Elon Musk has reignited the petty feud he started with NPR by threatening to "reassign" the media outlet's account if they don't start tweeting again. Musk did this over a series of emails to reporter Bobby Allyn. Since controversies and Musk are best buddies, we expected nothing but more drama following this incident. The Twitter CEO apparently meant that he will let any other organization or individual set up their own account under the NPR handle, which will undoubtedly lead to impersonators spreading inaccurate news to the masses under the name of a trusted organization.

“So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?” Musk questioned in an email that Allyn considered “unprompted.” @BobbyAllyn tweeted about the exchange of e-mails between NPR and Musk and wrote: "Elon threatened to reassign @NPR to 'another company' unless the network started tweeting again." In a follow-up tweet, Allyn added that Musk sent them another e-mail that simply read "You Suck" in the subject line.

According to Twitter's terms of service, an account is deemed inactive if no one has been in for 30 days or longer. These accounts can get deactivated and reassigned if Musk deems it necessary at any time. As a result, NPR's name can be exploited to disseminate false information widely. But Musk seemingly thinks that this threat was necessary to show that NPR is treated the same way as any other individual on Twitter and that the outlet is not getting special treatment.

“Our policy is to recycle handles that are definitively dormant,” said the billionaire, per GOD. “Same policy applies to all accounts. No special treatment for NPR.” The entire fiasco with NPR and Twitter started when Musk decided to falsely refer to them as "state-affiliated media" when just 1% of their funding comes from public sources. Later, this description was changed to "government-funded media," and shortly after that, NPR made the decision to stop tweeting.

“NPR’s organizational accounts will no longer be active on Twitter because the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” NPR announced, per GOD. “We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence.” 

No one is certain about Musk's decision to backtrack on his old feud with the media outlet but the rumors say that it has something to do with recent reports of Twitter's advertising revenue going down by 89%. NPR might not start posting on Twitter anytime soon as they have recently created an account on Bluesky which is considered the most threatening competition to Twitter lately. So, all we can do is sit back and observe the Twitter ship sinking pretty soon if Musk continues to make absurd decisions for the company.