The actress and singer, who famously played Mike Myers’ love interest Cassandra in the 1992 comedy “Wayne’s World,” is kicking off the new year in style. For her birthday, the ’90s pinup rocked a skimpy black halter bikini. She completed the look with a slick-back ponytail and aviator shades.
The 56-year-old took to Instagram on Monday and uploaded a photo of herself swimming in the crystal-clear waters of Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. One sizzling snap showed the star testing out her paddleboarding skills while enjoying her tropical getaway with a gal pal.
“#happynewyear #happybirthday to me,” Carrere captioned the pic. “Thank you thank you thank you @spychick_6 and @secretislandiar for an epic start to 2023 and the first day of the rest of my life!”
The “General Hospital” alum is happily celebrating her fit physique. In August, Carrere told Yahoo Life’s “Unapologetically” that she wasn’t one to post bikini photos on social media.
“I would love to get into amazing shape to show a bikini picture, but I prefer one-pieces anyway,” Carrere said at the time. “I know what works for me and I know what works for my body and what makes me feel comfortable. I could become a triathlete and go, ‘You know what? I can’t believe I have a 12-pack for the first time in my life,’ and maybe I would want to celebrate that with a bikini picture. But, as of yet, I haven’t gotten to that point.”
Still, Carrere told the outlet that she’s “comfortable in my skin” while staying busy in Hollywood.
“I’ve done incredibly well with maintaining a balanced mind, body and spirit for having been in this business for almost 40 years now,” she explained. “And unfortunately, we’ve all seen the carnage along the way. It’s very, very difficult when you’re the product not to take it personally when your stock goes up or down, when people take nasty potshots at you, as they can with easy access now with social media. You really, really have to work on your internal core strength so that the marketplace doesn’t dictate whether you’re happy with yourself.”
“When I was first starting, I was just thankful,” she said at the time. “Being an attractive, young female certainly afforded you some luxuries. People will see you, they are drawn to you. But then as time goes on, as you transition from your 20s to 30s and then 40s and 50s, there are treacherous waters that you need to navigate.”
“If you only value yourself for your physical beauty and youth, you’re going to be lost,” Carrere continued. “Because as time marches on, you can never be the girl that you were now that you’re a woman years later. You have to create a life, and you have to find joy and fulfillment outside of that identity. That’s why you do see these plastic surgery victims – they’re eternally chasing 28. You have to leave that. You have to mature and grow and find fulfillment elsewhere.”
Idaho murder suspect Bryan Kohberger’s family is “shocked” and doesn’t believe he slaughtered four college students, according to a report.
“They don’t believe it to be Bryan. They can’t believe this,” Monroe County Chief Public Defender Jason LaBar told NBC News. “They’re obviously shocked. This is certainly completely out of character, the allegations, and really they’re just trying to be supportive with the understanding that these four families have suffered loss.”
The attorney added that the Washington State University Ph.D. student-turned-accused mass murderer told him he believes he will be found not guilty.
“He believes he’s going to be exonerated. That’s what he believes,” said LaBar, who has visited Kohberger four times since his arrest. “Those were his words. He’s been very easy to talk to. Actually, he’s in a calm demeanor.”
The FBI, along with local police, arrested Kohberger at his parents’ home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, nearly seven weeks after Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle were stabbed to death Nov. 13 in a rental home near campus.
Kohberger is slated to appear in Monroe County Court for an extradition hearing Tuesday afternoon. His parents and two sisters are expected to be in court to support him, LaBar noted.
LaBar said his client, who was studying at WSU’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, will agree to return to Moscow, Idaho, where he’s charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary.
The public defender, who will not represent Kohberger once he returns to Idaho, described his client as “calm and polite despite knowing the death penalty is on the table” in an interview with ABC News.
He quoted his client as saying to him, “This will be a long process.” The Monroe County Correctional Facility, which has kept Kohberger in a suicide vest, has been accommodating of his vegan diet, LaBar said.
The accused killer asked to speak with his parents, but the request was declined, the attorney added.
Kohberger was taken into custody at about 1:30 a.m. Friday after authorities matched DNA from the crime scene to a sample submitted by one of his immediate family members to a genealogy testing website, a law enforcement source told Fox News.
Kaylee Goncalves’ father said it was a huge relief to learn that a suspect had been caught.
“It felt like a cloud was lifted off of us,” Steve Goncalves told ABC. “It’s like seeing sunlight after you’ve been stuck in a house for a month.”
Goncalves’ attorney, Shanon Gray, said all the victims’ families are searching for a possible connection between Kohberger and the slain students – and will turn that information over to police.
Goncalves added he’d never heard of Kohberger before his arrest.
The grieving father told ABC that the family will be regular fixtures at Kohberger’s court appearances.
We’ll probably take different schedules depending on who is available,” he added. “There will be a Goncalves representative in that courtroom almost every single day.”
A motive for Kohberger’s alleged crimes has not been disclosed by police. The fixed-blade knife he allegedly used in the attack has also not been recovered, officials said.
The Lada Niva is associated with off-road prowess and affordability, but this heavily modified example is a whole different story. The immortal Niva has been tuned to produce 300 hp alongside a large number of exterior and interior modifications, leading to an eye-watering price tag of $37k.
The owner, Vaggelis Tsoumanis from Igoumenitsa, Greece, spent a lot of time and energy on this unconventional build. As described on the listing on Classic Trader, the Niva has been fully restored prior to receiving the modifications, with a number of “racing parts” making it behave like an “everyday sportscar”. The listing suggests that this is a 2004 model that has only traveled 4,600 km (2,858 miles) after the restoration, which explains the pristine condition.
The highlight of the blacked-out Lada is the massive 22-inch alloy wheels shod in stretched tires measuring 245/30R22. Wheels of this size would look more fitting to a Lamborghini Urus or a Cadillac Escalade, making the 3,740 mm (147.2 inches) long Niva look like one of those wild renders.
All of the lights have been replaced with LEDs, with a metal front bumper and side steps keeping the lowered bodywork protected. Bolt-on fenders try hard to cover the wider tracks, while the suspension has obviously been lowered for improved handling – as much as you can say that for an off-roader dating back to 1977. Still, we have to admit that the Niva is the first of its kind with a unibody chassis instead of the more traditional ladder-frame solution. Stopping power has also been upgraded with disc brakes all around featuring Porsche-badged calipers.
If you are wondering why you need all these upgrades, you have to look under the bonnet – or behind the intercooler that is sticking out of the grille. There, lies a heavily modified version of Lada’s ancient 1.7-liter four-cylinder engine with an enlarged displacement of 1.8-liters, a turbocharger, a racing ECU, and the ability to run on three types of fuel.
As a result, the power output is 175 hp with LPG, a more respectable 210 hp with pump gas, and a crazy 300 hp with racing fuel or methanol. All of those numbers represent a significant increase over the 82 hp (61 kW / 83 PS) of the stock Niva. Power is transmitted to all four wheels through a five-speed manual transmission with the help of Lada’s 4WD system and locking differentials.
Moving inside, the additional equipment comes to ease the spartan nature of the original. The seats – buckets at the front, sourced from not a Lada obviously – are upholstered in red leather, while an aftermarket infotainment touchscreen has been added to the center console. The Pioneer subwoofer occupying most of the space in the boot hints at an upgraded audio system. Other amenities include air conditioning, hydraulic power steering, electric windows, and a central locking system.
For those interested in acquiring this unique version of the iconic Russian off-roader, the asking price is £30,678 ($37,013 / €34,698). Interestingly this is not the most expensive Lada Niva we have come across – the title belongs to an off-road-focused Niva by German tuner Zubr which was listed on eBay for €44k almost a year ago.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur is poised to make history as she’s sworn in on Tuesday, becoming the longest-serving woman in congressional history.
The Ohio Democrat won her 21st term in office in November, after fighting off a challenge from Republican J.R. Majewski. The 76-year-old lawmaker first won election to Congress in 1982.
Former Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) previously held the record as the country’s longest-serving woman in Congress. Mikulski retired in 2017 after serving in the House and Senate for a combined 40 years.
There were 23 women in Congress when Kaptur began her tenure in the House four decades ago, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. The 118th Congress includes a record 149 female lawmakers.
In 1983, the year that Kaptur was first sworn in, Microsoft introduced its first computer mouse, “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” was a box office blockbuster and then-President Reagan and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov were co-named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” — before the recognition was changed to “Person of the Year” in 1999.
While acknowledging that “America is becoming more and more representative” in a recent interview with the Associated Press, Kaptur said that her gender didn’t have anything to do with her decision to first run for office.
“I always say I ran as a person from the working class,” she said.
A $10,000 reward is being offered by authorities in Florida to find whoever is responsible for killing an elderly couple in a senior living community.
The husband and wife – both in their 80s – were found dead inside an apartment at Waterman Village senior living community in Mount Dora around 4 p.m. Dec. 31, FOX 35 Orlando reports.
Responding officers found the couple after a security guard called 911 to report an incident.
The case is being investigated as a homicide, with detectives saying the circumstances around the deaths are considered suspicious.
Along with Mount Dora police, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Lake County Sheriff’s Office are working the case. The partnership is largely due to the fact Mount Dora’s police department does not have the forensic capabilities to process a crime scene, the police chief said.
During a town hall meeting Monday, officials were tight-lipped about case details, due to it remaining an active investigation.
“This case is fast-moving,” Mount Dora Police Chief Mike Gibson said. “I feel very confident that we’re going to have a successful conclusion. If anyone has any information that may lead to a successful investigation and prosecution of this heinous crime, please let us know.”
Stocks fell Tuesday, giving up earlier gains, as concerns such as rising rates and high inflation that knocked the market down last year continued to trouble investors in the new year.
The S&P 500 fell 0.43%, slipping from highs of the day when December’s manufacturing index declined at the fastest pace since May 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial average fell 114 points, or 0.29% and the Nasdaq Composite shed 0.70%.
Shares of Tesla and Apple both slipped, weighing on the broader market and carrying forward a main theme from 2022, when the technology sector was hit hard as the Federal Reserve raised rates to fight inflation. Tesla fell more than 9% following disappointing fourth quarter deliveries and Apple shed more than 3% on reports that it will cut production due to weak demand.
The theme may continue in 2023 as the central bank is poised to continue to hike interest rates in the coming months, stoking fears that the U.S. economy may fall into a recession.
“A recessionary environment in 2023 could further hamper tech stock performance in the new year, as investors’ thirst would increase for value oriented companies and those with higher profit margins, more consistent cash flows, and robust dividend yields,” wrote Greg Bassuk, CEO of AXS Investments in New York.
The major averages closed 2022 with their worst annual losses since 2008, snapping a three-year win streak. The Dow ended the year down about 8.8%, and 10.3% off its 52-week high. The S&P 500 lost 19.4% for the year and sits more than 20% below its record high. The tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 33.1% last year.
Of course, there may be brighter days ahead. History also shows the U.S. stock market tends to rebound after down years. In fact, the S&P 500 has, on average, rebounded by 15% in the next year following a year where it lost more than 1%.
Investors are getting a bundle of data in the first trading week of the year that will give further information on the state of the economy.
Wednesday is a big day with the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, better known as JOLTS, due out in the morning and the minutes of the Fed’s latest policy meeting set to come out in the afternoon.
They’re also looking forward to Friday’s December jobs report, the final employment report the Fed will have to consider before its next meeting on Feb. 1. There are also several speeches by Fed presidents scheduled Thursday and Friday.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) begins his second term in office Tuesday with a swearing-in ceremony outside the historic state capitol in Tallahassee. Unlike his first gubernatorial election, which was very close, DeSantis won by a crushingly wide margin this time, 59 percent, compared to Democratic challenger Charlie Crist’s 40 percent.
The DeSantis campaign could point to actions the governor has taken. Conservative and controversial education policies under DeSantis have attacked what he derides as “woke” culture. The DeSantis-backed law prohibiting some discussions of LGBTQ issues in the classroom is known as “Don’t Say Gay” by detractors, who consider it discriminatory censorship.
But such hard-line stances also make DeSantis a formidable rival to former President Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Coverage of the ceremony is scheduled to begin shortly before 11 a.m. ET.
Watch the live video above.
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Everyone loves a good story. And one of the most popular is the fall from grace. The great athlete who holds on too long and ends his career in mediocrity. The visionary artist who reaches the height of influence only to lose it all with incomprehensible and reprehensible public rantings. Or the politician who soars to success on an uplifting narrative — promising a share of the American Dream he has created for himself to those who follow him — only to be revealed as an apparent fraud and serial liar. Schadenfreude can provide real pleasure.
By any measure, the New York Times broke a doozy of a story last month with its reporting of the fabrications and predations of George Santos, the Republican from Long Island who won election to Congress in a reliably Democratic district. A man who supposedly was the son of immigrants and rose through Baruch College and NYU to jobs with Wall Street titans Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. A man reportedly with a family-run $80 million asset management firm and real estate empire. A man whose pet rescue organization was said to have saved thousands of dogs and cats. And according to a widening web of reporting from the Times and other outlets — and now even by his own admission — a man who apparently fabricated much — if not all — of his life’s story.
Why did it take so long for the truth to come out? Surely, various parties had an interest in knowing the truth before election day: voters in New York’s 3rd Congressional district; Democrats desperate to hold on to the House; Republicans worried about candidate quality; donors on each side of the aisle who poured over $6 million into the race.
As journalists found — once they gave it a thorough look — Santos’s apparent fabulism was eminently detectable. His life story — in his own telling — was a daring feat of self-invention and pure imagination, full of inconsistencies and omissions. As the Times and CNN reported, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Baruch College, and NYU had no record of Santos as an employee or student. The IRS had no record of his charity. There seemed to be no discernable profile for his family firm or purported real estate holdings. While he claimed four of his employees were killed in the June 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a review of the professional histories of all 49 victims did not show any connection. While living in Brazil, he was reportedly arrested and charged with bouncing a check. In New York, he twice faced eviction suits. And significant questions remain about his sources of income and wealth, potential misstatements on personal financial disclosures he filed as part of his run for Congress, his family ancestry, and other topics — questions so breathtaking in scope they have now reportedly attracted the attention of federal and state prosecutors.
As professional investigators, we couldn’t help but note that Santos’s life story was littered with red flags. And apparently some of his mendaciousness had been discovered before the election, or at least hinted at. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee reported in a background research memorandum that the IRS had no record of his pet rescue charity. They asked “what is Santos hiding” about his “shady finances”? His vanquished Democratic opponent stated he “always knew Santos was running a scam” but his attempts to get traction with the press were “drowned out in a governor’s race, where crime was the focus.”
So why wasn’t the full story told?
Post-mortems examining why such “opposition research” efforts fell short and why journalists failed to uncover the story have cited many factors — a compressed campaign schedule, complacency in a “safe” Democratic district, competing priorities for investigative resources, poor messaging choices by the Democratic party, even outright incompetence.
The failure to scrutinize Santos’ story before the election was a failure of investigation — a failure to complete the precise, painstaking work that goes into verifying people are who they say they are and not figments of their hyper-active imagination.
At a deeper level, this was also a failure of imagination, not with Santos but with those charged with vetting him — a failure to imagine the red flags identified in a cursory review of Santos’s history were only the beginning, a failure to imagine that a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives would invent his whole history. That was the story no one could see. Had someone seen it, had someone imagined it, the outcome may well have been different.
Santos’s story may be extreme, but it is not unique. Power brokers, CEOs, and wealthy heiresses have all had their stories unravel. And that holds a lesson for us all. We choose to hire people, work with people, and invest with people, based on the stories they tell and the capabilities and intentions those stories imply.
While we want those stories to be true, wanting it doesn’t make it so.
Chris Ribeiro is a managing director at global investigations firm Nardello & Co. based in New York; he leads complex investigations for government agencies, law firms, multinational corporations, and nonprofit organizations. He was formerly an intelligence analyst and briefer with the CIA and the New York City Police Department.
Matt Bricken is a director in Nardello & Co.’s Washington, D.C., office. Prior to joining Nardello & Co., he founded and ran an opposition research consultancy that served candidates and political campaigns across 45 states and five continents.
A Portland woman showcased what she identified as an enablement problem within the city’s homeless crisis in a video posted to Twitter on Saturday, telling philanthropist and outreach worker Kevin Dahlgren that being homeless in Portland is a “piece of cake.”
“It’s a piece of cake, really. That’s probably why you’ve got so many out here because they feed you three meals a day and don’t have to do s— but stay in your tent or party. If you smoke a lot of dope, you can do that…,” she told Dahlgren.
The woman, named Wendy, also said many among the homeless population wake up and proceed to repeatedly eat and get high throughout the day.
In a separate tweet, Dahlgren said Wendy is a licensed hairdresser and would like to work. In the video attached to the post, Wendy tearfully described the lawless state of the homeless community by revealing her dentures were recently stolen from her tent.
“I went and got my teeth about six months ago and then someone stole them. I was living outside, and somebody took them,” she said.
“Now I can’t go get new ones because I just got the first ones paid for. I don’t know what I’m going to do… I can’t go to work without teeth.”
Dahlgren, affiliated with a nonprofit called “We Heart Seattle,” said Wendy told him he is the first outreach worker to stop by and greet her in years.
“When I’m in charge I will have [to] bring outreach back. It will be daily and we will come with actual resources, not just peanut butter sandwiches. We need to work together to end this very fixable humanitarian crisis,” he tweeted.
“[Oregon] is the only state that actually allows you to put a tent [on the sidewalk]…” Wendy said in video shared with Dahlgren’s third tweet.
“You don’t have any police around. If you get hurt, you’re screwed because they’re not helping anybody. You don’t see them anywhere.”
The city’s developing homeless crisis is believed to be a byproduct of a cocktail of other problems, including recreational drug policies implemented in The Beaver State.
The issue grew exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading residents and business owners to relocate.
In August, University Park Neighborhood Association Secretary Tom Karwaki told “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy that encampments are wreaking havoc on the city streets, but officials have done little to nothing to solve the issue.
“We need to solve this problem, it’s an emergency,” he said.
“There are six people so far who said that [they are moving]… three have sold their house and three are in the process,” Karwaki added later. “We’ve actually had commercial businesses also put up their businesses and their land for sale.”
But building a “super-app” like WeChat is a far more complicated challenge than Twitter, with far more points of conflict with regulators in Washington, California, Brussels and elsewhere. Nothing like it exists yet in the West, and it could create a “regulatory nightmare,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, the deputy director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that advocates for privacy reform.
For all its influence on media and politics, Twitter is a far smaller social platform than Facebook or TikTok, with relatively little exposure to government oversight. Anything that involves payments, health information or deeper uses of consumer data would be a whole different beast. And that’s all without integrating some of Musk’s wider and more futuristic interests, like his brain-computer interface company, his space-launch business, or his network of satellites, all of which draw their own kind of scrutiny.
If Musk tried to launch it, he’d be doing it in amoment when regulators and politicians are increasingly worried about Big Tech’s appetite for data, its impact on consumers’ lives and its unique ability to build monopolies — to say nothing of the political storm Musk has brought down on his own head with his increasingly partisan forays into politics. (Twitter did not reply to a request for comment about Musk’s app plans or regulatory strategy.)
There are plenty of business-world obstacles to the X App, and Musk has had his hands more than full just keeping Twitter afloat. But he’s also seen as ambitious enough to try anyway.
“Twitter is just one end of this future conglomerate app,” said Michael Sayman, a developer who helped create Instagram Stories, speculating that the X App could include finance, commerce, communication, news, entertainment, dating, music — and, of course, transportation, Musk’s chief business interest.
What could a Musk-owned super-app look like, and how would it collide with Washington? There’s no one authoritative answer — and a Twitter collapse would bring a quick end to the vision for now — but from observers and analysts, it’s possible to engineer a kind of preview of the maximal version of what he wants to do, and project just how many corners of Washington could find themselves facing off against one of the wealthiest men on earth.
Financial Services
The first and biggest question hanging over an “everything app” is money — specifically, payments and even banking.
Musk pitched investors on building Twitter into a digital payments behemoth that could generate as much as $1.8 billion by 2028 when he was getting financing for the buyout earlier this year. He hasn’t dropped that ambition: “It’s kind of a no-brainer for Twitter to have payments — in terms of both currency and crypto — and make that simple for people to use,” Musk said in the December Twitter Spaces.
Musk is publicly floating the concept of Twitter offering high-yield money market accounts, debit cards and checks. He has reportedly already filed paperwork to process payments. This clearly takes a page from WeChat’s playbook: The Chinese app created new ways for consumers and businesses to transact without cards or hardware, making money through merchant and withdrawal fees.
He’s not the first tech mogul to dream of an American version. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to launch his own digital currency, the Libra, and failed — but still considers it a missed opportunity.Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey also co-founded the payments company Block (formerly known as Square) and pursued a payments strategy that let Twitter users incorporate their handles for CashApp. The company also partnered with Stripe to let users pay businesses and creative outlets they discover on the social network. Those efforts haven’t transformed Twitter into a payments powerhouse, however.
Musk wouldn’t be coming to this cold: The Tesla CEO has an extensive background at payment-focused fintech startups — he co-founded the online bank X.com, which later merged with a Peter Thiel-led business to form PayPal. And his backers in the buyout include Binance, the global crypto exchange, as well as Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture firm that’s invested heavily in digital asset startups.
“I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth,” Musk said at a Twitter all-hands meeting earlier this year. “Currency as well as crypto.”
But if he tries, he’ll be entering one of the most tightly regulated spaces in American business. Unlike social-media platforms, which only hit Washington’s radar recently, banking and payment companies have been under the microscope for decades, with multiple agencies and vast regulatory requirements to meet — a task that Musk has struggled with, even disdained, as an entrepreneur.
If the X App developed digital wallets for users or a crypto-friendly token for payments, Musk could face opposition from banking regulators like the Federal Reserve and Treasury as well as top lawmakers on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would likely weigh in on how the social network handled instances of fraud and abuse. And Musk could invite even more scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission if he were to bring crypto trading to the platform.
Zuckerberg’s experience in trying to launch Libra — later rebranded as Diem — in 2019 is a sobering precedent: Despite an aggressive international lobbying campaign, policymakers from both parties — and on the other side of the Atlantic — blasted his far-reaching proposal for being a potential threat to global finance and commerce.
Consumer groups that opposed Meta’s efforts are already bracing for a similar fight if Musk tries to get into the game — possibly even more intense, given Musk’s newly contentious political brand, highly impulsive management style and propensity to tweak Congress and regulators.
“A big part of what really led to the downfall of Diem was the bad press around Mark Zuckerberg and Meta specifically,” said Cheyenne Hunt-Majer, a big tech policy advocate at Public Citizen. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Elon Musk is looking at this and saying, ‘Okay, well, I can do this differently.’”
Privacy
Any successful X App would bring in a massive new haul of consumer data – and would require the company to navigate a complicated, evolving new patchwork of U.S. and EU data-privacy rules.
Musk has already suggested Twitter’s immediate future would include advertisements carefully tailored to individual users — which could mean more sophisticated use of customer data. This data collection would likely only increase with an X App that touched more parts of people’s lives.
Even before Musk took over, however, Twitter struggled to meet basic privacy and data-handling requirements.
The company has been under a consent decree with FTC since 2011 for previously mishandling user data and paid a $150 million fine in May 2022 for breaking its commitment to protect user data again. The FTC is currently investigating allegations made by former Twitter security chief Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, who claims the company intentionally misled the agency and violated the terms of the 2011 settlement, according to a person familiar with the probe who is not authorized to speak publicly.
At Twitter, Musk’s abrupt staff cuts, and the exodus of its top privacy, cybersecurity and compliance executives, have already drawn a rare warning shot from the Federal Trade Commission: The FTC said in a statement in mid-November, “We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” adding, “no CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees.”
And Democrats on Capitol Hill are paying attention too — calling on the FTC to enforce its consent decree — which could mean large fines and penalties for Musk’s Twitter if it is found to have violated the settlement terms.
His ambition also arrives amid growing concerns about U.S. consumer data security and privacy protections.Though Congress hasn’t managed to pass a comprehensive data privacy bill, several states are already plowing ahead with their own rules, including California, Virginia and Colorado, creating a complicated patchwork for tech companies to navigate. And any company with a global presence also needs to worry about Europe’s data privacy law — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which gives consumers the right to opt out of data collection. Some aspects of the X App would also be subject to sectoral federal privacy laws, like in finance and health care.
Musk would also immediately draw a spotlight from privacy advocates, who worry that he’d potentially have access to millions of Americans’ data without any federal law to ensure it’s properly protected.
“As a society, we really have kind of started getting to a point where we feel uncomfortable with the loss of privacy,” said Karan Lala, a software engineer who previously worked at Facebook. “Maybe folks are not fully comfortable with having one person having access to all of that information.”
Health care
In China, people can look up doctors, book them, conduct a telehealth appointment and even manage their medical records inside of WeChat. In other countries, patients can use WhatsApp to book their doctor appointments over text.
In the U.S., that kind of user-friendly approach to health care is largely blocked by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the 1996 patient-protection law setting strict rules around how health care providers share and store data.
So an X App could track your fitness, scrape your data and log your steps, but hit a wall when it comes to the highly regulated world of the American medical system. It doesn’t mean Musk wouldn’t try — but he’d need to find partners willing to test the edges of what’s possible under the law.
Musk does have his own medical venture, though, and that raises another question. Neuralink is a brain-computer interface that allows a person to navigate a computer directly from their brain with an implantable device. Musk says the company has submitted “most” of the paperwork needed to get the FDA go ahead for a clinical trial in 2023 in order to bring that invention to market.
Right now, brain-computer interfaces are being trialed to help people with paralysis, but Neuralink’s website tantalizingly promises a “non-medical application” and says the technology could someday “expand how we interact with each other and experience the world around us.”
If a person used a Neuralink chip to interact with the X App, would the app literally be reading that person’s mind? And what happens to the data? Brain data isn’t necessarily protected by HIPAA, and the issue is not yet on Washington’s radar, but it’s a real concern among policy thinkers; Chile recently became the first country to protect “neurorights.”
At this point, the idea of a neural connection to any app is purely speculative. However, it’s not as sci-fi as it might sound: Synchron, a competing BCI company, which launched an FDA clinical trial earlier this year, already allowed one patient to Tweet directly from their brain.
Transportation
Though Musk is often lumped in with pure tech moguls like Zuckerberg, he’s primarily a transportation mogul — a maker of cars and rockets, with some interest in tunnels.
Musk hasn’t talked specifically about the transportation side of an X App. But WeChat also offers a ride-hailing service, and the X app has a range of potential applications for ride-hailing, transit and more.
Ian Adams, a specialist in the automotive technology practice at the Orrick law firm, envisions an app that offers a “hub of information” for easy access to “hopping on transit, hopping in a rideshare, hailing an automated system — who knows what that will look like, at what point.”
Putting Musk at the center of an identity-verification app with security implications could be problematic, though. Adams said government regulators might be skeptical of the arrangement — to say nothing of any connection to Tesla, whose cars are already software-intensive products that constantly track user behavior. “The big question mark right now is, we’ve got an FTC and a DOJ that takes a really dim view of all kinds of data-sharing arrangements and particularly of consolidation,” Adams said. The FTC is “going to take a fine-tooth comb through everything that they attempt to do.”
Antitrust
Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are looking more and more closely at big tech companies’ anti-competitive behavior. AndWhile Musk’s businesses don’t currently run afoul of monopoly review by either agency, that could easily changeif he were to buy a lot of other apps, said Charlotte Slaiman, the competition policy director at nonprofit Public Knowledge.
She said antitrust regulators may be concerned about a vertical relationship wherein Musk incentivizes his X App offering over competitors. And antitrust regulators may weigh in if Musk purchases another app that competes directly on his platform.
“From a competitive climate, now might not be the best time to even put up the fact that you want an app that does everything,” former Facebook engineer Lala said. “I don’t think Congress is going to take lightly to that, so that might be victim number one.”
There’s a counterargument, though, based on the fact that the X App would be the first of its kind.Graham DuFault, a senior director of public policy at ACT | The App Association, a trade group representing app developers, says that U.S. policies tend to be conducive to new market entrants — at least to start.
“One of the striking things about the U.S. competition, law and policy landscape is that it’s pretty permissive in that it treats a new company’s entry as something that is a benefit to competition and a benefit to consumers unless there really is evidence that is going to harm competition, and then therefore harm consumers,” DuFault said in an interview.
The network in the sky
When it comes to other competitors, Musk has an offering that many others still don’t have — Starlink, the world’s satellite internet constellation company. Operated by his firm SpaceX, it provides service to at least 36 countries, with plans to offer mobile phone service with T-Mobile in 2023.
Depending on how he links up the satellites and the X App, Musk could start to collide with California’s net neutrality law — which says internet service providers are not allowed to slow down or limit services online, especially efforts to advantage their products over competitors. Ever since the Trump administration rescinded the FCC’s net neutrality policy — and Congress has failed to enact it into law — California’s law is the de facto law of the land.
Using Starlink internet, Musk would be able to streamline faster and more efficient access to the X App services — and potentially throttle access to competing mega-apps, Sayman said. This preference of service could potentially run afoul of California’s rules.
It could be worth him testing the waters on that, even if it’s risky: “The level of fundamental dominance that could be achieved — if he’s able to do that well — I think positions his ‘X’ company to be able to do all the rest of this stuff,” Sayman said.
Politics
For the average big tech giant, politics is a third-tier risk at best: The companies and moguls strategically spread out their political donations, and only occasionally do executives run afoul of elected officials, or get hauled in front of Congress.
Musk is different. After being out of the political wind for years, he has jumped full-bore into the American culture wars, attacking Democrats by name, re-platforming Donald Trump and hosting elaborate Twitter threads suggesting collusion between the FBI and his own company. He’s also aligned himself with Republicans, encouraging votes for the GOP in the 2022 midterms and backing a Ron DeSantis run for president in 2024, earning him the kind of support from the GOP that other tech billionaires can only dream of.
However, Congress has failed to pass bipartisan tech legislation — and is unlikely to next year under a split House and Senate — so the action is expected to continue in state capitals where legislatures have passed the most aggressive laws regulating tech platforms to date.
So far, there has been more smoke than fire on the political front. But a bigger consumer platform could easily change that, as activists, think tanks, elected officials and voters increasingly see Musk as a player in American political life – either for better or worse.
