Twitter break: The Tipline for 16 July 2020

Prominent and widely followed Twitter accounts were hacked in a coordinated operation late yesterday, with Tesla chief executive Elon Musk’s account one of the first to display a message asking users to send cryptocurrency Bitcoin to a certain address. The accounts of Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden also displayed the spam message. Twitter blocked all verified accounts from tweeting while figuring out a fix. During that period of uncertainty, the antitrust world may have been deprived of Twitter spats between Josh Wright and Matt Stoller or Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee. Lucky for all of you, @gcr_alerts was not impacted.