Elon Musk said over the weekend

that Twitter will limit,

at least temporarily,

the number of posts you can read.

He claims it's an effort

to address

extreme levels of data scraping,

so verified accounts

limited to 10,000 posts

per day,

unverified accounts 1000 per day.

And this was revealed

after thousands of users

complained that they were unable

or had trouble accessing the site.

Many reported

getting messages

that they had exceeded their rate limit.

So what is behind this latest turmoil

for the company?

CNN's senior

media analyst Sarah Fischer joins us.

She's also senior media reporter

at Axios.

And Sara, what gives what now with him?

There's always something, Audie,

that was a dull day in Elon Musk land.

You know,

I think this is a response

to the rise of a lot of big A.I.

platforms

that are starting to scrape

big social media platforms

for data to help train their algorithms.

You saw Reddit

a few weeks ago

said that they would start

to charging developers

for some of that back and to access.

They got a lot of pushback

from their community.

It seems like Elon Musk

is trying to do something similar.

But the difference, Audie, is

that this is going to have

a huge impact

on the everyday users

experience with Twitter.

You saw some people

tweeting frustration yesterday,

ironically tweeting frustration

about Twitter.

That they weren't able

to get severe

weather updates, critical news

and information

because they were being limited

to the number of posts

that they were able to view.

Now, Elon Musk has not said

how long he's going to implement

this temporary crackdown,

but I do know that it's going

to be frustrating for advertisers

because they're reliant

on have the usage

in order to fulfill their ad campaigns,

make sure they have enough people

watching and reading tweets

in order to insert their ads

between them,

theoretically reliant

on them for business.

But one quick fact check,

what's this about

maybe him not paying his bills.

Can you talk about what's going on there?

There have been so many reports,

whether it's been submitted

to B2B vendors or its licensing or its

leases, if you will, that Twitter

has struggled to pay its bills.

And that's because Twitter

is really struggling

with profitability right now.

Now, to be honest,

Twitter has always struggled

with profitability

even before Elon Musk took over.

But the difference is

that they are not

a publicly traded company.

They do not need to be transparent

about their finances,

what money they're bringing in

and what money they're spending

And so it seems like

the company is

just in this sort of chaotic spot

where it's trying to stay afloat,

but it's not necessarily doing it

in the most transparent way.

We keep getting reports

not also just about not paying bills,

but they're still in litigation

with former employees

about paying out severance, etc.

So expect

Twitter to continue

to be

in the sort of financial chaos

until maybe they

can turn the platform around.

But I'm still skeptical, Audie,

even though they have

put in

a new chief executive,

this platform continues to be chaos.

As I cover it.

All right, Sara, stay with us.

I want to bring Shelby and Earl back in.

You're so jealous that you didn't write

the program

is broadcast worthy to be right there.

I think

why I love listening to Sarah talk about

this is because I'm fascinated

by the business story.

Less, less on the myopic

like Navel-gazing

people being angry about their tweets

not being available

and all that sort of stuff.

But from a business perspective,

they bring in Linda Marino,

a big time executive.

It's supposed to juice up their

advertising and,

you know, I'm

asking Elon Musk, how does this end?

Well, it's not going to be pretty.

At this point,

the estimate is that under Elon Musk,

the company has lost

two thirds of its value.

He paid $44 billion for it.

It's worth something like 50 billion.

And that's not good. Right?

Right. Right, right.

Not good.

It's not going to be

the number to go in the other direction.

The fact that advertisers

and important users

like the National Weather Service

and others are saying like this,

this may not be for us

the algorithm

is it still sort of promotes and favors,

you know, kind of anger and division

and outrage,

making it

a much less pleasant user experience.

For everybody who's left on it.

And then this idea

that you're going to get out of it

by paying eight bucks,

which has just been roundly rejected,

they've got very, very few subscribers

even among their daily users.

So as a business,

it just seems to be falling apart.

Now, it's it's

got a lot of sort of potential.

It's got a lot of residual affection.

It's got a lot of users apolitical tool.

Right.

We have 20, 24 coming up.

I mean, do campaigns

think they're going to

still be using Twitter?

Yeah, I think well,

I think the big thing is

if it was just this change,

it would be a huge change.

But given how much Elon Musk

has already changed the platform,

like I know

personally, I feel like

the platform is a little bit

less reliable

now in terms of me finding verified news

that has been fact-checked

and is legitimate And so I think

in that sense,

it's a little bit less of a priority

for campaigns.

I mean, Donald Trump

is still not on the platform,

for example.

I do think

pre Elon Musk,

he would have more of a reason

to join it.

Sir, with the time we have left,

I mean, from a business perspective,

from a one day

Carino perspective,

do that

when you talk to both people

inside the company,

but also analysts outside?

Is there a pathway that exists here

to kind of get them out of this

just constant

state of tumult and seeming collapse,

followed by resuscitation,

followed by some new

strategy that I can't figure out

there is a pathway.

One of

the things that you're going to hear

internally a lot

is that Linda brings assurance

to the talent inside.

There's still some people

who are great salespeople,

who are great engineers

that want

just guidance and direction

and some assurance that things aren't

going to change that much.

And they're hoping that Linda

will bring some consistency.

But from the outside world,

the perspective of the advertisers

and marketers,

I just spent a good week

with them

at a big advertising festival overseas.

And the thing that you keep hearing is

that Twitter is still the most relevant

public square for political discourse.

You have media,

which is the parent company

that Instagram and Facebook

that's trying to build out a rival.

You have small budding

rivals like Mastodon and Blue Sky.

But at the end of the day, Twitter

is still the biggest public square

in the world.

And so if Elon Musk can figure this out,

there's definitely a product

case to be made for it being relevant.

I'm just not quite sure, quite frankly,

if he's going to be able to do it

and keep Linda Guarino at his side

and she doesn't get too frustrated

and just leave.

Yeah.

It's fascinating to

watch it all play out.

Sara, thanks as always

for the great reporting. I.