Business

By Maria Ponnezhath

(Reuters) – Netflix Inc said on Sunday it has decided to drop works on Meghan Markle’s animated family series “Pearl” as the streaming platform hew its animated content.

Netflix decided to stop developing several projects, including Meghan’s series as part of its strategic decisions on creating animated series, the company said in a statement, without providing further details on its decisions.

Archewell Productions, the company formed by Meghan and her husband Prince Harry, formally known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, had announced last year that Meghan would be an executive producer of “Pearl”. The series was planned to be centered on the adventures of a 12-year-old girl, who is inspired by a variety of influential women from history.

Archewell Productions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Netflix also decided not to move forward with two animated kids’ series “Dino Daycare” and “Boons and Curses.”

The decision to cancel these shows came after Netflix reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, falling well short of its forecast of adding 2.5 million subscribers.

However, Netflix confirmed that the company would continue to work on a number of projects with Archewell Productions, including previously announced documentary series “Heart of Invictus”. The series will focus on athletes competing in the Invictus Games for injured veterans in The Hague in 2022.

Netflix did not respond to a query on whether it will cut down more animated shows.

(Reporting by Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; editing by Diane Craft)

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(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s economy grew by 9.6% in the first quarter of 2022, compared to a year earlier, according to flash government estimates on Sunday, as a recovery in the oil sector drove the strongest growth in more than a decade.

During the first quarter, oil activity in Saudi Arabia increased by 20.4% and non-oil activity by 3.7%, the estimates showed.

If the estimates are confirmed, they would mark the highest growth rate since 2011, the Saudi General Authority for Statistics said.

(Reporting by Moataz Mohamed,; Editing by Barbara Lewis)

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By Dawn Chmielewski and Lisa Richwine

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Walt Disney Co’s head of corporate affairs, Geoff Morrell, is leaving the company three months after joining from oil and energy company BP Plc, according to an email on Friday from Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek.

Morrell’s brief tenure has been marked by controversy over the company’s response to Florida’s law barring classroom instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity for some younger students.

“It has become clear to me that for a number of reasons it is not the right fit,” Morrell wrote in a separate email to his staff. “I have decided to leave the company to pursue other opportunities.”

Both emails were seen by Reuters.

Kristina Schake will lead the company’s communications efforts, Chapek said in the email. Her 30-plus years of experience include heading up President Joe Biden’s vaccine education program, as well as communications for Instagram and work in the Obama administration.

Government relations and global public policy will be led by Disney’s general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez.

Disney became the focus of criticism for initially failing to speak out publicly against the Florida legislation, which critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The company said it worked behind the scenes to influence the legislation, an approach Chapek admitted had failed. He later voiced disappointment with the measure and apologized to the company’s LGBTQ employees for failing to be a “stronger ally in the fight for equal rights.”

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law on March 28, Disney issued a statement saying it “should never have passed” and said that it should be repealed.

Disney’s public condemnation opened a new front in the nation’s culture wars, with DeSantis signing a bill on April 22 that would strip the company of its self-governing authority at its Orlando-area parks in apparent retaliation.

The company has yet to issue a statement on the new law, which would take effect on June 1, 2023.

(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Editing by Chris Reese and Matthew Lewis)

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By Natalie Grover and Pushkala Aripaka

(Reuters) -AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine still has a role to play in the fight against the pandemic, even as sales slow and the company charges more in some places, CEO Pascal Soriot said on Friday, the latest drugmaker to warn about a global supply glut.

The comments come after the company reported better-than-expected first-quarter profit and sales driven by the vaccine, its second bestseller last year raking in $3.9 billion. It also confirmed its forecast that 2022 sales of the shot would fall.

The vaccine, branded as Vaxzevria and Covishield, has struggled to compete with rivals made by Pfizer and Moderna using mRNA technology, and has hit setbacks with production, rare side-effects and relatively limited shelf life. Approval in the United States has been delayed.

Soriot said the shot, which was seen early in the pandemic as the inoculation of choice for low-income countries, should remain relevant because it’s easy to administer and distribute.

Volume will ease, though, because people will probably only need one booster.

“We are no longer in a period of scarcity of vaccine supply – we have oversupply everywhere around the world. So what is out there needs to be used and then of course we’ll be able to get a better sense for reordering,” he said on a media call.

Rival Johnson & Johnson this month pulled its sales forecast for its COVID-19 vaccine, blaming oversupply on hesitancy in developing countries.

So far, 2.9 billion shots of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been delivered globally.

In the first quarter, the company recorded $1.15 billion in sales for the product, the majority of which came from initial contracts, but that number eclipsed analysts’ consensus forecast of $739 million, cited by Credit Suisse.

AstraZeneca’s shares were down 0.6% in early afternoon trading, underperfoming London’s blue-chip index.

The company has started earning a modest profit on the vaccine, which was initially sold at-cost, but it will continue selling in low-income countries on a non-profit basis.

Apart from the vaccine, AstraZeneca also has a COVID-19 treatment, Evusheld, which has been authorised in many regions including the United States, United Kingdom and European Union for preventing infections in people whose immune system is too weak to respond to vaccines.

The drug generated $469 million in first-quarter revenue, below the consensus forecast of $480 million, cited by Credit Suisse.

Access to the drug in the United States has been limited by logistical bottlenecks that are being addressed, Soriot said, adding Britain was one of the few developed countries that has not ordered Evusheld.

“It’s a sad situation, quite frankly, because people who are immunocompromised are really suffering from the COVID crisis.”

CANCER

AstraZeneca – which unveiled plans to open an R&D centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts designed to serve as the new headquarters for rare disease unit Alexion, which it bought last summer – relies on cancer drugs for about a third of its total product sales.

Even though COVID-19 levels are beginning to wane, access to cancer diagnoses and treatment has still not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. Things should normalise over the next few months, Soriot predicted.

Meanwhile, the company pared back its expectations for China, which accounted for about 16% of total revenue last year.

The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker said it expected sales there to decline by a mid-single-digit percentage in 2022, largely due to the impact of a programme designed to bring down the prices of off-patent drugs in the country.

“The future for China, we believe is still very strong and we expect to return to growth in the next couple of years,” Soriot said, cautioning that lockdowns in China this year could hurt the uptake of cancer and other drugs.

(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru and Natalie Grover in LondonEditing by Jason Neely and Mark Potter)

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BEIJING (Reuters) -China signalled an easing of its crackdown on the once-freewheeling tech sector on Friday as President Xi Jinping seeks to bolster the economy in the face of growth-sapping COVID-19 lockdowns, sending shares in online heavyweights surging.

China’s powerful Politburo, in a meeting chaired by Xi, said it will step up policy support for the world’s second-largest economy, including its so-called “platform economy”, fueling investor hopes that the worst may be over for an unprecedented, multi-pronged crackdown that began in late 2020.

The optimism was also powered by reports that China’s top leaders will hold a symposium early next month with a number of internet companies, expected to be chaired by Xi, according to two people familiar with the matter. Food delivery giant Meituan was among those invited, one source said.

The sources declined to be named cited confidentiality constraints.

The South China Morning Post, which first reported on the upcoming meeting, said that tech giants Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and TikTok owner ByteDance were also invited, citing two sources.

Authorities are seeking to reassure the corporate executives about the current regulatory environment and encourage them to continue to develop their business, one source told Reuters.

Separately, sources said Chinese and U.S. regulators were discussing operational details of an audit deal that Beijing hopes to sign this year, the latest move to try to keep Chinese companies from being kicked off U.S. exchanges.

“The Chinese regulators have been trying to strike a balance between growth and regulation over the years,” said Ming Liao, founding partner of Beijing-based Prospect Avenue Capital, which manages $300 million in assets.

“For now, we might see the regulatory crackdown wrapping up as earlier policies take effect while the economy looks for growth,” he said, adding that investors are anxiously awaiting regulatory actions to reassure the investment outlook for China, particularly a clarified set of overseas listing rules.

Earlier on Friday, the Politburo, a top decision-making body of China’s ruling Communist Party, vowed to “complete the special rectification of the platform economy”, without giving a timeline, and roll out measures to support its development.

TOUGH TARGET

Beijing has set a growth target of 5.5% this year, which private economists have said will be difficult to reach without significant support, as COVID-19 lockdowns and other heavy curbs to battle the pandemic create havoc for businesses and supply chains.

During Friday’s meeting, the Politburo said it will support COVID-hit industries and small firms, accelerate infrastructure construction, and stabilize transport, logistics, and supply chains, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Gary Ng, senior economist at Natixis in Hong Kong, said the Politburo meeting “is a positive sign that the government seeks to prioritise growth versus a lot of other goals such as deleveraging or other regulatory change in the short term.”

Ng said that anti-trust measures that have squeezed the platform economy as well as a clampdown on the property sector could ultimately return.

“But in the short run because of the pressure on growth and the zero covid policy, there will need to be a trade off between deleveraging and crackdowns versus growth, and that’s why the market is a bit more optimistic in the short term,” he said.

The Hang Seng Tech index rose 10% for its best day since Vice Premier Liu He promised policy support six weeks ago. E-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com rose 16%, as did Meituan, while Tencent rose 11%.

China’s benchmark share index jumped more than 2%.

Markets had been hit hard over the past two weeks by fears that lockdowns would cause severe damage to China’s economy and derail a global recovery just as many countries are rebounding from pandemic-led slumps.

(Reporting by Julie Zhu, Kevin Yao, Alun John, Xie Yu and the Beijing newsroomWriting by Tony Munroe; Editing by Carmel Crimmins)

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By Sabrina Valle and Shariq Khan

(Reuters) -Exxon Mobil Corp doubled its first-quarter per-share profit, it said on Friday, but the results fell short of Wall Street estimates, even excluding a $3.4 billion writedown from its withdrawal from Russia.

The top U.S. oil producer tripled its buyback program, saying it will repurchase up to $30 billion in shares by the end of next year.

Exxon reported net income of $5.48 billion, or $1.28 per share, in the three months ended March 31, compared with $2.73 billion, or 64 cents per share, last year.

The company’s adjusted earnings per share came to $2.07, short of the Refinitiv consensus for $2.12 a share, while revenue came in at $90.5 billion, below the $92.7 billion consensus.

The results included a $3.4 billion after-tax hit on the oil major’s Russia Sakhalin-1 operation, which it said it would exit on March 1, shortly after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Exxon’s writedown follows others oil majors exiting Russia after the Ukraine invasion. BP PLC and Shell PLC have flagged up to $25 billion and $5 billion in writedowns from leaving their Russian businesses, respectively.

Exxon has been trying to boost output in its primary development areas, the U.S. Permian basin, and in Guyana, the tiny South American nation that has seen windfall oil discoveries in recent years and where Exxon has two major offshore developments.

Notably, the company’s refining division posted much weaker results from the previous quarter, with earnings of $332 million, compared with $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter. The company said the sharp rise in prices ended up costing $1.3 billion of “negative timing impacts,” including $760 million in mark-to-market effects on open derivatives positions.

The company said those losses will be unwound when it makes certain physical sales.

Exxon’s output of crude and other liquids including bitumen and synthetic oil was 2.3 million barrels per day, a 5% drop from the previous quarter. Natural gas production fell by 1.5%.

Exxon’s shares were down 1.1% to $86.25 in premarket trading.

(Reporting by Sabrina Valle in Houston and Shariq Khan in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur; editing by David Evans and Chizu Nomiyama)

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By Leika Kihara

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Bank of Japan on Thursday strengthened its commitment to keep interest rates ultra-low by vowing to buy unlimited amounts of bonds daily to defend its yield target, triggering a fresh sell-off in the yen and sending government bonds rallying.

Reinforcing its resolve to support a fragile economy even as sharp rises in raw material costs push up inflation, the BOJ maintained its ultra-loose monetary policy and a pledge to keep interest rates at “present or lower levels.”

It also said it would buy unlimited amounts of 10-year government bonds to defend an implicit 0.25% cap around its zero yield target every market day, instead of on an ad-hoc basis.

The BOJ’s commitment to its zero-rate programme puts it at odds with other major economies that are shifting toward tighter monetary policy to combat surging prices, although inflation in Japan is expected to creep up towards the central bank’s 2% target.

“The key announcement is the commitment to conducting fixed-rate operations every day,” said Bart Wakabayashi, co-branch manager at State Street Bank in Tokyo.

“I think they are trying to make the point here that we’re ready to act at any second. They’ve quadrupled down on their commitment to this.”

The BOJ’s strengthened commitment to keep policy accommodative drove the yen well below the psychological threshold of 130 to the dollar for the first time since 2002.

Yields on the benchmark 10-year Japanese government bonds slipped to a more than three-week low of 0.215%.

“We want to prevent Japan’s long-term interest rates from rising in line with overseas bond yield increases,” BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told a news conference after the policy decision.

Kuroda said there was no change to his view that a weak yen benefits Japan’s economy, a sign further falls in the currency likely won’t prompt the BOJ to tweak its ultra-easy policy.

But he warned that excess market volatility could hurt the economy by making it difficult for firms to set business plans.

An official of Japan’s finance ministry, which decides whether to conduct currency intervention, told reporters Tokyo will take “appropriate” action as needed and warned that recent sharp yen moves were “extremely worrying”.

As widely expected, the BOJ left unchanged its -0.1% target for short-term interest rates and a pledge to guide the 10-year bond yield around 0%.

RISING INFLATIONARY PRESSURE

In fresh quarterly forecasts, the central bank projected core consumer inflation to hit 1.9% in the current fiscal year before moderating to 1.1% in fiscal 2023 and 2024 – a sign it sees current cost-push price rises as transitory.

In a nod to rising inflationary pressure, however, the BOJ said wage and price increases were expected to broaden as the economy continues to recover.

“The rise in underlying inflation is likely to further push up medium- and long-term inflation expectations,” the central bank said in its quarterly outlook report.

But Kuroda said he did not expect conditions to fall in place for the BOJ to seek an exit from its loose policy in the foreseeable future.

BOJ officials see developments in long-term price expectations as crucial to judging whether inflation becomes embedded and warrants withdrawing monetary stimulus.

Core consumer inflation, which hit 0.8% in March, is set to accelerate to around 2% from April, though the rise will be driven largely by rising fuel costs and the dissipating effect of past cellphone fee cuts – rather than from higher wages, or underlying demand.

Some analysts say the markets could challenge the BOJ’s easy policy commitment.

“There’s no sign at all that prices are stably going to rise to 2% so everyone is wondering whether it’s really good to keep going as it is,” said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute in Tokyo.

“Markets could attack (the BOJ’s unlimited bond buying),” he said.

(Reporting by Leika Kihara; Additional reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto, Daniel Leussink and Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Kim Coghill)

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(Reuters) -PayPal Holdings Inc shares traded higher Wednesday even after the company lowered its full-year profit outlook, signaling that payments volumes could take a hit from surging inflation and the conflict in Ukraine.

Still, the company reported a modest increase in revenue and user growth, appearing to quell some investor fears. Its shares traded 5% higher after the market closed.

The company said it expects adjusted profit between $3.81 and $3.93 on a per share basis, down from its previous forecast of $4.60 to $4.75.

In a conference call with analysts, Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman said the company was withdrawing its medium-term outlook as both e-commerce penetration and macroeconomic conditions presented challenges.

He also acknowledged that “our shareholders expect more from us than our track record over the past several quarters.”

Schulman said 2022 remains another challenging year to forecast, adding “forecasting normalized consumer ecommerce spending as we come out of the pandemic is exceedingly complex.”

Customers in the United States have started tightening their belts in recent months as inflation surges to its highest in decades, pressuring earnings of payment processors like PayPal.

The company is also expected to take a financial hit from its decision to join the Western corporate boycott of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow has called a “special operation.”

PayPal had hit 52-week lows this week before reporting its earnings for the first quarter of 2022 as the market braced for a grim readout.

In the first three months of the year, PayPal’s revenue rose 8% on an FX neutral basis to $6.5 billion, above Wall Street estimates of $6.4 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

The company processed a total of $323 billion in payments in the first quarter, up 15% from a year earlier. Venmo – PayPal’s app that allows U.S. individuals to send and receive money, posted a 12% jump in payments processed to $57.8 billion.

PayPal closed the first quarter with 429 million active accounts, up 9% from the previous quarter, mostly driven by Venmo users.

PayPal earned a profit of 88 cents per share on an adjusted basis, which was in line with analysts’ expectations.

The company said it expected an adjusted profit of 86 cents per share in the current quarter, below analysts’ estimates of $1.12 per share.

(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Hannah Lang in Washington; Editing by Aditya Soni, Bernard Orr)

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Former U.S. President Donald Trump cast himself as a master of “The Art of the Deal,” but his old buddy, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may be taking over that title.

Last week, López Obrador pressured a U.S. gravel company into agreeing to operate a tourist resort and cruise ship dock at a quarry it owns on the Caribbean coast.

The Alabama-based aggregates company Vulcan Materials — once known as Birmingham Slag Co. — has no experience at doing either, and would just like to continue mining gravel.

But López Obrador has used pressure and threats in a bid to get private and foreign companies to shore up his infrastructure plans and pet projects — state-run ports, terminals and rail lines that could become white elephants unless the private sector boosts them with real traffic.

For a leader once depicted as a leftist, López Obrador is in fact more of a populist and nationalist, and is quite conservative on some social issues. And he and Trump share an essentially transactional view of politics: two old-style bosses who like making deals.

On Monday, López Obrador became one of the few foreign leaders to say he genuinely liked Trump.

“We understood each other, and it was good for both countries,” López Obrador said of Trump’s time in office.

The examples of López Obrador’s pressure are many.

In 2020, he called a referendum that stopped a partly built, $1.5 billion U.S.-owned brewery in the border city of Mexicali, which had received all the needed permits but brought complaints from some residents that it would use too much water.

The Victor, N.Y.-based Constellation Brands, the company that brews Corona beer, wanted to be on the border in order to export Corona to the U.S. market. But López Obrador has a long-range goal of promoting investment in southern Mexico. That’s the region where he grew up, and where poverty is greater and water is more plentiful.

So last week, López Obrador said the governor of the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, who belongs to the president’s Morena party, smoothed the way with all necessary permits for Constellation to build a brewery there.

Some say the president may be scaring off foreign investment with such heavy-handed tactics.

“The critics and the pundits are complaining … because he chases away investments. He doesn’t give a damn,” said Federico Estevez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “That’s what they haven’t understood. He’s not after growth. He’s not after investment. He’s not a normal politician.”

In March, López Obrador issued an ultimatum to the U.S. energy company Sempra saying it had one month to sign an agreement to build a liquified natural gas export terminal in the Pacific coast port of Salina Cruz. Industry insiders say the project isn’t attractive for foreign investors, since it involves building pipelines to the port.

López Obrador has renovated the port as part of a plan to revive a 150-year-old dream of a rail line linking ports on the Pacific to the Gulf over Mexico’s narrow Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he desperately needs commercial customers for the ports. Sempra hasn’t yet responded to the demand.

Similar thinking — and practices — went into the president’s most surprising deal yet, the tentative agreement with Vulcan Materials to run a resort and port.

Vulcan wound up with a series of crushed-limestone quarries on Mexico’s Caribbean coast near the resort of Playa del Carmen in the 1990s, when the area wasn’t as popular as it now.

Vulcan would like to keep exporting gravel, but its export permits have been blocked since late 2018, leading the company to file a trade dispute arbitration case under NAFTA, which has yet to be resolved.

The quarries are near XCaret, a lagoon that private investors turned into a high-end theme park that charges $100 a day in admission. The Mexican president loves state-owned businesses and hates pricey private ones.

One of Vulcan’s gravel quarries was dug out to below the water table, and it filled with turquoise water. López Obrador wants to turn it into an artificial swimming and snorkeling lagoon.

His other pet project in the area is the Maya Train, a 950-mile (1,500- kilometer) rail line that will run in a rough loop around the Yucatan peninsula, connecting Caribbean coast resorts with archaeological sites inland.

Controversially, and with no environmental studies, the president decided to cut down a swath of low jungle between Cancun and Tulum, near the quarries, to build the train line.

The project needs huge amounts of gravel spread between rail ties to stabilize them, and it needs a seaport to get rails, cars and other train-building materials into the jungle.

Vulcan Materials has crushed limestone and it has a deep-water port, Punta Venado, that it uses to export shiploads of gravel to Florida for road projects. López Obrador also wants Vulcan to operate a cruise ship dock just across from Cozumel — the world’s busiest port of call for cruise ships.

So the president offered “a deal” to the company — run a water park and a cruise ship dock, or the government will shut down the quarries. And he threatened further action.

“I am waiting for an answer to the offer we made to them, because otherwise, we will take legal action,” Lopez Obrador said April 19, sounding a lot like Trump.

On Monday, Vulcan Materials issued a statement saying it had told Mexican officials “of its openness to supply construction materials needed for the construction of the Maya Train and other infrastructure projects and to make port capacity available for transfer of train-related construction materials.”

The company said it also told the government it was open to developing “a large-scale ecotourism project — suggested by the Government of Mexico — on land owned by the Company, as long as the Company can continue supplying its customers.”

Vulcan added that it is “also prepared to explore an expansion of the Punta Venado maritime terminal to receive passenger, freight and naval vessels in the coming years.”

A person privy to disputes with private firms during this administration, but not authorized to be quoted by name, said López Obrador often seeks to pile rhetorical pressure on companies, but doesn’t really appear to step over the line.

“You get the rhetoric, but you don’t get the strongarm,” said the insider. “It’s a lot more bark than bite.”

“One company was asked to do something they didn’t want to do, and they started getting calls from government agencies, saying we’ve been asked to review every contract we have with you … but nothing was cancelled,” he said. “Is that pressure? Sure, but is it illegal?”

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Three days before Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter, the world’s richest man tweeted a photo of Bill Gates and used a crude sexual term to make fun of his belly.

Playful, aggressive and often juvenile, Musk’s past tweets show how he has used social media to craft his public image as a brash billionaire unafraid to offend. They may also reveal clues as to how Musk will govern the platform he hopes to own.

“Look at the feed: It’s all over the place. It’s erratic. At times it’s pretty extreme,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University professor who studies social media and who recently assigned Musk’s tweets as reading material for their students. “It paints him as some sort of rebel leader who will take control of the public square to save it. That is a myth he has constructed.”

Musk joined Twitter in 2010 and now has more than 85 million followers — the seventh most of any account and the highest for any business leader. He had mused about buying the site before he agreed on Monday to pay $44 billion for Twitter, which he said he hopes to turn into a haven where all speech is allowed.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

As the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk uses his Twitter account to make business announcements and promote his enterprises. He muses about technology and trade, but has also posted jokes about women’s breasts and once compared Canada’s prime minister to Hitler. He regularly weighs in on global events, as he did in March 2020 when he tweeted that “The coronavirus pandemic is dumb.”

He’s also used the account to punch back at critics, such as when he called a diver working to rescue boys trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo,” short for pedophile. The diver had previously criticized Musk’s proposal to use a sub to rescue the boys. Musk, who won a defamation suit filed by the diver, later said he never intended “pedo” to be interpreted as “pedophile.”

A few years ago, after software engineer Cher Scarlett criticized Musk’s handling of the cave incident, the tech billionaire fired back and she was soon being harassed by dozens of Musk’s online fans. He later deleted the posts, but not before Scarlett had to lock down her account because she was receiving so many hateful messages.

“It’s ironic to me that somebody who claims they want to buy Twitter to protect free speech has such thin skin,” she said. “He’s a very smart man, and when he replies to people that criticize him, he knows what he’s doing. To me that’s not championing free speech, it’s weaponizing free speech, and I think that’s what he’ll do owning this platform.”

Nineteen-year-old Jack Sweeney got Musk’s attention when he created an automated Twitter account that tracked the movements of Musk’s jet. Musk responded by offering Sweeney $5,000 to pull the account. When Sweeney refused, Musk blocked him on Twitter.

Sweeney said he’s worried he may get kicked off the site entirely if Musk’s takeover is approved. But he said he likes Musk’s free speech absolutism, and hopes he sees it through.

“He’ll make it more open, and I think that’s a good thing,” Sweeney said.

Musk’s use of Twitter has also led to problems for his own companies. In one August 2018 tweet, for instance, Musk asserted that he had the funding to take Tesla private for $420 a share, although a court has ruled that it wasn’t true. That led to an SEC investigation that Musk is still fighting.

More recently, Musk appeared to have violated SEC rules that required him to disclose that he’d acquired a 5% stake in Twitter; instead he waited until he had more than 9%. Experts say these issues aren’t likely to affect his Twitter acquisition.

Last year another federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, ordered Musk to delete a tweet that officials said illegally threatened to cut stock options for Tesla employees who joined the United Auto Workers union.

Those tweets helped cement Musk’s reputation as a brash outsider, a workingman’s billionaire, Grygiel said. But that doesn’t mean he is equipped to run a social media platform with more than 200 million users, the professor added.

“Maybe he wants to burn it down,” Grygiel said. “I don’t know. But I do know that it shows that no one person should have this kind of power.”

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