Since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, many people have claimed the algorithm change ruined the platform. Musk, now admitting the “algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements,” has made the algorithm open-source.
In an X post announcing the plan a couple of weeks ago, Musk said the repository would be updated every four weeks and include comprehensive developer notes so people could easily identify what changed. With Monday’s launch, Musk said making the model open-source would allow users to see the company struggle in real-time as it attempts to improve the model.
Specifically, the open-source GitHub repository contains the X algorithm that determines what shows up on your “For You” feed on the platform — the content you find organically on your homepage.
The model overview in the repository details how the algorithm works. A high-level look shows that the algorithm takes into account both in-network content (content from accounts you follow) and out-of-network content (discovered through ML-based retrieval), then ranks it using Phoenix, a Grok-based transformer model that predicts engagement probabilities for each post.However, if you dive deeper into the repository, you can learn exactly how it works, and people are taking to X to post the breakdowns of their findings.
The bigger impact, however, is that this is the first social media platform to openly post its proprietary algorithms, which helps with transparency, as users can learn exactly why information is being served up to them and even suggest tweaks to popular issues.
Open-sourcing the model also helps spur innovation, as developers trying to launch similar platforms better understand and potentially learn how to do so on their own. Twitter is not a stranger to copycats, with the X rebranding sparking competitors such as BlueSky and Threads.
Open-sourcing the model continues a trend we’ve seen recently: companies offering more transparency and user control over the AI algorithms powering their media consumption. For example, with the launch of Sora 2and its accompanying social media app, OpenAI unveiled a new type of recommender algorithm trained on natural language. Similarly, Instagram unveiled a feature in which you can use AI to personalize your Reels feed by selecting what you’d like to see more of.
Trump’s ‘deranged’ Greenland outbursts rattle medical expert about president’s ‘fitness’
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route from Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., January 4, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland for the U.S. is reaching an unusual level of “pettiness,” one political science expert told The New Republic, and it’s “beyond anything” else that has happened in recent history.
On Wednesday, Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist with expertise in international relations, was interviewed for the New Republic’s podcast, Daily Blast, to discuss the latest developments in the Trump-Greenland story. In particular, host Greg Sargent pressed her on the president’s “deranged text”to the prime minister of Norway, in which he claimed that being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize was driving his push for Greenland, as he was supposedly no longer motivated only by “peace.”
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump’s message read.
The Norwegian government, despite Trump’s insistence, is not involved with choosing Nobel Prize winners. Norway is also not the country that controls the autonomous territory of Greenland; Denmark is.
This message left many observers stunned, with one Danish leader calling it “mad and erratic,” and some American lawmakers renewing calls for Trump to be removed from office, either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Saunders said that while “strongly worded” messages between leaders are not uncommon, this text from Trump went beyond anything she could think of.
“It’s not that unusual for leaders to say things behind closed doors or even in diplomatic cables that are strongly worded and so forth, even in leader-to-leader [communications],” Saunders explained. “But I think this is the level of pettiness, and the accusation that Norway is somehow responsible for him not getting the Nobel Prize and that that should matter in the matter of Greenland’s sovereignty, is kind of beyond anything I think any of us have seen or even can speak about in history.”
Sargent also highlighted a reaction from Dr. Jonathan Reiner, the former cardiologist for Vice President Dick Cheney, who said that the message should raise alarms about Trump’s fitness for office.
“This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness,” Reiner said in a post to X.
Here is Alex Soros son of George talking at The WEF Davos 2026 about Donald Trump & democracy, seriously struggling to construct a semi coherent sentence.
“When I look at this regarding democracy – I think when was this great time when everybody got along?”
Elon Musk: "I don't think anyone will ultimately control digital superintelligence, any more than a chimp could control humans. Chimps don't control humans. I do think it matters how you build the AI and what values you instill in it."pic.twitter.com/rsXiXrbFtE
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
On the campaign trail leading up to his election in 2024, Donald Trump made a plenty of bizarre promises that have fallen by the wayside. Arguably the strangest one he’s still harping about? Greenland — a massive island in the Arctic Ocean, currently a territory of Denmark, that he desperately wants to seize.
Geopolitical analysts and pundits have spilled plenty of ink over the past year trying to come up with some rational explanation for Trump’s obsession with the idea. One of the simplest, the New York Times suggests — yet somehow the most cynical — has to do with the scientific certainty that Greenland’s ice will soon melt away.
From September 2024 to September 2025, Greenland lost a staggering 105 billion metric tons of ice, according to researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute.Between 1985 and 2022, Greenland’s ice sheet has shrunk by some 2,000 square miles. These trends are sure to continue in the years to come.
Beneath all that ice and permafrost is a veritable treasure trove of minerals like graphite, zinc, and rare earths. Basically, as the climate warms and Greenland’s ice melts, more and more of those minerals will become available for extraction.
In a nakedly empire-building type of way, in other words, Greenland makes perfect sense. The only problem? Publicly, Trump disparages the very notion of climate change — meaning that if really does understand the wealth of resources that the phenomenon is opening up in colder parts of the world, he’s fibbing to his base for jaded political reasons.
“His fixation on Greenland is an admission that climate change is real,” John Conger, an advisor to the Center for Climate and Security told the NYT.
If Trump or his advisors really are intrigued by Greenland because they’re anticipating a thawing world,that puts them in good company with Trump’s longstanding allies in Russia, where the ruling oligarchy is said to be banking on a similar strategy for the country’s immense frozen expanses.
If it sounds convoluted, it’s only because other explanations for Trump’s North Atlantic fixation just don’t add up.
As economic historian and analyst Adam Tooze explains, the US has a long-standing Cold War treaty with Denmark giving the US military carte blanche to do whatever it wants on Greenland’s territory. As such, there’s no national security justification for why the US needs to own Denmark outright.
“If Greenland isn’t currently adequately defended, it might be to do with the fact that America has completely run down multiple military bases it used to maintain on Greenland during the Cold War,” Tooze said on a recent episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze.
Oil — the classic raison d’être for US intervention on foreign soil — also doesn’t apply here. (Nor Venezuela, for that matter.)
In 2021, the governing body of Greenland stopped granting oil exploration licenses, the NYT notes, due to “climate considerations, environmental considerations and economic common sense.” That news came after 50 years of unsuccessful attempts to strike black gold in the icy waters off the island’s coast, meaning oil is a very unlikely motivation.
At the end of the day, we probably won’tknow the administration’s true motivations for Greenland unless they actually pull the trigger — though if Venezuela is any indication, a straight answer is far from guaranteed.
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
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For much of the 20th century, Sweden enjoyed a justifiable reputation as one of Europe’s most egalitarian countries. Yet over the past two decades, it has transformed into what journalist and author Andreas Cervenka calls a “paradise for the super-rich”.
Today, Sweden has one of the world’s highest ratios of dollar billionaires, and is home to numerous “unicorn” startup companies worth at least US$1 billion (£742 million), including the payment platform Klarna and audio streaming service Spotify.
The abolition of the wealth tax (förmögenhetsskatten) 20 years ago is part of this story – along with, in the same year, the introduction of generous tax deductions for housework and home improvement projects. Two decades on, the number of Swedish homes that employ cleaners is one marker of it being an increasingly two-tier country.
This trend has been coupled with a gradual shrinking of the welfare state. Many of my interviewees regret that Sweden no longer has a collective project to build a more cohesive society.
“Us pensioners can see the destruction of what we built, what was started when we were small children,” Kjerstin, 74, explained. “I was born after the end of the war and built this society through my life, together with my fellow citizens. [But] with taxes being lowered and the taking away of our social security … we’re not building anything together now.”
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Sweden’s gini coefficient, the most common way to measure inequality, has reached 0.3 in recent years (with 0 reflecting total equality and 1 total inequality), up from around 0.2 in the 1980s. The EU as a whole is at 0.29. “There are now 42 billionaires in Sweden – it’s gone up a lot,” Bengt, 70, told me. “Where did they come from? This didn’t used to be a country where people could easily become this rich.”
But like other pensioners I met, Bengt acknowledged his peer group’s role in this shift. “I belong to a generation that remembers how we built Sweden to become a welfare state, but so much has changed. The thing is, we didn’t protest this. We didn’t realise we were becoming this country of rich people.”
Opposite of the American dream
Wealth taxation was introduced in Sweden in 1911, with the amount due based initially on a combination of wealth and income. Around the same time, some of the first moves towards the Swedish welfare state were made – notably, the introduction of the state pension in 1913.
The term used to describe this, folkemmet (“the people’s home”), denoted comfort and security for all in equal measure. It was arguably the ideological opposite of the American dream – its aims not exceptionalism but reasonable living standards and universal services.
After the second world war, the wealth tax – now separated from income – was raised again in several steps up to a historical high of a 4% marginal rate for wealthy individuals in the 1980s, although actual tax burden is is less clear due to complex exemption rules. But total revenues generated from the tax were still relatively low. As a share of Sweden’s annual GDP, it never exceeded 0.4% in the postwar period.
By the end of the 1980s, the political winds were starting to change in Sweden, in line with the shift to privatisation of public services and deregulation of financial markets in several European countries, including the UK under Margaret Thatcher, and the US.
One recurrent criticism of Sweden’s wealth tax was that it was regressive, taxing middle-class wealth (mainly housing and financial assets) while exempting the wealthiest people who owned large firms or held high-up positions in listed companies. Another criticism was that the wealth tax drove tax avoidance, especially in the form of capital flight to offshore tax havens.
‘We’re not building anything together now: one of the author’s interviewees in their home in Stockholm. Miranda Sheild Johansson, Author provided (no reuse)
While a wealth tax might appear to signal their country’s commitment to socioeconomic equality, my interviewees said it wasn’t something they really thought about much until it was abolished in 2006 by Sweden’s then-rightwing government, following the axing of inheritance tax a year earlier by the previous social democratic government.
“When the wealth tax was abolished,” Marianne, 77, told me, “I wasn’t thinking about millionaires being given a handout, because … we didn’t have lots of rich aristocrats who owned everything. Abolishing the wealth and inheritance tax seemed like a practical thing, not so political.”
Marianne and other pensioners I talked to all told a story of the welfare state having been built through communal effort, as opposed to it being a Robin Hood project – of taking from the rich to give to the poor. This notion of the Swedish welfare state as having been built by equals, by an initial largely rural and poor population, arguably distracted these pensioners from questions of wealth accumulation.
While Sweden still taxes property and various forms of capital income, in hindsight, many of my elderly interviewees now regard the abolition of the wealth tax “on their watch” as a crucial step in reshaping Swedish society away from a social democracy welfare state towards something new – a place of billionaires and increased social disintegration.
“I think about my children, my two daughters who are working and have young families,” Jan, 72, told me. “As children, they were provided for by the welfare state, they went to good schools and had access to football and drama class and the dentist – but now I worry that society is going to get worse for them.”
As with others I spoke to, Jan showed regret at his own role in this change. “I now think that is partly my fault,” he said. “We got lazy and complacent, thought the Swedish welfare state was secure, didn’t worry about abolishing the wealth tax, didn’t think it was going to change anything … but I think it has.”
‘A society that is more humane’
My research suggests the impacts of wealth taxes, or absence of them, are not only about fiscal revenue streams and wealth redistribution. They have wider social ramifications, and can be foundational to people’s vision of society.
In Sweden at least, the question today isn’t just whether wealth taxes work or not, but about what kind of society they project – one of folkhemmet, or a paradise for the rich.
“Tax was just natural [when] I grew up in the 1950s,” Kjerstin recalled. “I remember thinking when I was in second grade, that I will always be taken care of, that I didn’t ever have to worry.”
Reflecting on how different living in Sweden feels today, she said: “Now people don’t want to pay tax – sometimes even I don’t want to pay tax. Everyone is thinking about what they get back and how to get rich, instead of about building something together.”
“I don’t think you can say: ‘I pay this much in taxes and therefore I should get the same back.’ Instead, you should pay attention to the fact that you live in a society that is more humane, where everyone knows from second grade they’ll be taken care of.”
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