Microsoft is removing Twitter from its ad platform next week, more than two months after Twitter said it would begin charging a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its API, which include enterprises and research institutions.
Users started getting e-mails about its new pricing details early in March, according to a recent report in Wired, which said at the time that the new pricing scheme "prices out nearly everyone."

But with a $2.15 trillion market cap and some $100 billion cash on hand at the end of last year, Microsoft obviously has the money to pay Twitter what it wants-so the move appears to be a bit of a statement, even as Microsoft is declining to elaborate further about its decision.

Specifically, what it communicated to its customers today is that, "Starting on April 25, 2023, Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform will no longer support Twitter," and that "Digital Marketing Center (DMC) will no longer support Twitter starting on April 25, 2023."

The moves mean users will no longer be able to access their Twitter account or create, schedule or otherwise manage tweets through Microsoft's free social media management service.

As Mashable notes in a related report, though, companies that use Microsoft Advertising will still be able to manage and create content for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn through the platform.
 
No surprise, then, that Twitter owner Elon Musk finds the move galling, going so far as to tweet today that he intends to take legal action.

Apparently referring to Microsoft’s licensing arrangement with the AI outfit OpenAI — which trained its powerful AI models on a “vast corpus of diverse text data from the internet,” per OpenAI’s own popular chatbot ChatGPT — Musk tweeted today of Microsoft’s decision, “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.”

And there is some reason for animus between Microsoft and Twitter. Besides licensing a deal with OpenAI, Microsoft has sunk many billions of dollars into OpenAI, which Musk co-founded back in 2015 and left several years later. He has periodically trashed it since, including on Twitter. He also more recently announced that he was planning a rival initiative.

The move, however comes at lousy times for Musk, after he has been working much more actively to win advertisers reportedly by losing more than half of the top 1,000 advertisers on Twitter after taking over the platform late October.

Just yesterday, he sat onstage in Miami with the chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, reportedly saying during the interview that he is open to hearing legitimate concerns advertisers might have about Twitter but stressing he won't make changes he doesn't believe in.

Meanwhile, asked on Twitter today about Musk’s decision to charge so much for Twitter’s API access — one entrepreneur with his own controversial past noted that “in some cases,” the move is killing traffic to Twitter from outside sources — Musk responded, “I’m open to ideas, but ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isn’t a winning solution.”