Elon Musk has secured $46.5 billion in financing to buy Twitter (see 2204150051), the Tesla CEO said Thursday in an SEC filing. Morgan Stanley committed $25.5 billion, and Musk will put up $21 billion, according to the filing.

The U.S. launched multilateral privacy negotiations with Canada, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced Thursday. The countries established the Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules Forum, the start of cross-border negotiations to set rules and privacy recognition for processors systems. Raimondo said the “first-of-their-kind data privacy certifications” will help companies “demonstrate compliance with internationally recognized data privacy standards.” The forum will “facilitate trade and international data flows and promote global cooperation, building on our shared data privacy values while recognizing the differences in our domestic approaches to protecting data privacy,” she said.

Texas has until May 10 to respond to Twitter’s request for a rehearing in the company’s lawsuit against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation into Twitter’s decision to suspend then-President Donald Trump for his actions linked to the Jan. 6 Capitol siege (see 2204120056), said the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday in 21-15869. Twitter requested rehearing March 30 after a federal judge in California dismissed the lawsuit, calling it “premature.”

Sierra Wireless announced a new partnership with Orange Wholesale France to bolster its access to global networks and expand connectivity coverage across Europe. Access to a wide range of radio technologies, including low-power wide-area and LTE networks, “allows customers with the new offer to enable a variety of use cases regardless of data usage,” said Sierra Tuesday.

Florida’s legislature should use its special session to amend the state’s social media censorship law so Disney isn’t exempted (see 2203250048 and 2202160012), Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Tuesday. The governor announced various actions aimed at removing special districts and privileges for Disney in Florida in response to the company’s opposition to HB-1557, Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. The state’s social media law is tied up in a legal battle with the tech industry. NetChoice, which is suing Florida with the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said the Florida law is unconstitutional because it undermines the First Amendment, not because of special treatment for Disney, said Vice President Carl Szabo: “Regardless of whether the Florida legislature takes out the Disney exemption, the law is still flagrantly a violation of the First Amendment.”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology plans a May 4 open meeting at 1 p.m. EDT of its National AI Advisory Committee to address the current state of U.S. competitiveness in AI germane to workforce, says a notice for Tuesday’s Federal Register. The committee also will discuss the potential “to use AI for workforce training,” and whether “societal issues are adequately being addressed,” it says. Members also will discuss enhancing AI opportunities for “diverse geographic regions” of the U.S., it says. Registration is required for the virtual meeting, which begins at 1 p.m. EDT. The Commerce Department announced the appointment of 27 members to the committee last week, including executives from Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft (see 2204140052).

Twitter’s board unanimously adopted a year-long shareholder rights plan, the company announced Friday, a day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered to buy the platform for $43 billion and take it private. Commonly referred to as a “poison pill,” a shareholder rights plan is one board strategy for fending off a hostile takeover. The rights plan “will reduce the likelihood that any entity, person or group gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium or without providing the Board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders,” the company said. The plan expires April 2023, and doesn’t prevent the board from accepting a transaction. It’s “intended to enable all shareholders to realize the full value of their investment in Twitter,” the company said. The rights would activate if an entity or person “acquires beneficial ownership of 15% or more of Twitter's outstanding common stock in a transaction not approved by the Board.” Each shareholder, other than the purchaser, would have the right to buy additional shares of common stock at a discounted rate. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted Friday that “as a public company, twitter has always been ‘for sale.’ that's the real issue.”

State enforcers lacked sufficient information to block Facebook’s buys of Instagram and WhatsApp, partly because the platform misrepresented its intentions, 48 state attorneys general argued Thursday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in docket 21-7078 (see 2203150046). The basis of the antitrust claims only became clear after Facebook’s conduct was “well underway” and the cumulative effects of its behavior became apparent, the states argued. Facebook doesn’t refute that law enforcers “should judiciously evaluate competitive concerns” before filing and enforcers shouldn’t be “stripped of their critical law-enforcement authority merely because they took the time to do so,” the states wrote.

Executives from Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM will join President Joe Biden’s artificial intelligence advisory committee, the Commerce Department announced Thursday. Commerce announced the appointment of 27 members to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, which advises the president and the National AI Initiative Office. Google Vice Chair James Manyika, Amazon Web Services Vice President-Database, Analytics and Machine Learning Swami Sivasubramanian, Microsoft Vice President Ashley Llorens, IBM Chief Privacy Officer Christina Montgomery and BSA|The Software Alliance CEO Victoria Espinel made the list.

FTC Chair Lina Khan has unrealistic views about the agency’s authority, and her bold strategies to modernize antitrust policy are likely to fail, former agency officials told an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event Thursday. Khan’s attempts to revamp the FTC’s antitrust policies through rulemakings tied to unfairness authority is a “dead end,” said ex-FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen, now at Baker Botts. Khan is basing her decisions on overly broad interpretations of the FTC statute, an approach that resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision against the agency in the AMG case (see 2104270086), said Ohlhausen. Pursuing many rulemakings will also mean far less staff for enforcement, she said. “This is a recipe for more political control, less public input” and “probably slower rulemakings,” said Howard Beales, a Consumer Protection Bureau director under President George W. Bush, now at George Washington University. The current administration is deploying a cleanup strategy in response to years of lax antitrust enforcement, said American Antitrust Institute President Diana Moss: There’s credible evidence antitrust enforcers should be paying close attention to the debate of whether there’s observable increases in market concentration. Enforcers largely have the tools they need to enforce merger control, she said, arguing the problem is that the consumer welfare standard’s broad standards have been underutilized. There isn’t a “single feature” of current antitrust law that Khan “doesn’t hate,” said George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce. He noted Khan’s attempts to streamline the FTC’s Magnuson-Moss rulemaking procedures because the average timeline for such a rule is about eight years. The agency is subject to Mag-Moss procedures, as opposed to processes under the Administrative Procedure Act, which take anywhere from one to three years. It would be “foolish to go down that road” because the Mag-Moss prospects are so “unpromising,” he said.