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Tag: X (Formerly Twitter)

  • Ashton Hall’s Unconventional Morning Routine Has Drawn Nearly a Billion Views

    Ashton Hall’s Unconventional Morning Routine Has Drawn Nearly a Billion Views


    Rise and grind, superstars! Why are you sleeping at 3 a.m. when you could be dunking your head into a bowl of ice-cold Saratoga bottled water?

    That message is conveyed in a video, posted by the X account @tipsformenx last week, that showed a shirtless man with protruding biceps (actually, protruding everything) recapping in minute detail his morning routine. It has since been shared, and shared, and shared. As of Monday, it is up to more than 700 million views on X alone.

    The man is Ashton Hall, a Florida-based fitness trainer who often posts videos of his daily routine. That is fairly common among lifestyle influencers. But since January, Mr. Hall’s routine has included dunking his head into a bowl of Saratoga Spring Water — let’s call it a Saratoga Splash.

    These videos have invited widespread mockery and parodies, including from sports teams and politicians. On Monday, the X account of Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, posted a screenshot of Mr. Hall plunging his head into cold water and likened him to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who came under fire for discussing war plans on a commercial messaging app in a group chat that included a journalist.

    Mr. Hall, a former college football running back, has a large audience. On TikTok, he has 4.8 million followers. He has almost double that on Instagram, and another 2.96 million subscribers on YouTube.

    Videos like the ones Mr. Hall posts are becoming increasingly common and popular in recent years: They’re short, easily digestible and show an idealized version of how a man should live.

    Some young men are taking notice. Husam Hasan, a 23-year-old fitness influencer based out of Calgary, Alberta, posted a video weeks before Mr. Hall’s widely viewed one that was a parody of a day in the life of a so-called Gymfluencer. It included a flight time-stamped one minute before a workout, as well as a homage to Mr. Hall’s previous posts showing the ice water dunk. Mr. Hasan’s video is up to 1.5 million likes and counting, but he also counts himself as a fan of Mr. Hall.

    “It works,” Mr. Hasan said in an interview. “I dip my face in cold water. I was like, ‘I see why everybody is doing it now.’”

    He added, “It wakes you up and makes you ready to tackle the day in a positive manner.”

    It is hard to pick out just one highlight from last week’s video. There’s the 3:54 a.m. swig of Saratoga Spring Water. The 4:04 push-ups, followed by another Saratoga Swig. Some meditating. A 5:47 head dunk into a bowl of Saratoga water. A treadmill sprint. A dive into a rooftop swimming pool. (Ignore the sign in the back that says “No Diving.” Also that he takes off in the dive at 7:36 but lands in the pool at 7:40.) Rubbing a banana peel on his face (?). Another ice dunk. And then the day really begins with Mr. Hall apparently on a call saying a line that has since entered the cultural lexicon: “So, looking at it, bro, we’ve gotta go ahead and get in at least 10,000.”

    The mockery from others, Mr. Hasan said, came from the routine being “obviously” unrealistic.

    “Everyone is like, ‘OK, there’s no way you can do so much and film,’” Mr. Hasan said.

    Mr. Hall did not respond to a request for an interview. A spokesperson for Primo Brands, Saratoga’s parent company, said Mr. Hall is not a paid spokesperson and has never received compensation from Primo Brands for his posts.

    “As a marketer, you’ve done something right when your brand becomes a part of someone’s life and their story,” Kheri Tillman, the chief marketing officer for Primo Brands, said in a statement.

    The company declined to comment on the effect of Mr. Hall’s videos on their business.

    Nonetheless, Mr. Hall’s content has drawn attention. Joseph Phillips, a 26-year-old content creator from Memphis, who goes by the name @JoeFromYouTube, posted his own parody of Mr. Hall, with several clips timestamped before dawn — despite the outdoors showing daylight. The video has almost 11 million views.

    Mr. Phillips said he didn’t intend to disrespect Mr. Hall in any way. He just wanted to display his own flavor of dunking his face into cold water. In fact, he said, he was “amazed” by Mr. Hall’s morning routine, and said his appeal was aspirational.

    “People want to live better,” Mr. Phillips said. “There’s a lot of people who want to be fit. And they see him taking care of his body every day, and they see how wealthy he is.”

    Mr. Hall’s videos, in the context of a broader discussion around masculinity, particularly after the 2024 election, are a fascinating case study. A column in the British media publication Unherd called Mr. Hall’s routine “a bleak new masculinity.” In The Cut, the routine prompted a writer to ask — once again — if men were OK.

    Makana Chock, a communications professor at Syracuse University who studies social media, said that there was a “dark side” to some of the messaging that influencers such as Mr. Hall put out. In the video, women appear only to serve Mr. Hall in some way — whether it is his breakfast or his towel. She said the videos overlap with messages “from some of the more toxic masculinity sites,” which preach “that this type of look and this type of discipline is somehow inherent in being a real man, which is not particularly achievable for most men.”

    In the meantime, Mr. Hall posted a new morning routine on Monday. It includes similar moments, though in this one, he shows himself scrolling through the memes and parodies of himself.

    “You’ve made your first 10,000,” Mr. Hall says in the video. “Congratulations. We’ve got to do at least 20, bro.”





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  • Meet Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s Top Lieutenant Who Oversees DOGE

    Meet Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s Top Lieutenant Who Oversees DOGE


    Elon Musk declared last month that the federal government was engaged in “utterly insane” activity, claiming without evidence that it had distributed $100 billion to people without Social Security numbers.

    Two days after Mr. Musk’s comments, one of his key lieutenants, Steve Davis, began pressing the Social Security Administration for information. Mr. Davis called the agency’s leaders to insist they give a young engineer from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to databases that contained sensitive information about Americans.

    Mr. Davis’s demand was “unprecedented,” Tiffany Flick, a former Social Security official, said in a sworn statement this month for a lawsuit filed by federal employees trying to block access to the data. She added that she could feel Mr. Davis grow impatient in the hours before the DOGE engineer was eventually permitted to investigate “the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud.”

    Deploying staff into federal agencies is just one task that Mr. Davis has carried out recently for Mr. Musk, as the world’s richest man continues an all-out effort to reshape the U.S. government. At every turn, Mr. Davis has backed his boss, laying the groundwork for cost cutting during the presidential transition, slashing diversity initiatives, meeting lawmakers and helping to send a governmentwide “Fork in the Road” email that urged workers to resign.

    Those actions demonstrate how Mr. Davis, 45, has effectively become the day-to-day leader of DOGE. He has more power than Amy Gleason, the Trump administration’s acting DOGE administrator, two people close to the effort said, adding that Ms. Gleason has sometimes been in the dark about Mr. Davis’s decisions.

    How Mr. Davis got to this position is hardly a secret. For more than 20 years, the engineer has devoted himself to fulfilling Mr. Musk’s desires, following the billionaire to his various companies, including the rocket maker SpaceX and the social media platform X. Mr. Davis wholeheartedly believes Mr. Musk will bring about humanity’s progress, according to interviews with 22 friends, former colleagues and government officials.

    For Mr. Musk, Mr. Davis represents the ideal employee — an engineer who will throw himself at any task, even if he has no expertise in the area, two former colleagues said. Mr. Musk has especially praised Mr. Davis’s ability to excise waste, once likening his lieutenant to a cancer-killing treatment.

    “Steve is like chemo,” Mr. Musk said at a transition meeting before President Trump took office. “A little chemo can save your life; a lot of chemo could kill you.”

    Mr. Musk and Mr. Davis have bonded deeply over cost cuts. At SpaceX, Mr. Davis devised ways to build rockets more cheaply. He also oversaw layoffs at Twitter, which was renamed X. At DOGE, he is coordinating engineers and lawyers to find $2 trillion that Mr. Musk has promised to eliminate from the federal budget.

    Mr. Davis is so loyal to Mr. Musk that he and his partner, Nicole Hollander, 42, who joined the General Services Administration to cut federal real estate costs, have set up a base of operations on the agency’s sixth floor in Washington. It is guarded by a full security detail, three agency employees said.

    Adam Green, a progressive organizer who befriended Mr. Davis about a decade ago when they lived in Washington, said Mr. Davis was once a “fun outside-the-box thinker,” who had turned into a “blind servant” to Mr. Musk.

    Mr. Davis, Mr. Musk, Ms. Hollander and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

    Mr. Davis began working for Mr. Musk in 2003, when the tech entrepreneur plucked him out of a Stanford aeronautics graduate program. Mr. Davis became the 14th employee at SpaceX. He quickly endeared himself to Mr. Musk by finding less expensive ways to develop rocket parts, including making a shuttle steering device for a hundredth of the price.

    His frugality led to mistakes. In 2007, Mr. Davis removed components from SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket that prevented fuel from sloshing inside the vehicle, three former colleagues said. That caused the fuel to unbalance the rocket during a test flight, and it shut down midair before reaching orbit.

    By 2008, Mr. Davis had moved to Washington and was later named SpaceX’s director of advanced projects. He had a broad range of responsibilities at the company, including finding land around Boca Chica, Texas, for what would become Starbase, SpaceX’s rocket launch facility.

    On the side, Mr. Davis pursued an economics doctorate and opened Mr. Yogato, a frozen yogurt shop that offered discounts to customers who answered trivia questions. He also helped create a Jewish lifestyle website, Gather the Jews, and joined the board of the Atlas Society, a nonprofit dedicated to the teachings of the libertarian author Ayn Rand.

    In 2018, Mr. Musk appointed Mr. Davis to lead the Boring Company, a start-up that aims to build tunnels under major metropolitan areas to ease congestion.

    “In general there is almost zero R&D in tunnels in America,” Mr. Davis said at a presentation for the company that year. “So trying new things is actually helpful for us.”

    The Boring Company opened a tunnel in Las Vegas in 2021, but has run into regulatory roadblocks elsewhere. That frustrated Mr. Musk, who berated Mr. Davis and threatened to fire him, three people who have worked with Mr. Davis said. The stress weighed on Mr. Davis, and he sometimes pulled out his hair, five people close to him said.

    After Mr. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Mr. Davis helped slash the company’s costs, telling people that he hoped to eliminate more than $500 million. He was so dedicated that on some nights, he stayed with Ms. Hollander and their newborn baby at Twitter’s San Francisco office.

    Mr. Davis also oversaw the installation of a personal bathroom for Mr. Musk there, telling one employee not to bother obtaining a construction permit.

    “We don’t have to follow the rules,” Mr. Davis said, according to a 2023 lawsuit from former Twitter workers who accused the company and Mr. Musk of violating the terms of their employment agreements.

    Some workers complained about Mr. Davis’s cost cutting to Linda Yaccarino, who became X’s chief executive in 2023, and asked her to rein him in, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. He left X soon after.

    When Mr. Musk stumped for Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania during last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Davis relocated to hotels in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to oversee a super PAC that Mr. Musk had backed, three people said. Mr. Davis helped conceive a $47-a-head petition that Mr. Musk promoted to turn out Trump voters, and cited his Twitter cost cutting as a way of doing things cheaply at the super PAC.

    After Mr. Trump won the election, Mr. Davis joined a transition “landing team” and interviewed candidates for Mr. Musk’s efficiency commission. He also met with agencies that employed engineers to assess the technical talent that DOGE might tap, three government officials said. Mr. Musk included Mr. Davis in recruiting pitches to potential government hires, according to an internal email seen by The New York Times.

    After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Davis pushed administration officials to let him email all government employees at once, two people with knowledge of his efforts said. That led to a January email blast known as the “Fork in the Road,” which included a governmentwide resignation offer.

    When leaks about the resignation offer circulated in the media, Mr. Davis rebuked officials for not controlling their staffs and accused them of embarrassing Mr. Musk, two people said.

    Mr. Davis pushes for Mr. Musk’s priorities daily with Mr. Trump’s advisers, two people with knowledge of the conversations said. He has alerted administration officials to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that are targeted for cuts and individuals to be removed from government boards.

    Mr. Davis, who can be blunt and undiplomatic, especially in late-night texts, has also clashed with some of Mr. Trump’s staff. He and his colleagues upset some White House advisers with the way DOGE tried to place some of their recruits at the Pentagon, three people said.

    Throughout, Mr. Davis has studiously avoided attention. Mr. Musk and the White House have not mentioned him. In Washington, Mr. Davis mostly avoided having his picture taken until this month, when he spoke at the DOGE Caucus, a House of Representatives group that works with the cost-cutting task force.

    “Wrapped a great meeting with @elonmusk and Steve Davis on their goals for the @DOGE,” Representative Aaron Bean, Republican of Florida, posted on X. The message included a photo of Mr. Davis holding a microphone and smiling beside Mr. Musk.

    Reporting was contributed by Kirsten Grind, Eric Schmitt, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.



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  • Elon Musk Tells Federal Workers to Detail Work in an Email or Lose Their Jobs

    Elon Musk Tells Federal Workers to Detail Work in an Email or Lose Their Jobs


    The demand left many workers reeling.

    Most of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s work force had recently been placed on leave as Mr. Musk gutted the agency, and have been instructed not to work — leaving them with no accomplishments to report, a worker there said.

    Mr. Musk’s allies in government have suggested using artificial intelligence to identify budget cuts, and workers at several agencies worried their responses would be assessed by A.I.

    The approach echoed one Mr. Musk took with executives and employees at Twitter. In April 2022, Mr. Musk was set to join the board at the social media company, but bickered with Parag Agrawal, its chief executive at the time, over his public criticism of the company. When Mr. Agrawal asked Mr. Musk not to post detrimental things about Twitter, Mr. Musk responded in a text, “What did you get done this week?” and then told Mr. Agrawal he would buy Twitter outright.

    The exchange led to Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company, which he completed in October 2022. Mr. Musk claimed he fired Mr. Agrawal immediately, although Mr. Agrawal contested the circumstances of his departure and sued Mr. Musk for withholding severance payments.

    Shortly after the acquisition, Mr. Musk told employees to print out code they had written recently — an exercise intended to prove how hard they worked. When executives at the company raised privacy concerns, Mr. Musk instructed employees to shred the code they had printed.

    On Saturday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the similarities. “Parag got nothing done. Parag was fired,” he wrote in an X post about the message he intended to send to federal workers.

    Nicholas Nehamas, Maggie Haberman, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Madeleine Ngo, Mattathias Schwartz, Matthew Goldstein, Erica L. Green, Eileen Sullivan, Margot Sanger-Katz, Edward Wong, Mark Walker, Kennedy Elliott, Lisa Friedman and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.



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  • Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?

    Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?


    Elon Musk’s role as President Trump’s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.

    Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.

    And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.

    In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla’s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world’s richest person.

    But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.

    Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk’s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.

    “We don’t have a C.E.O. who is fully focused on ensuring that Tesla remains a leader in the E.V. space,” said Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, who oversees employee pension funds that own Tesla shares worth $1.25 billion.

    Mr. Lander said he wanted Mr. Musk to stay on Tesla’s board and relinquish his chief executive duties to someone who would do the job full time. “That’s not too much to ask for,” Mr. Lander said. “That’s just the basic model of shareholder governance in America.”

    Few, if any, executives have ever had such an array of responsibilities, said Eric Talley, a Columbia Law School professor who focuses on corporate governance. And while some of Mr. Musk’s businesses stand to benefit from his ties to the president, it is virtually impossible for Mr. Musk’s commercial and political interests not to collide in ways that could hurt Tesla and his other companies, Mr. Talley said.

    “The more you split your loyalties,” Mr. Talley said, “the more it’s going to be difficult to claim you had an undivided loyalty to any company.”

    Mr. Musk and Tesla did not respond to emails seeking comment.

    In the past, he and the company’s board have defended Mr. Musk’s management of Tesla and dismissed the idea that he was spread too thin. They have pointed to the company’s soaring stock price and robust profits as evidence that Tesla has not suffered because of his other commitments.

    Mr. Musk’s support for right-wing leaders at home and in Germany, Britain, France and other countries appears to have alienated significant numbers of customers.

    There are signs that Mr. Musk’s political activities and reduced presence at Tesla are also stirring dissatisfaction within the company.

    The discontent was apparent during an unusual meeting last month at the company’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., where numerous employees vented their frustrations.

    A senior executive who spoke at the meeting told the employees that he, too, was discouraged by Mr. Musk’s “mercurial” behavior and by the departure of some senior executives who had been a moderating influence. The chief executive’s polarizing social media posts and work in the Trump administration were driving away customers, prompting some employees to leave and making it harder to recruit new talent to Tesla, the manager said, according to an audio recording of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times.

    The executive urged employees to focus on their work and tune out Mr. Musk’s comments on X and other forums. “I just kind of ignore it and think about what are we working on and is it exciting to me and is it having an impact?” the manager said. “That’s the best advice I can give for how to handle it.”

    The recording was first reported by The Washington Post.

    There are signs that at least some investors are having doubts, too. Tesla’s share price has fallen 25 percent since mid-December, though it is still up about 40 percent since the election. The S&P 500 stock index is up about 6 percent since the election.

    Many investors still have faith in Mr. Musk. That’s why Wall Street treats Tesla as being more than three times as valuable as Toyota, the world’s largest automaker.

    Optimistic investors believe that the company will develop cars that can drive themselves in most conditions. ARK Invest, an investment firm that has long been bullish about Mr. Musk’s endeavors, estimates that Tesla could control half of an estimated $10 trillion market for autonomous ride-hailing services.

    “I see a path for Tesla being the most valuable company in the world by far,” Mr. Musk said in January. The growth, he added, would “overwhelmingly be due to autonomous vehicles and autonomous humanoid robots.”

    What Mr. Musk has appeared surprisingly unconcerned about is Tesla’s biggest business today: selling cars.

    During a conference call last month to discuss Tesla’s fourth quarter results, a financial analyst asked him to elaborate on his plans to sell more cars to take advantage of Tesla’s competitive advantage in technology that allows cars in some cases to steer, accelerate and slow down on their own. Mr. Musk said he didn’t understand the question and said the company already had millions of cars on the road.

    The company has lost market share to BYD in China; BMW and Volkswagen in Europe; and Hyundai and General Motors in the United States. Some Tesla drivers like the musician Sheryl Crow are so upset by Mr. Musk’s political activities that they are selling their cars or saying they won’t buy another one.

    In January Tesla’s sales were down 59 percent in Germany, 63 percent in France and 12 percent in Britain after Mr. Musk endorsed right-wing politicians and made inflammatory statements on social media. Tesla sales fell 12 percent last year in California, which accounts for nearly one-third of the electric cars sold in the United States.

    “The hate is real,” Ross Gerber, chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, wrote on an X post along with a photo of a Cybertruck that someone had defaced with an obscenity.

    But political blowback is not the company’s only problem.

    Tesla remains reliant on two vehicles, the Model 3 and Model Y, for 95 percent of its sales. BYD has more than a dozen electric models, some costing much less than $20,000. The Model 3 starts at $42,000 in the United States before taking into account a $7,500 federal tax credit.

    Auto experts say Tesla badly needs a cheaper car to revive sales. But last year, Mr. Musk delayed indefinitely plans to build a low-cost car in Monterrey, Mexico, that would have cost $25,000.

    The company has promised to begin producing a new model at its existing factories by the end of June, but it has not displayed a prototype or provided details. Analysts expect it to be based on the Model 3 and cost a lot more than $25,000.

    “You would think they would be doubling down and trying to capitalize on the lead they have on other players,” said Michael Lenox, a professor of business at the University of Virginia. “It begs the question,” he added, “has there been a lack of attention?”

    Some investors said that Mr. Musk’s lack of interest in selling cars was apparent in how little he had said about Mr. Trump’s initiatives that could hurt Tesla’s sales.

    The chief executive of Ford, Jim Farley, last week said that some of Mr. Trump’s plans to repeal Biden era incentives for electric cars could force the company to layoff workers. But Mr. Musk has said nothing publicly about them.

    Environmentalists in particular are very concerned that Mr. Musk, who once talked about electric vehicles as a solution for climate change, has allied himself with climate change deniers.

    “It’s really concerning that Elon is more focused on D.C. than on advancing E.V. production,” said Katherine Garcia, director of the Clean Transportation for All campaign at the Sierra Club.

    Mr. Musk has argued that electric cars don’t need government incentives. “You can’t stop the advent of electric cars,” Mr. Musk said in January. “It’s going to happen.”



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  • PlayStation Network Is Working After 24-Hour Outage, Sony Says

    PlayStation Network Is Working After 24-Hour Outage, Sony Says


    The PlayStation Network, which users of the Sony PlayStation platform rely on to play games, download content and access apps, started working again on Saturday night after a 24-hour outage that left customers frustrated.

    “All services are up and running,” PlayStation announced on its website around 7 p.m. on Saturday. The problems, which prevented many customers from “launching games, apps or network features,” were first reported at 7 p.m. on Friday, the company said.

    “PSN has been restored,” the company’s support team posted on X at 6:58 p.m. on Saturday. “You should be able to access online features without any problems now.”

    The company did not explain the cause of the outage and did not immediately respond to an email seeking more information.

    The issues affected users of PlayStation’s most popular offerings, including its console and web products. Account management, gaming and social, PlayStation Video, PlayStation Store and PlayStation Direct were among the impacted services.

    PlayStation creates software and hardware, including hugely popular gaming consoles. Users play video games and run apps like Netflix, Spotify and YouTube through the PlayStation Network.

    On social media, some users reported that they were able to use their PlayStation on Saturday afternoon but many were still experiencing issues into the evening.

    During the outage, some users reported that they were not able to play offline games, a testament to how severe the server problems were, as offline games usually do not face the same issues that online games will sometimes experience.

    As users complained on social media, other brands fired off trolling messages.

    “Calling all gamers: this play station still works,” Krispy Kreme posted on X. Krispy Kreme offered free glazed doughnuts for two hours on Saturday “because sweet rewards don’t need a server.”



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