s biggest tech firms.

Motorola phone that wraps around wrist

Motorola showed off a concept smartphone that has the ability to bend along the spine-like hinge, including wrapping around your wrist.

The “adaptive display concept” smartphone from the brand, which is owned by China’s Lenovo,  has an interface that changes depending on how it bends.

It even has a feature to generate a background to match your outfit.

Lenovo’s see-through laptop

Lenovo revealed a concept laptop with a transparent screen.

A company representative showed how an object could be placed behind the screen. The laptop’s camera can identify it. Artificial intelligence is then used to display information about the object on the screen.

Expandable smartphone

Forget foldables. It’s now about rollables, according to one company.

Tecno, a brand under Chinese firm Transsion, showed off the Phantom Ultimate, a phone with an expandable screen.

The screen expands horizontally after it a user presses the button on the top of the device.

Humane AI Pin

The AI Pin from a company called Humane is a small device that attaches to your clothing.

You can ask it questions and it will give you a response.

There’s also a camera built in so it can take pictures.

Here’s the coolest part: The laser projector beams a menu onto your hand. You can then use hand gestures to navigate.

We posted a video about it on social media here.

OPPO augmented reality glasses

Oppo debuted a set of augmented reality glasses it calls the Air Glass 3.

The glasses are equipped with an AI assistant you can talk to.

AR gaming headset

Tecno showed off an augmented reality glasses product with a video game controller attached.

It allows a user to play games on a big screen by wearing the glasses.

The processing power for the whole system is housed inside the gaming controller.

Xiaomi phone that turns into a proper camera

Xiaomi has spent years talking up its smartphones’ camera capabilities.

This year, the company took it one step further when it announced that it is selling a professional photography kit with its flagship Xiaomi 14 smartphone.

This is a kit that attached to the smartphone and turns it into something akin to a DSLR camera.

Samsung Galaxy Ring

Samsung introduced its Galaxy Ring this week.

It’s the South Korean tech giant’s first foray into smart rings.

It is equipped with sensors that can track things like heart rate and aspects of your sleep.

Samsung said that this, combined with its smartwatch and phone, can give users some insightful health readings.

The company is looking to launch it in the second half of 2024.

Robot dog

Chinese firm Tecno showed off a robot dog.

Called the Tecno Dynamic 1, it has a design inspired by a German Shepherd, according to the company.

In a demo, the dog danced to a beat, jumped around and shook hands with a person.

Other companies like Xiaomi are also developing robot dogs.

Xiaomi SU7

Xiaomi debuted its first ever electric vehicle, the SU7, in Europe this week. The car is not yet on sale and it’s unclear if Xiaomi will sell the car in Europe. But the Chinese tech company is keen to flaunt its progress and entrance into the highly competitive EV space. The car took center stage at Xiaomi’s display at MWC.

The food delivery app is already used by millions of consumers to have food from restaurants and grocery orders delivered to their home or business. Now, the company says it is starting new programs to help people save time and money as they shop for food on the go.

Here are all the ways Uber Eats will be helping users save money later this year and into 2024:

SNAP/Food Stamps

Food stamps issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will soon be accepted by Uber Eats.

More than 41 million Americans receive SNAP benefits to help pay for fresh and nutritious groceries.

Starting in 2024, Uber Eats will accept SNAP benefits as a form of payment, reducing barriers for people who live in food deserts or have transportation issues.

Other food delivery apps, such as DoorDash and Instacart, already accept SNAP as payment for grocery deliveries.

Healthcare Benefit Payments

Uber Eats will also begin accepting Flex Cards, FSA Cards and other relevant waiver payments provided to Americans from Medicare Advantage and Managed Medicaid plans as part of its food delivery services.

Artificial Intelligence

Starting later this year, Uber Eats users will be able to use an AI chat feature to discover new food options, as well as deals and discounts.

Consumers will even be able to make affordable meal plans using the new AI tool, the company said.

Sales Aisle

In another way to help save consumers time and money, Uber Eats will launch a Sales Aisle section of its app to put the best deals and brands in one place.

The company described the new feature as something that “combines promos and deals into one easy to find space, saving you the hassle of long searches through the app.”

A day after Gov. Gavin Newsom and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff discussed the myriad issues San Francisco is facing as a city and a host for future innovation, Dreamforce turned the conversation’s focus on AI.

Davis and Lee are scheduled to take part in a session titled “Taking Creative Control: Lights, Camera, AI” at 2 p.m. Meyers and comedian Sheng Wang are slated to host the “Dreamforce Comedy Hour” at 3 p.m.

For a full list of Thursday’s events, visit the official conference website.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Friday that he plans for his newest venture, the artificial intelligence startup xAI, to collaborate with the automaker both on the “silicon front” and on the “AI software front.”

Musk also said, during Friday’s live audio session on Twitter Spaces, that xAI will use Twitter data for training the “maximally curious” artificial intelligence systems and products he hopes to build there. Musk did not specify whether and how much Twitter will charge xAI or his other companies for its data.

When Musk led a buyout of the social media venture in October 2022, Twitter took on $13 billion in new debt. The company has struggled to juice its subscription revenue, and has been sued by ex-employees and vendors for non-payment for completed work or severance.

Several of the other companies where Musk was a founder or serves as CEO, including Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Co., have done business together for years. Some of their transactions have been disclosed in Tesla financial filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

On Friday, without citing evidence, Musk alleged that “Every AI organization on Earth” had used Twitter’s data for training, “in all cases illegally.” It was not clear which laws would have been violated by others’ data scraping. Earlier this month, Twitter sued four unknown parties for data scraping in Texas.

Twitter implemented rate limits on the social media platform in recent weeks because, Musk claimed, it was “being scraped like crazy.” He said, “We had multiple entities scraping every tweet ever made, and trying to do so in like, basically a span of days. So — this was bringing the system to its knees. So we had to take action.” He apologized for the inconvenience of the rate limiting.

In light of widespread use of Twitter data by AI software developers, Musk said, “I guess we will use the public tweets — obviously not anything private — for training as well, just like basically everyone else has.”

Twitter’s data set appeals for “text training,” and “image and video training,” Musk said. However, he specified that AI systems need more than human-created data and he was hoping that xAI could follow in the footsteps of Alphabet-owned DeepMind’s Alpha Zero, a computer program that achieved a masterful level of play in three games, chess, shogi and go, after training by playing these games against itself.

A Tesla fan and promoter, Omar Qazi (known as Whole Mars Catalog on Twitter) asked Musk a few questions about how he plans for xAI to work with Tesla during the Spaces event. Among other things, he asked whether xAI would potentially use Nvidia- or Tesla-made silicon for data processing.

Musk said, “That’s sort of a Tesla question. Tesla is building custom silicon. I wouldn’t call anything that Tesla’s producing a ‘GPU’ although one can characterize it in GPU equivalents.” He then spoke about Tesla’s in-vehicle hardware, which enables the company’s advanced driver assistance systems to work in its cars. The systems are marketed as Autopilot and Full Self Driving capability in the US.

Tesla has been promising fans a robotaxi, or self-driving vehicle, for years. At that time, Musk said a cross-country demo with a Tesla car would be possible without a single human intervention by the end of 2017. In 2019, Tesla raised billions of dollars with the promise of a million robotaxi-ready Tesla vehicles on the road in a year. So far, none of Tesla’s vehicles are capable of operating without a human driver ready to steer or brake at any time.

Musk said on Twitter Spaces on Friday that Tesla’s hardware 4, which is shipping in now, is “three-to-five times more capable than hardware 3,” and promised “hardware 5” would come along in a few years and would be “four or five times more capable” than its current version.

The CEO also discussed Dojo, a supercomputer Tesla is developing for AI machine learning and computer vision training purposes. Tesla uses video clips and data from its customers’ vehicles to improve existing software, or develop new features.

Musk said that the eventual AI language model that xAI will presumably develop won’t be “politically correct.” The CEO, who has repeatedly attacked “woke” or progressive values, said “I think our AI can give answers that people may find controversial even though they are actually true.”

The Tesla CEO said that xAI will need to develop technology that “understands the physical world and not just the Internet,” and he thinks that Tesla’s driving data will help it on that front.

Walter Isaacson, the author of an Elon Musk biography coming out later this year, asked Musk about Optimus, a humanoid robot Tesla is developing with the aim of using it in manufacturing. Musk said that the robot is still in its “early stages” and his team needs to find a way that users will be able to easily turn it off.

Tesla showed off a design for a humanoid robot called Optimus at its AI day in September 2022. Tesla executive are expected to share updates on this and more on an earnings call next Wednesday.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed reporting.

The Aigen Element looks like a drafting table on rugged tires. It drives itself continuously at around two miles per hour over farmland, using an advanced computer vision system to identify crops and unwanted botanical invaders.

With two-axis robotic arms positioned close the ground, the Element can flick weeds out of the way where they’ll dry out before they can grow seeds and spread.

The robots, which are used in a fleet and sized to meet the needs of a particular growing operation, work continuously for 12 to 14 hours at a time and never need to be plugged in. They are equipped with a lithium iron phosphate battery pack, as well as flexible solar panels which are lighter than the kind typically used on rooftops. They can even run in the dark for about four hours, or six hours in light to moderate rain — all without the emissions associated with diesel-powered farm equipment.

The company behind the robots, Aigen, was founded by Rich Wurden, an ex-Tesla engineer, along with former Proofpoint executive Kenny Lee in 2020.

According to the most recent data available from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. pesticide usage reached more than 1.1 billion pounds annually by 2012, with herbicides accounting for nearly 60% of that. Glyphosate was the most used active ingredient that year, with 270 million to 290 million pounds used then, and it had been since 2001.

Reducing growers’ over-reliance on pesticides and heavy use of chemicals in the global food supply is of personal importance to Wurden and Lee. Both founders and several employees in their 15-person team have experienced significant health issues associated with exposure to pesticides.

Wurden, who is Aigen’s CTO, comes from a family of farmers who grew sugarbeets in Minnesota. Now, he says, his family’s farm grows sorghum and soy.

“My pancreas stopped producing insulin when I was 15 all of a sudden,” he said. He always suspected pesticide exposure, which is associated with a higher risk of diabetes, was a factor.

As a type 1 diabetic, he lives with an insulin pump with environmental health on his mind every day since his diagnosis.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Wurden worked as a mechanical engineer and on battery technology at Tesla, helping to create the battery pack that is found in the company’s best-selling Model 3 and Y vehicles and Model S flagship sedan. He later joined an electric boating startup called Pure Watercraft in Seattle, where he says he caught something of the startup bug.

Lee, who is Aigen’s CEO, overcame non-Hodgkins lymphoma as a young man, and says he’s interested in both personal and planetary health following a career in cybersecurity, where he was more focused on making the internet a safer place for all. (Lee was co-founder of Weblife.io, which was acquired by Proofpoint in a deal valued around $60 million in 2017.)

Wurden and Lee met in a Slack channel called Work on Climate where tech industry veterans discussed how to pivot or grow their careers while combating the climate crisis.

Gathering data to analyze pests and water

Farmers want the ability to identify exactly when and where insects are showing up so they can eliminate those that pose a risk, for example. They also want irrigation-related analytics, which would tell them whether their plants are getting enough water, and whether some parts of the field may need more irrigation than others.

Typically, a fleet of the Element robots would pass over the field continuously, gathering data each time. Currently, the system can provide what farmers call a “stand count,” analyzing how many healthy plants are in the field.

The Aigen Element runs on solar and wind power, completely off the power grid. It also runs its analytics and AI-machine learning software on the device, rather than in the cloud. Because of that, Lee said, the company has the potential to give farmers more extensive crop analytics.

“While we’re taking weeding actions, we can do other things that no other agtech can because we’re mobile on the ground.”

The Element could also help farmers work around a persistent labor shortage in agriculture, and keep their crops healthy even during extreme heat that would make it hostile for people to stay out in the field weeding.

According to Trent Eidem, who has signed up to put the Aigen Element to work at his sugarbeet growing operation near Fargo, the robots are also appealing because they could reduce the amount of money that growers have to spend on costly “inputs,” namely herbicides. Inputs and energy are his biggest budget items, Eidem said.

In the next year, the company plans to build and bring more of their robots to farmers — and to develop additional capabilities for them, too.

Aigen has raised around $7 million in early-stage funding and additional grant money from the state of Idaho to develop their system.

Investors include a mix of tech and climate-focused seed and venture funds: NEA, Global Founders, Regen Ventures, Bessemer, Climate Tech VC, Cleveland Ave., and a climate fund founded by ex-Meta exec Mike Schroepfer.

NEA Partner Andrew Schoen, who invests in emerging tech, told CNBC that Aigen founders’ track record in both software and hardware and ability to build an “autonomous ground robot” before raising any funding gave him confidence to invest. He also said Aigen is tackling a massive pain point for farmers, representing a potentially massive market.

According to forecasts by Fortune Business Insights, the global market for pesticides, or “crop protection products,” is expected to exceed $80 billion by 2028. Increasingly, the investor believes agricultural producers will include robotics, not just chemical inputs, in their mix.

But many of the features require minors — and their parents — to opt in, raising questions about how effective the measures are. Instagram, for instance, will now send a notice to teens after they have blocked someone, encouraging them to let their parents “supervise” their account. The idea is to grab kids’ attention when they might be more open to parental guidance.

If a teen opts in, the system will let parents set time limits, see who their kid follows or is followed by, and allows them to track how much time the minor spends on Instagram. It does not let parents see message content.

Instagram launched parental supervision tools last year to help families navigate the platform and find resources and guidance. A sticking point in the process is that kids need to sign up if they want parents to supervise their accounts. It’s not clear how many teen users have opted in and Meta has not disclosed any numbers.

Such supervision allows parents to see how many friends their child has in common with accounts the child follows or is followed by. So if the child is followed by someone none of their friends follow, it could raise a red flag that the teen does not know the person in real life.

This, Meta says, “will help parents understand how well their teen knows these accounts, and help prompt offline conversations about those connections.”

Meta is also adding parental supervision tools already available on Instagram and on virtual reality product to Messenger. The opt-in feature lets parents see how much time their child spends on the messaging service and information such as their contact lists and privacy settings — but not who they are chatting with, for instance.

Such features can be useful for families in which parents are already involved in their child’s online life and activities. Experts say that’s not the reality for many people.

Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens and called on tech companies to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”

Murthy told The Associated Press that while he recognizes social media companies have taken some steps to make their platforms safer, those actions are not enough. For instance, while kids under 13 are technically banned from social media, many younger children access Instagram, TikTok and other apps by lying about their age, either with or without their parents’ permission.

Murthy also said it’s unfair to expect parents to manage what their children do with rapidly evolving technology that “fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world — and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage.”

“We’re putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which is just simply not fair,” Murthy said.

Also beginning Tuesday, Meta will encourage — but not force — children to take a break from Facebook, just as it already does on Instagram. After 20 minutes, teenage users will get a notice to take time away from the app. If they want to keep scrolling, they can just close the notification. TikTok also recently introduced a 60-minute time limit for users under 18, but they can bypass it by entering a passcode, set either by the teens themselves, or if the child is under 13, by their parent.

“What we are focused on is kind of a suite of tools to support parents and teens on how they how can they can best engage in safe and appropriate experiences online,” said Diana Williams, who oversees product changes for youth and families at Meta. “We’re also trying to build tools that teens can use themselves to learn how to manage and recognize how they’re spending their time. So things like ‘take a break’ and ‘quiet mode’ in the evenings.”

Bankman-Fried, 30, is accused of illegally diverting massive sums of customer money from FTX to make lavish real estate purchases, donate money to politicians and make risky trades at Alameda Research, his cryptocurrency hedge fund trading firm.

Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Mark Cohen, announced his client’s plea, saying: “He pleads not guilty to all counts.”

Afterward, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan set a tentative trial date of Oct. 2, saying he might move it forward or backward a day or two.

Wearing a backpack, Bankman-Fried marched through a crush of cameras as he entered the courthouse on a rainy day to make his first appearance before Kaplan. After taking a plea during the arraignment, Kaplan discussed with lawyers a schedule for proceeding toward a trial.

news Dec 30, 2022

Bahamian Regulator Says It Seized $3.5 Billion of FTX Crypto Assets for ‘Safekeeping'

news Dec 22, 2022

FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried to Be Released on $250 Million Bail, Will Live With His Parents

Kaplan decided that motions by the defense and responses to them by prosecutors would be due in April with an argument over the motions taking place on May 18.

Prior to his appearance, his lawyers sent a letter to the judge, saying Bankman-Fried’s parents in recent weeks have become the target of “intense media scrutiny, harassment, and threats, including communications expressing a desire that they suffer physical harm.”

As a result, the lawyers requested that the names be redacted on court documents for the two individuals who were lined up to sign Bankman-Fried’s $250 million personal recognizance bond. Bankman-Fried was released with electronic monitoring about two weeks ago on the condition that he await trial at his parents’ house in Palo Alto, California.

The judge invited prosecutors to respond to the letter and said he’ll rule at a later date.

Carolyn Ellison, 28, who ran Alameda, and Gary Wang, 29, who co-founded FTX, have pleaded guilty to fraud charges and are cooperating with prosecutors in a bid for leniency. Both are free on bail.

Their pleas were kept secret until Bankman-Fried was in the air after his extradition from the Bahamas, where FTX is based, due to fears that he might flee.

Shortly before Bankman-Fried’s arraignment, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams announced that he was launching a task force made up of senior prosecutors in his office to investigate and prosecute matters related to the FTX collapse. He said the task force also will work to trace and recover victim assets.

“The Southern District of New York is working around the clock to respond to the implosion of FTX,” Williams said in a press release. “It is an all-hands-on-deck moment. We are launching the SDNY FTX Task Force to ensure that this urgent work continues, powered by all of SDNY’s resources and expertise, until justice is done.”

“The people have spoken,” Elon Musk tweeted. 

Twitter users voted in a poll posted by Musk to reinstate the accounts, which were cut off without warning. The social media platform’s new owner has recently used Twitter polls for several high-profile decisions including the reinstatement of former President Donald Trump’s account.

The accounts of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster were all suspended Thursday evening.

“Matt Binder is back,” the Mashable journalist tweeted early Saturday.

Read the full story here at NBCNews.com.

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Individual reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other news agencies saw their accounts go dark Thursday.

The suspensions continued Friday with the account of a Business Insider columnist who published a series of articles between 2018 and 2021 highlighting what she called dangerous Tesla manufacturing shortcomings.

Many advertisers abandoned Twitter over content moderation questions after Musk acquired it in October, and he now risks a rupture with media organizations, which are among the most active on the platform.

The company has not explained why the accounts were taken down. But Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts, which he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” He provided no evidence for that claim.

Twitter Dec 15, 2022

Twitter Suspends Accounts of Journalists Who Cover Elon Musk and the Platform

news Dec 16, 2022

EU Threatens Elon Musk With Sanctions After Twitter's Suspension of Journalists

Business Insider’s Linette Lopez told The Associated Press that she was given no explanation for her suspension. Shortly before being suspended, she said she had posted court-related documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. That address is not current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”

On Tuesday, she posted a 2019 story about Tesla troubles, commenting, “Now, just like then, most of @elonmusk’s wounds are self inflicted.”

The same day, she cited reports that Musk was reneging on severance for laid-off Twitter employees, threatening workers who talk to the media and refusing to make rent payments. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon-going-for-broke behavior.”

Alarm over the suspensions extended beyond media circles to the United Nations, which was reconsidering its involvement in Twitter.

The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The reporters’ suspensions followed Musk’s decision Wednesday to permanently ban an account that automatically tracked the flights of his private jet using publicly available data. That also led Twitter to change its rules for all users to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent.

Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family Tuesday night in Los Angeles.

The official Twitter account for Mastodon, a decentralized alternative social network where many Twitter users are fleeing, was also banned. The reason was unclear, though it had tweeted about the jet-tracking account. Twitter also began preventing users from posting links to Mastodon accounts, in some cases flagging them as potential malware.

“This is of course a bald-faced lie,” cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs posted.

Explaining the reporter bans, Musk tweeted, “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.”

He later added: “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”

“ Doxxing ” refers to disclosing someone’s identity, address, phone number or other personal details that violate their privacy and could bring harm.

The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said technology reporter Drew Harwell “was banished without warning, process or explanation” following the publication of accurate reporting about Musk.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”

“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” the statement added.

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.

The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including the AP, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

Binder said he did not share any location data or any links to the jet-tracking account or other location-tracking accounts.

“I have been highly critical of Musk but never broke any of Twitter’s listed policies,” Binder said in an email.

The suspensions come as Musk makes major changes to content moderation on Twitter. He has tried, through the release of selected company documents dubbed “The Twitter Files,” to claim the platform suppressed right-wing voices under its previous leaders.

He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

Opinion columnist Bari Weiss, who tweeted out some of “The Twitter Files,” called for the suspended journalists to be reinstated.

“The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted “I oppose it in both cases.”

If the suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are highly active on Twitter, the platform would be changed at the fundamental level, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former Bank of America head of global media.

CBS briefly shut down its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely remained on the platform.

“We all know news breaks on Twitter … and to now go after journalists really saws at the main foundational tent pole of Twitter,” Paskalis said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

“It is an overt demonstration of what advertisers fear the most — retribution for an action that Elon doesn’t agree with,” he added.

On Thursday night, Twitter’s Spaces conference chat went down shortly after Musk abruptly signed out of a session hosted by a journalist during which he had been questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later tweeted that Spaces had been taken offline to deal with a “Legacy bug.” Late Friday, Spaces returned.

Advertisers are also monitoring the potential loss of Twitter users. Twitter is projected to lose 32 million users over the next two years, according to a forecast by Insider Intelligence, which cited technical issues and the return of accounts banned for offensive posts.

Meanwhile, some Twitter alternatives are gaining momentum.

Mastodon on Friday had more than 6 million users, nearly double the 3.4 million it had on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are crowd-funded. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Frank Bajak in Boston and Hillel Italie and Edith Lederer in New York contributed to this report.

Musk has told prospective investors in his Twitter purchase that he plans to cut nearly 75% of Twitter’s employee base of 7,500 workers, leaving the company with a skeleton crew, according to the report. The newspaper cited documents and unnamed sources familiar with the deliberations.

San Francisco-based Twitter and a representative for Musk attorney Alex Spiro did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

While job cuts have been expected regardless of the sale, the magnitude of Musk’s planned cuts are far more extreme than anything Twitter had planned. Musk himself has alluded to the need to cull some of the company’s staff in the past, but he hadn’t given a specific number — at least not publicly.

“A 75% headcount cut would indicate, at least out of the gates, stronger free cash flow and profitability, which would be attractive to investors looking to get in on the deal,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “That said, you can’t cut your way to growth.”

Ives added that such a drastic reduction in Twitter’s workforce would likely set the company back years.

Already, experts, nonprofits and even Twitter’s own staff have warned that pulling back investments on content moderation and data security could hurt Twitter and its users. With as drastic a reduction as Musk may be planning, the platform could quickly become overrun with harmful content and spam — the latter of which the Tesla CEO himself has said he’ll address if he becomes owner of the company.

After his initial $44 billion bid in April to buy Twitter, Musk backed out of the deal, contending Twitter misrepresented the number of fake “spam bot” accounts on its platform. Twitter sued, and a Delaware judge has given both sides until Oct. 28 to work out details. Otherwise, there will be a trial in November.