This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

Whatever else he might lack, Elon Musk does not go wanting when it comes to impeccable timing and the art of distraction. Right on the heels of Tesla’s weakest earnings report in the past few quarters, the CEO of Tesla and Twitter just dropped a bombshell threat to sue Microsoft.

Source: https://help.ads.microsoft.com/apex/index/3/en/60085

Today, Microsoft announced that Twitter would not be supported on the tech giant’s Digital Marketing Center (DMC) starting on the 25th of April, 2023. Smart Campaigns with Microsoft’s Multi-platform would also cease working with Twitter on the given date.

As a refresher, the Microsoft Advertising platform allows users the ability to manage various social media accounts dispersed on multiple platforms in one place.

Users would no longer be able to access their Twitter accounts from the DMC’s social media management tool. The ability to tweet or modify tweets via the Microsoft Advertising platform is also being suspended.

They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2023

In reaction, Elon Musk declared just moments ago that Microsoft “trained [their AI] illegally using Twitter data.” He went on to announce his intention to sue Microsoft.

Of course, given the release of Tesla’s troubling Q1 2023 earnings just moments ago, this aggressive declaration on the part of Elon Musk serves as an opportune diversion tactic. For those who might be unaware, Tesla has missed the consensus revenue estimate for Q1 2023. Moreover, if one were to exclude the $500 million in regulatory credits, the company would have registered a negative free cash flow quarter. Head over to this post for further details.

Earlier this week, in an exclusive interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk declared that he is working on an AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe and is, therefore, unlikely to “annihilate humans.”

This declaration came after Elon Musk poached talent from DeepMind – a subsidiary of the tech giant Alphabet – and purchased around 10,000 GPUs from NVIDIA to train a Large Language Model (LLM) on the pattern of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Additionally, the CEO of Tesla and Twitter has registered a company in Nevada by the name X.AI Corp. These developments show intense interest on Musk’s part to corner at least a slice of the booming AI sphere.

Just yesterday, Elon Musk tried to lure back advertisers by allaying concerns about hate speech and other forms of harmful content on Twitter. The CEO of Tesla and Twitter declared that he was receptive to the legitimate concerns of advertisers but won’t respond to strong-arm tactics.

As per the tabulation by Sensor Tower, 37 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers from before Musk’s takeover have spent zero dollars on advertising at Twitter in the first quarter of 2023. Another batch of 24 advertisers in this cohort has curtailed its ad spend on the platform by as much as 80 percent.