• Donald Trump owns his own social media company.
• But Truth Social isn't where to go if you want a lot of people to see you attack Jimmy Kimmel.
• So Melania Trump made sure her demand that ABC do something about Kimmel appeared on Elon Musk's X, too.

Melania Trump says ABC should "take a stand" over Jimmy Kimmel, because she doesn't like a joke the talk show host made last week.

First things first: The first lady calling on a media company to do something about its employee because she doesn't like what that employee said is a bad thing. It's an attempt to use the power of the White House to silence speech that the White House doesn't like.

And it's just as worrisome as it was last September, when Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, told ABC owner Disney to "take action, frankly, on Kimmel" because Kimmel had made a joke about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk. Disney suspended Kimmel for a few days and then reinstated him after public outcry.

There is a difference between Carr's demand and Melania Trump's demand on Monday, since Carr is a regulator with direct oversight over parts of Disney's business, and Melania Trump doesn't have any formal power over … anything. But she's still using the power of the White House to try to control speech, and that should alarm anyone with any common sense. (I've asked her office for comment.)

Let's see how new Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro responds to this one.

Much less important, but still interesting to me: The first lady's choice of platform to make her demand/threat. Melania Trump used Elon Musk's X, the site formally known as Twitter, to post her thoughts on Monday, using both her official First Lady of the United States account and her own personal account.

Trump also posted the same statement on Truth Social, the social media site owned by her husband. But that one seemed obligatory. Not in the way it's literally obligatory for Donald Trump to post at least some of his thoughts on his own social platform before he puts them anywhere else. But in the way you're supposed to tell your significant other you think they make the best pasta, when what you really crave is Olive Garden.

The numbers make it clear why Melania Trump chose to use X to make a splash: Her post on that platform has 230,000 likes, and that number is skyrocketing. Her Truth Social post has 6,500 likes and is traveling at a much more leisurely pace.

All of which is a reminder that while Truth Social is the Trump-owned Twitter alternative Donald Trump uses, it remains a minor-at-best platform. One that won't tell you how many users it has, and one that managed to lose more than $700 million on revenue of $3.7 million in 2025.

None of that is news, nor does it seem to matter to Trump, who still owns a company worth nearly $3 billion, even after a stock plunge and the departure of its CEO — perhaps because the company's current plan is to merge with a nuclear fusion company.

It also doesn't matter where Donald Trump truths or posts or spouts off — he's the president of the United States, so just about anything he says that's noteworthy gets instantly transmitted through the global media ecosystem. Like what happened on Monday afternoon, where he piggybacked on his wife's post and explicitly called on Disney and ABC to fire Kimmel.

But for the rest of us — including the first lady of the United States — where you post a message matters. Which is why she's using the one that helped her husband get into the White House in the first place.

• In October, Sam Altman said "erotica for adults" was coming to ChatGPT.
• Now those plans are reportedly being mothballed.
• It's fine for young startups and even mature companies to try out new ideas. But OpenAI and Altman are trying out a lot.

Last fall, Sam Altman told us he was about to bring spicy chat — "erotica for adults," in his words — to ChatGPT.

That never happened, and now it looks like it never will: Altman's OpenAI has put those plans on hold "indefinitely," per the Financial Times.

This is Altman's second big walkback in the last few days. Earlier this week, the company canned Sora, the briefly popular video app it rolled out last fall. I've asked the company for comment.

Both retreats are supposed to be part of a new push at OpenAI to focus the company's efforts on things that could make money today, as it preps for an IPO at the same time it faces real competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic.

So all this starting and stopping could be viewed as necessary growing pains at a fast-growing tech company — ones that won't mean anything in the long run, if it delivers on its world-changing ambitions.

Not only that, but Altman told us we should expect this sort of stuff. "Please expect a very high rate of change from us," he wrote last fall, after hearing from content owners who were outraged to find their stuff on Sora without their permission. "We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly."

It's not that companies aren't allowed to make wrong turns and head up dead ends as they grow up, and even once they're fully mature. That kind of pivoting is celebrated in tech (and is why very few people are mad that Mark Zuckerberg has stopped telling us the metaverse is the future, or that Google once bought Motorola and decided that was a bad idea a couple years later.)

But "move fast and break things" lands differently when the company doing the moving and breaking isn't running a photo app or playing around with crypto.

Instead, OpenAI and its competitors say they're leading us into a world where everything — the way we live and work (or don't work) and fight wars and everything else — will change in fundamental ways.

And investors have bought this pitch, which means our economy now seems yoked to all this — which means all of us are yoked to it, even if we never touch a chatbot.

Which makes me slightly queasy to see Sam Altman promise dirty chats in October, and then walk away from the plan less than six months later.

Not because dirty chat is obviously absurd. Lots of people in AI think romantic or sexual chatbot conversations are a real use case and could be a real business.

But the reasons it might be a bad idea for OpenAI were pretty obvious from the start. It's a giant, heavily scrutinized company that wants to be treated as central and indispensable, and it's only going to get more scrutiny.

If those objections only became real after Altman floated the idea in public, that's not charming startup experimentation. It's a sign that OpenAI is still making itself up as it goes. And that would be easier to shrug off if the rest of us weren't already being told to build our lives, jobs, and businesses around what OpenAI says comes next.

• It's easy to dunk on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for burning $80 billion on the metaverse and then moving on.
• But that's not exactly true.
• What is true is that Zuckerberg used to spend a lot of time talking about the metaverse. Now he talks about AI instead.

Nearly five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg told us the future was the metaverse — an idea that seemed to involve all of us strapping on virtual reality goggles and interacting with digital versions of ourselves.

Now, reports say Zuckerberg's Meta is bailing on the metaverse after losing more than $80 billion on the project.

This is a fun story for people who like stories about Big Tech tripping on itself.

But it's not really true.

Start with the $80 billion that publications like The New York Times and others say Zuckerberg has lost chasing the metaverse. Meta has indeed generated losses of at least $80 billion via its Reality Labs unit, which lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone.

But Reality Labs is not going away. That's because Reality Labs makes lots of things beyond Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality space Zuckerberg told us that we would work and play in, but that almost no one actually visited.

Reality Labs also develops all the hardware Meta has been selling over the years, including its Quest virtual reality goggles, and its Ray-Ban AI glasses, which seem to have at least some consumer uptake (whether that's good for the world is a different issue).

At some point in the next couple years, Meta will roll out yet another set of glasses, purportedly designed to let you stream movies at home. (These are the same glasses Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said director James Cameron can't stop talking about.)

It's entirely possible that all of Meta's device efforts will amount to very little. Efforts to get anyone but gamers to buy virtual reality headsets really haven't panned out, and while Meta, Apple, and others are now racing to bring the same tech to lightweight glasses, we have no idea if these things will ever be more than a novelty.

But for now, Meta is still plugging away at this stuff. Which means Reality Labs will continue to generate billions of dollars in losses this year and beyond.

OK. What about the idea that Meta is no longer interested in the metaverse — a notion Zuckerberg said was so important that he re-named his company after it?

That's a little trickier to assess. Meta is quite prickly about the notion that it's bailing on the metaverse: Its argument is that the metaverse doesn't have to involve headsets, and that you could do all kinds of metaverse-y things on your phone — or maybe your phone paired with some new glasses.

That's what Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is getting at with this tweet he put out this week (and which Meta comms directed me to when I asked them for comment for this story):

Could be! But it's also true that Zuckerberg's public interest in the metaverse seems to have dramatically tapered off since 2021, when he told us the future was all about living in virtual space. (Zuckerberg had very different hair back then, too.)

Now, of course, Zuckerberg spends most of his time talking about AI, and Meta's ambitions to build "superintelligence." Which is why he's spending gazillions on AI talent and datacenters.

It's possible that all of those efforts get replaced by something else, too. Everyone in tech swears that the current AI boom really is a world-reshaping moment, and maybe it will be. But if you're still wondering what happened to all those NFTs you bought in 2021, I'll forgive you if you're going to remain in a wait-and-see on this one.

There is another way to think about Meta's interest in both the metaverse and AI. They're both shiny new things that offer Zuckerberg the promise of something he's wanted for a very long time: a way to run a business without having to rely on Google or Apple as his intermediaries.

Right now, Meta reaches people through phones and operating systems it doesn't control. At peak metaverse hype, Zuckerberg was clearly hoping to replace the iPhone with devices of his own. And in an AI-first world, it's possible the phone matters a lot less — or gets displaced by a new set of devices and interfaces.

That doesn't mean AI is just the metaverse with a new label. But it does suggest the through line here isn't the technology. It's Zuckerberg's recurring search for a platform he owns.