Business

When sponsored content meets 'sharenting,' kids are powerless to stop their influencer parents using them as props

When it comes to sharing content of children on social media particularly via sponsored posts and brand deals whats legal isnt always whats ethical.

Influencer Brittany Dawn, who initially gained a following for her fitness workouts before pivoting to religious content, recently came under fire for monetizing her foster child on social media.

While Dawn has blurred out her childs image in photos shared a stipulation decreed by the U.S. Childrens Bureau for foster parents in their social media rules she has found a different way to capitalize on being an influencer with a foster child. She includes affiliate links on her posts to promote products like baby monitors. If viewers follow the link and purchase the product, Dawn gets a commission.

Similarly, YouTube family vlogger Myka Stauffer has shared a number of details about her children, and has also relayed her experience of adopting a baby boy from China who frequently appeared in her videos. (The Conversation reached out to Dawn and Stauffer about these criticisms, but did not receive a response.)

None of this is currently illegal. But this practice exists at the intersection of two social media trends: sponsored content and sharenting when parents post sensitive information about their children online.

There are very few safeguards in place to protect the interests of children both personal and financial from their influencer parents. But the questionable practice of leveraging children for followers, fans and sponsorships is currently experiencing a groundswell of attention. Critiques of famous creators like Dawn and Stauffer are becoming more pointed and persistent, while some of the now-adult children of influencers are pushing back.

When kids become a prop

As a scholar of social media, Ive spent nearly a decade studying influencers and content creators and how they blur the lines between entertainment, business and freelance work. Influencers constantly search for a niche, or something to make them stand out amid the immense amount of content online. My own research has examined pet influencers, ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) influencers and veterinarians who are influencers.

Showcasing your children is also a niche. And as internet scholar Sophie Bishop has shown, influencers who feature their children sometimes use their kids to pivot the focus of their social media niche. They can move from being a fashion or travel influencer in their 20s to becoming a wedding influencer once theyre engaged and to a parenting influencer merely by hitting some of lifes big milestones, taking their built-in audience on the journey with them.

Children, however, cannot consent to being the star of their parents show.

While a child could feasibly find it fun to be in mommys video, it is unlikely they understand the long-term ramifications of being broadcast to thousands even millions of followers. The oversharing of images of children is even a concern for many parents, not just influencers.

But the business aspect of sponsored content adds another layer to this complicated issue. Who is protecting childrens financial interests for the money their influencer parents earn off this content? How much money do children earn for their parents by appearing in their content?

In addition to the financial ethics, the personal, emotional and mental toll cannot be overlooked. TikTok user @softscorpio has talked about her lingering trauma from being a child featured in a parents account. Sarah Adams, who goes by @Mom.UnCharted, also tackles the issues of child social media exploitation and oversharing, talking about the ethical issues surrounding parent influencers and family YouTube channels.

Videos making fun of parent influencers also frequently circulate on TikTok, whether its through mocking the aesthetics of these influencers or humorously critiquing the ways in which parents force their children to work to build their brand and appease their following.

Updating the Coogan Act for the digital age

In 1939, California passed the Coogan Act. The law, also known as the California Child Actors Bill, was named for former child actor Jackie Coogan, whom many hail as Americas first child actor.

He became famous after appearing as Charlie Chaplins adopted son in the 1921 film The Kid. But when Coogan reached adulthood, he learned that his mother and stepfather had squandered the $4 million he had earned what would amount to tens of millions of dollars today.

After Coogan sued his parents and was able to reclaim only a fraction of what was left of his earnings, the California Legislature passed the Coogan Act. The law protects children who have been hired as an actor, actress, dancer, musician, comedian, singer, or other performer or entertainer and stipulates that their earnings must be safeguarded for them until they reach adulthood. Nine other states have since enacted similar legislation.

While some lobbyists and activists have called for the Coogan Act to be applied to the children of parent influencers at the federal level, regulations have not yet been adopted.

The Coogan Act was written to protect children in traditional entertainment. However, the lines between traditional entertainment and social media entertainment continue to blur, making this distinction less and less sound.

Additionally, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which protects children from excessive labor, has not been updated to apply to child influencers, or the children who regularly appear in the feeds of their parents. Theres a notable distinction between child influencers, who may run their own feeds and businesses, and children who are featured by their parents. But the Fair Labor Standards Act protects neither, and even children who run their own social media careers may still have their finances regulated by their parents.

Some parent influencers could easily set aside money earned either by or off their kids in trusts or college funds. But theres nothing in place that specifically requires this.

France has already passed legislation protecting the commercial use of children under 16 on social media.

Its hard not to see at least some precedent in the Coogan Act, particularly the part that refers to other performers and entertainers. With debates about the ethics and exploitation of children by parent influencers gaining steam in the U.S., it will be interesting to see whether there will be legislative updates to the definition of child labor in the digital age.

Jessica Maddox is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Its time to fill the publics appetite for better, more sustainable food

When you sit down for a meal, you are rarely eating just one thing. Whether its a dinner plate of food, last nights leftover pizza, or a piece of toast and coffee, there are multiple ingredients touched by many hands that are coming together to sustain you in that moment. And in all of that work, and all of those resources present, there is an opportunity for a better world.

While our current food system has enabled the world to feed billions, it is also damaging to the environment and to eaters alike. Its imperative that we begin to produce our food in better waysways that are more creative, equitable, and sustainable. How, and which, food gets to our plates is as big a determinant to planetary and public health as anything else you can name.

At this moment environmentalists, policymakers, and the agriculture and food industries are uniquely poised to make progress at the intersections of food, equity, climate, and sustainability. The need for this work is as urgent as it is profound, and notably, the appetite for this work is increasingly apparent in the general public.

A Morning Consult poll conducted for the Walton Family Foundation found that nearly 90% of Americans believe that its important to update the agricultural system to encourage sustainable farming practices that support clean water and healthy, productive soil. Roughly 80% of that same group favors modernizing the Farm Bill to support farmers as they implement more sustainable farming practices.

It is a sign of hope that in these profoundly divided times, something as essential as food can unite Americans across all divides. Policymakers, farmers, and food industry leaders should listen toand learn fromconsumers who want to see change. We should seize this opportunity for people and political parties to unite and break more sustainable bread together, for the common good of our communities and the planet.

A new report from the Boston Consulting Group conducted for the Walton Family Foundation explores a range of practices and technologies that can reduce net emissions from U.S. agriculture across three categories: how we grow, how we eat, and how we use land. Working across the public, private, and social sectors, we can make real progress reducing the environmental impact of our food system.

Much of the how we grow category includes practices that we have known are good for soil health and the environment for the last 50 years, including cover-cropping, no-till farming, and other sustainable farming practices that protect soil and water while producing food. The Farm Bill is an opportunity to build on the agriculture provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act to kick-start the transition to a more sustainable, climate-smart future for agriculture. This is a moment in which America can commit to the promise that growing food can be good for people and the planetand that such food must be made available to all.

How we eat is of course equally important. For example, the differences between conservative and optimistic scenarios for shaping agricultures impact on climate depend a lot on whether people are moving toward greenhouse-gas-conscious diets, which also relates to increased demand forand supply ofsustainable products. This is a place for the food industry in particular to meet the needs and wants of both people and the planet.

Finally, as we think about how we use land, we know that most of Americas current farmland should stay in production. Taking land out of production in the United States drives that growth to other parts of the world, which often results in deforestationthreatening biodiversity and releasing increasingly dangerous carbon along with it.

At the same time, Americas farmland ownership is based on a well-documented history of policies that have excluded African Americans, especially, as well as women and farmers of color in general from becoming and remaining agricultural landowners. The benefits of our nations natural capitalsoil, water, the resources of land and seamust be more accessible to wider sections of humanity and distributed more fairly.

None of these challenges are easy to address, but there are common threads among potential solutions. Improving just one lever can positively impact agriculture across the board. The benefits we yield will directly correlate to how strategic we are in our approaches, and how high we reach in terms of our aspirations for creating change.

The benefits of growing our food more sustainablywith more recycling of nutrients and an emphasis on biodiversity and equitygo well beyond the specific moves needed to slow and reverse climate change, as important as that is. A healthier and more just society ultimately depends on an agricultural system where more (and more diverse) people decide what is grown, and how it is produced, processed, distributed, and eaten.

If we dont address the opportunities and challenges associated with whats on our plates and how it gets there, its our children and grandchildren who will pay the price. The climate crisis, unequal distribution, and control of land, public health, food distribution, and access are all inextricably linked. It is time for us to do better, together.

Mark Bittman is the author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, From Sustainable to Suicidal and the founder of The Bittman Project. Caryl M. Stern is the executive director of the Walton Family Foundation. The Walton Family Foundation is a partner of Fortune Next Gen.

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Too many nursing homes misdiagnose their patients with schizophrenia. The federal government is on the case.

The federal government says it will begin a targeted crackdown on nursing homes abuse of antipsychotic drugs and misdiagnoses of schizophrenia in patients.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is launching investigations this month into select nursing homes, aimed at verifying whether patients have been properly diagnosed with the psychiatric disorder.

Evidence has mounted over decades that some facilities wrongly diagnose residents with schizophrenia or administer antipsychotic drugs to sedate them, despite dangerous side effects that could include death, according to the agency.

No nursing home resident should be improperly diagnosed with schizophrenia or given an inappropriate antipsychotic, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement Wednesday. The steps we are taking today will help prevent these errors and give families peace of mind.

Some facilities may be dodging increased scrutiny around gratuitous use of antipsychotic medications by coding residents as having schizophrenia, even when they do not show signs of the extremely rare disorder, a government report last year found. Less than 1% of the population is believed to have schizophrenia, which is marked by delusions, hallucinations and disordered thinking.

In 2012, the federal government began tracking when nursing homes use antipsychotics on residents doing so can impact the facilitys quality rating in a public database but only for those who have not been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Antipsychotics for those nursing home residents has dropped to under 20% in recent years, according to federal data.

A November report from the HHS Office of the Inspector General, however, revealed that the number of residents reported as having schizophrenia without a corresponding diagnosis skyrocketed between 2015 and 2019, with 99 nursing homes in the country reporting that 20% or more of their residents have the disorder.

The number of unsupported schizophrenia diagnoses increased and in 2019 was concentrated in relatively few nursing homes, the report concluded.

Nursing homes have worked on other ways to treat residents, especially those with dementia, and trained staff to use alternative methods, said Katie Smith Sloan, the CEO of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit aging service providers.

Much has been achieved since the programs start in 2012, and nursing homes deserve a lot of the credit for the progress, she said in a statement.

CMS will start targeted audits to ask nursing homes for documentation of the diagnoses in the coming days, focusing on nursing homes with existing residents who have been recorded as having schizophrenia.

The rating scores for nursing homes that have a pattern of inaccurately coding residents as having schizophrenia will be negatively impacted, CMS said in a statement released Wednesday, stopping short of threatening to levy fines against facilities.

Dinging nursing homes public ratings will be effective in some cases, said Dr. Shekinah Fashaw-Walters, a researcher at the University of Minnesota who has found that schizophrenia diagnoses have risen in Black nursing home patients compared with their white counterparts in recent years.

She is hopeful that the CMS audits will help to narrow that racial disparity and said that its about time for CMS plan.

Its time to do this and really hold nursing homes accountable for providing high quality care, she said. Im thrilled to see that they are taking these steps, and I think theyre very warranted.

The agency does not have plans to immediately intervene in the patients care directly or notify relatives of residents who have been wrongly coded or given antipsychotics, according to senior HHS officials who insisted on anonymity to brief The Associated Press on the matter on Tuesday.

CMS will monitor the facilities to make sure the issues are corrected, officials said.

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One of the Fed's most consistent hawks thinks that interest rate hikes are working in the battle against inflation

Growing evidence that high inflation is finally easing shows that the Federal Reserves sharp interest rate hikes are working as intended, says Loretta Mester, a key Fed policymaker. But further rate hikes are still needed, she says, to decisively crush the worst inflation bout in four decades.

Were beginning to see the kind of actions that we need to see, Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said in an interview with The Associated Press. Good signs that things are moving in the right direction Thats important input into how were thinking about where policy needs to go.

Other Fed officials, too, have said recently that they were encouraged by a series of milder readings on inflation and wage growth. But Mesters comments are notable because she is among the more consistently hawkish members of the Feds 19-person interest-rate-setting committee. (Hawks typically support higher rates to fight inflation, while doves tend to favor lower rates to boost employment.)

She has been ahead of the curve on a lot of the arguments that have pushed the Fed to act more hawkishly over the past year, said Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.

As a result, Mesters views provide a measure of how far the Feds more hawkish policymakers might be willing to go in their drive to tame inflation. Consumer price increases, as calculated by the government, have steadily eased from a four-decade high of 9.1% in June to 6.5% in December.

Yet because the Feds own inflation target is much lower 2% its policymakers have penciled in further rate increases. The rate hikes the Fed has already imposed have contributed to a near doubling of mortgage rates and to sharply higher costs for auto loans and other consumer and business credit. They have also elevated the risk of a recession.

How high the Fed will raise its benchmark short-term rate and how long it keeps it there will likely determine whether it ultimately curbs inflation and at what price to the economy. The Feds rate is now in a range of 4.25% to 4.5%, the highest level in 15 years.

The Feds policymakers are grappling with two conflicting risks: That theyll fail to raise rates high enough and thereby allow high inflation to persist, or that theyll raise rates too high and tip the economy into recession.

Despite the recent progress on inflation, Mester said in her interview Tuesday with the AP: I still see the larger risk coming from tightening too little.

Mester, 64, also stressed her belief that more hikes are needed and that the Feds key rate should rise a little bit above the 5% to 5.25% range that policymakers have collectively projected for the end of this year.

Mester, who has been president of the Cleveland Fed for eight years, didnt say how large a rate hike she favored when the Feds next meeting ends on Feb. 1. Most economists expect the central bank to announce a smaller quarter-point hike. But Mester noted that the economy and the financial markets were able to handle the half-point hike that the Fed carried out in mid-December.

Were not at 5% yet, were not above 5%, which I think is going to be needed given where my projections are for the economy, she said. I just think we need to keep going, and well discuss at the meeting how much to do.

Mesters comments follow remarks from other Fed officials last week that seemed to indicate a likely quarter-point hike at the Feb. 1 meeting. That move would follow a half-point rate increase in December and four three-quarter-point hikes before that.

Patrick Harker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said that quarter-point hikes will be appropriate going forward. Two other Fed regional bank presidents Susan Collins of the Boston Fed and Raphael Bostic of the Atlanta Fed also said they were leaning toward a quarter-point increase.

Mester acknowledged that the Feds ever-higher rates will likely lead to layoffs and higher unemployment. But she said she thinks any increase in joblessness will be smaller than during a typical economic downturn.

She also said she hopes the Feds higher rates will mostly reduce the number of openings that employers have posted rather than cause widespread job cuts. Job vacancies are at historically high levels a sign that companies are competing for scarce workers. If the number of posted job openings were to fall, it would mean that wages wont likely rise so fast, a trend that should cool inflation.

On Wall Street, though, investors have signaled that they dont expect the Fed to raise rates as high as Mester prefers. Futures prices suggest that the market thinks the central bank will implement two more quarter-point hikes and then stop.

But Mester said she would need to see inflation moving down faster before she could support a pause within the next few months.

Were starting to see our policy actions do what theyre intended to do, she said. But I do believe we have to continue raising and then hold for a while so that we get back to price stability in a timely way.

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Elon Musk is auctioning off the soul of old Twitter: Literally

Its a fire sale at Elon Musks Twitter. The social media platforms new owner is holding an auction to sell off many of the companys remaining corporate assets and everything must go, whether its chairs, couches, or a nearly-300 pound coffee machine.

More than 600 items including Twitter office supplies, furniture, and memorabilia were put on the auction block last month as Musk began his Twitter takeover with a mission to cut costs. The online bidding, organized by Heritage Global Partners Inc., officially kicked off Tuesday and will wrap late Wednesday morning Pacific Time.

And with the variety of items on offer, casual shoppers, Twitter aficionados, and restaurant owners alike may all find something useful in Musks catalog.

Interested in not one but five authentic Italian espresso makers? A wide assortment of meat slicing machines? Industrial-sized freezers? A massive neon Twitter bird display? For all the above items and many more, Elon likely has shoppers covered.

Musks offerings also include office supplies and furniture, but some of the items are much more luxurious and high-end than most would expect in an office. The selection includes custom-made wooden tables and desks as well as high-end lounging sofa chairs.

But these office supplies also hold sentimental value to a company that has recently begun a new tumultuous chapterand that has seen more than half of employees laid off. Twitter alumni took to the platform this week to reminisce on the companys mementos from its earlier days.

Kevin Weil, a former Twitter executive, wrote that the auctioned items reminded him of great memories from a different era.

Some of the items are coming in at a pretty penny for most buyers. The electrical Twitter bird display, for instance, was going for $35,000. And if youre in the market for a meat slicer, dont expect to find one for less than $5,000.

But Musk is probably hoping the items go for even more, as the auction is just the latest in a string of cost-cutting measures the new Twitter owner has implemented since his $44 billion acquisition bid went through in October.

In the nearly three months he has been in charge at Twitter, Musk has revamped the companys structure in a bid to reduce expenses. In November, Twitter laid off around 50% of Twitters workforce, about 3,700 employees, while also releasing outsourced content moderators and disbanding certain advisory groups. Also in November, Musk directed Twitters teams to figure out how the company could save $1 billion in annual infrastructure costs by cutting back on cloud services and internal server space.

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has repeatedly voiced his concerns over its solvency, even claiming in December that the company had been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. In a live forum on Twitter last month, Musk described the company as a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls dont work, adding that Twitter could be faced with a negative cash flow situation of about $3 billion in 2023.

Over the past few months, Musk has presided over a steady drop in Twitters ad revenues, which in 2021 accounted for 90% of the companys overall revenue. On Tuesday, a senior Twitter manager told employees that the companys daily revenue was 40% lower than the same day a year ago, The Information reported, as more than 500 of Twitters top advertisers had paused their spending on the platform since Musks takeover.

When Twitters auction went live last month, Nick Dove, a representative for Heritage Global Partners, told Fortune that this auction has nothing to do with their financial position.

Heritage did not immediately reply to Fortunes request for comment once the bidding went live, although Ross Dove, chief executive of Heritage Global, told the New York Times on Tuesday that the auction could net Twitter up to $1.5 million. That number is unlikely to move the needle when it comes to the companys financial woes, he added.

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New Jersey loves gambling again, but it's different this time around

New Jerseys gambling revenue matched its all-time high of $5.2 billion in 2022, but only half that amount was won by casinos from in-person gamblers.

Figures released Tuesday by the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement show the casinos, the horse tracks that take sports bets, and online partners of both types of gambling won $5.21 billion last year, up 10% from a year earlier and matching a level last seen in 2006. That was just before the advent of casino gambling in neighboring Pennsylvania sent New Jerseys gambling industry into a downward spiral that eventually led to the closures of five of the 12 casinos that were operating at the time.

But the 2022 number was reached with a hefty assist from internet gambling and sports betting revenue streams that help contribute to the bottom line but are also heavily shared with third parties such as sports books and tech platforms.

Sarah Grady, assistant director of the Lloyd Levenson Institute at Stockton University, which studies the Atlantic City gambling industry, said it took an enormous amount of work by the casinos and state government to replicate the levels of 2006, when gambling revenue consisted solely of what was won from in-person gamblers.

To compare these returns, it is important to consider how much the market has changed in the past 16 years, she said. To achieve the returns we have today took a substantial expansion and diversification of the New Jersey gaming product to compete with increased competition from neighboring states.

That included the legalization of internet gambling in 2013, and the introduction of sports betting in 2018 following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case brought by New Jersey that cleared the way for any state to offer legal sports betting; about two-thirds of the states now do.

In 2022, the Atlantic City casino industry continued to face challenges, including the lingering effects from the pandemic, a difficult economy and high inflation, said Mark Giannantonio, president of the Casino Association of New Jersey. As we move into a new year, Atlantic City casinos are committed to providing the best possible experience for our customers, which includes making significant investments that will continue to solidify Atlantic Citys position as a world-class resort destination with top-notch dining, shopping and entertainment offerings.

In-person winnings from gamblers finally surpassed pre-pandemic levels of 2019 a long-sought goal of the Atlantic City casino industry. The casinos won $2.78 billion from in-person gamblers in 2022, compared with $2.68 billion in 2019.

But only three of the nine casinos Borgata, Ocean and Resorts had more in-person revenue in 2022 than they did in 2019.

Six casinos had more total gambling revenue in 2022 than they did the year before.

The market-leading Borgata won $1.3 billion in overall gambling revenue, up 18.2%. The Golden Nugget won $581 million, up 10.2%; Hard Rock won $576 million, up 12.7%; Ocean won $389 million, up 13.6%; Tropicana won $365 million, up 2.9%, and Ballys won $198 million, up 37.3%.

Harrahs won $258 million, down 3.4%; Caesars won $239 million, down 1%, and Resorts won $168 million, down 0.3%.

Resorts Digital, the casinos online arm, won $546 million, up 21.3%. Caesars Interactive NJ won $113 million, up 1%.

In terms of in-person gambling revenue, the Borgata won $724 million, up 19.5%. Hard Rock won $492 million, up 14.2%; Ocean won $356 million, up 16.3%; Harrahs won $257 million, down 3.2%; Tropicana won $248 million, down 1.8%; Caesars won $235 million, down 0.7%; Resorts won $167 million, up 0.8%; Ballys won $153 million, up 9.4%; and Golden Nugget won $148 million, up 1.1%.

The casinos, sports books and internet gambling operations paid more than $526 million in taxes in 2022, nearly half of that coming from a 15% tax on online gambling revenue.

New Jerseys casinos and horse tracks took nearly $11 billion worth of sports bets in 2022, just a tiny bit more than they did in 2021.

Of that $11 billion, the casinos, tracks and their online partners kept $726 million as revenue after paying off winning bets and other expenses.

The 2022 figures got a nice boost from a strong December, in which total gambling revenue was $454 million, up 12.5% from December 2021. In-person casino winnings were $215 million in December, up 1.8% from a year earlier.

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Twitter revenue reportedly down 40% just as Elon Musks first interest payment is due

Twitters well-documented turmoil under new owner Elon Musk has reportedly left deep scars in its income statement at the worst possible time.

As the polarizing entrepreneur gets ready to confront his first interest payments after taking on billions in debt to buy the company for a $44 billion, his revenue base appears to be in bad shape.

According to a report in The Information on Wednesday, the social media companys top line shrank by 40% over the previous year as over 500 advertisers, who are responsible for the lions share of its turnover, halted their spending.

Companies have complained since November that the mass firing of Twitter staff left them without their account manager contacts, while Musks attempt to monetize his user base by selling $8 per month subscriptions sparked an avalanche of imposter accounts that targeted Nintendo, Eli Lilly and others. A surge in hate speech on the platform also made companies nervous to advertise.

As a result of Twitters general financial troubles, one of the elite group of third-party investors allowed to join Musk in the deal suggested its accountants no longer thought the social media company was worth anything like what it paid. Portfolio manager Fidelity took the book value of its stake in Twitter parent X Holdings and marked it down by more than half at the end of last year.

Even though revenue may be significantly down, however, there are other factors at play. Musk took a flamethrower to Twitters cost base, torching entire teams on the company payroll and laying waste to company perks like free lunch and healthcare treatments.

He is also reportedly refusing to meet rent payments for some of his Twitter offices in his fervor to cut costs.

With only about $1 billion in available liquidity reserves and expected outflows this year estimated by Musk to surpass over $6 billion, the centibillionaire will likely be scrounging between the sofa cushions to scrape up every last dollar in cash to pay creditors and suppliers. Twitter is even going so far as to auction off some of its furniture.

On Wednesday, the Financial Times cited people close to the buyout as saying the required loan payment for Musk could come as soon as the end of this month. Consequently, bankers are negotiating with him over the replacement of about $3 billion of expensive unsecured debt carrying an interest rate of 11.75% with margin loans that are backed by Musks stake in Tesla.

For his part, on Tuesday the entrepreneur posted a link on Twitter to an Axios story reporting that the social media platform was eyeing content sponsorship deals with more than three dozen news outlets, media companies and sports leagues in the first half of this year.

The party is on!! he wrote triumphantly on his own platform.

However, when Musk acquired Twitter he took it private, and there is little transparency into the companys accounting. No figures are independently verifiable for investors, since the company is not required to publish audited statements.

In mid-December, Musk told a Twitter Spaces that the company expected to generate $3 billion in sales this year, down from $5.1 billion in 2021.

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