Tech Digest daily roundup: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $41.39bn
Billionaire Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for $41.39bn, according to a regulatory filing. The Tesla chief executive’s offer price of $54.20 per share was 38% higher than the closing price of Twitter’s stock on 1 April, the last trading day before his investment of 9.2% in the company was publicly announced. “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he said in a letter to Twitter chairman Bret Taylor. “Since making my investment I now realise the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.” Sky News
The buyer of a non-fungible token (NFT) of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet says he “may never sell it” after receiving a series of low bids. Malaysia-based Sina Estavi has been offered just over $6,200 (£4,720), about 0.2% of the $2.9m he paid for it. Mr Estavi has compared the digital asset to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The tweet, which says “just setting up my twttr,” was first posted in March 2006 and was auctioned off last year by Mr Dorsey for charity. Mr Estavi bought the tweet in the form of a NFT in March 2021. BBC
If you were to switch from your internal combustion-engined car to an electric vehicle, what would be an acceptable amount of range? Would 400 kms be enough? How about 600 kms? Mercedes-Benz has just announced a world-beating efficiency in real-world driving of 1,000 kms (621 miles) on a single charge by its one-off Vision EQXX concept car. On Tuesday, April 5, the all-electric EQXX left Germany, drove for 12 hours non-stop on one charge, across the Swiss Alps, and arrived in France with 140 km of range still left in its battery pack, according to Mercedes. It shows what is possible when state-of-the-art lightweight materials, a slippery body design, advanced battery technology, an F1-inspired electric motor setup, and aerodynamic tires are combined into the one vehicle. Forbes
Both Nintendo and Sony will change how they market their respective subscription offerings in response to an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. The UK regulator had been investigating all of the big three console manufaturers, though Microsoft opted in January to get ahead of its findings and role out changes to Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass worldwide. Now, Nintendo and Sony will also alter their services to offer better guidance for customers, as reported today by GamesIndustry.biz. Sony has said it will contact long-term inactive PlayStation Plus customers who are still being billed to remind them to cancel unwanted subscription plans – then eventually stop making payments. Nintendo, meanwhile, will no longer sell you its Nintendo Switch Online subscription with auto-renewal as its default setting. Eurogamer
The pandemic sparked a running boom, with one study finding that roughly 28 percent of current runners got their start during quarantine. To cater to this new crowd, Polar announced today that it’s launching two new GPS watches designed to help runners get better at the sport. The $199.90 Pacer is aimed at novices, while the $299.90 Pacer Pro is meant to help serious runners up their game. Polar says that both smartwatches will feature faster processors than their predecessors, with 5MB of RAM. It’s an upgrade that’s meant to improve performance and deliver a better user experience. That’s been sorely needed in Polar watches, which sometimes lag during syncing and occasionally struggle with menu transitions. Both watches also have Polar’s Precision Prime heart rate monitoring tech. The Verge
