Musk took action against Microsoft, and Twitter accused it of abusing data. Will he charge money in the future?

On Thursday, May 19th, social media platform Twitter wrote a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella accusing Microsoft of improper use of Twitter's data, violating the data usage agreement, and refusing to pay. Twitter claims that Microsoft's use of Twitter data exceeded the agreed limits in the agreement and some of it was shared with government agencies without permission

On Thursday, May 19th, social media platform Twitter wrote a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella accusing Microsoft of improper use of Twitter's data, violating the data usage agreement, and refusing to pay. Twitter claims that Microsoft's use of Twitter data exceeded the agreed limits in the agreement and some of it was shared with government agencies without permission.

Alex Spiro, the personal lawyer for Twitter CEO Elon Musk, wrote in the letter: "Microsoft may have been in long-term violation of multiple terms of the relevant agreement

This letter may be a prelude to Twitter's attempt to charge Microsoft for data usage fees.

Last year, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He once said that making money for the company is a top priority, and Twitter is on the brink of bankruptcy.

Afterwards, Twitter launched a new subscription service and took other measures to increase revenue. In March of this year, the company announced that it would charge developers a higher fee to gain access to Twitter APIs.

Last month, Musk publicly accused Microsoft of "illegally" using Twitter data to train its artificial intelligence technology. He wrote on Twitter: "It's time for litigation

Microsoft acknowledges that it is currently not paying for the use of Twitter data. The company spokesperson Frank Shaw stated that Microsoft has received a letter from Twitter and will review these issues and respond. He also said, "We look forward to continuing to maintain a long-term partnership with the company

Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Recently, Musk's relationship with Microsoft has been a bit tense, as they have been arguing over the issue of OpenAI. Musk participated in the establishment of OpenAI in 2015, but later withdrew. Musk stated that Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and now controls the company's commercial decision-making power, but Microsoft has expressed opposition to this.

Last month, Microsoft stated that it would not pay for accessing Twitter data and informed its advertising platform customers that it would remove Twitter from the platform. It is reported that advertisers use Microsoft's advertising platform to manage their social media accounts, including Twitter.

In recent months, Twitter and other organizations have also begun to complain that their data is being used to build a new generation of artificial intelligence technology. Reddit announced last month that it will begin charging for accessing its application programming interface (API), and data cannot be used for free.

Microsoft's Bing chatbot and OpenAI's ChatGPT are both built on big language models, which improve themselves by analyzing massive amounts of data collected from the internet.

Last December, Musk severed the data connection between OpenAI and Twitter. OpenAI pays $2 million annually to access this data, but Musk believes that this money is not enough to fairly compensate Twitter.

In his letter to Nadella, Spiro did not specify whether Twitter would take legal action or demand economic compensation, but requested Microsoft to comply with Twitter's developer agreement and check the data usage of its eight applications.

Twitter also requires Microsoft to submit a report by June stating how much Twitter data the company has, how this data is stored and used, and when relevant government organizations have access to this data. Twitter's regulations prohibit government agencies from using its data unless notified in advance.

The letter also mentioned that Microsoft's gaming system Xbox, search engine Bing, and several other advertising and cloud computing tools all use Twitter data.

Twitter has imposed restrictions on the amount of data used by other companies, stating that it cannot exceed "reasonable values". The letter states that in 2022 alone, Microsoft used the Twitter data portal more than 780 million times and retrieved over 26 billion tweets. (Small)