Recode Daily: Elon Musk teases taking Tesla private with a tweet

Tesla halted trading after CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he wants to take the company private at $420 a share. Musk also tweeted that he would not sell the company, and planned to remain as its CEO; he sent this email to Tesla employees today. Going private may be a welcome change for the company, which is the most-shorted stock on Wall Street — particularly as Tesla attempts to make the critical move from a luxury automaker to a mass-market one while also becoming profitable. [Johana Bhuiyan and Rani Molla / Recode]

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Snapchat’s user base shrunk by three million daily users last quarter, the first time it has ever reported a decline. Snap blamed its recent app redesign, which wasn’t very popular. (Snap also blamed the redesign for crummy first-quarter earnings back in May.) [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Instagram’s decision to clone Snapchat’s Stories feature two years ago was its smartest move yet. Instagram Stories has become the most important and fastest-growing media format, driving creativity and creating community. It has attracted some 400 million users, simultaneously seeming to curb rival Snapchat’s growth. And it has a chance to become Facebook’s next big business. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Twitter is sticking with Alex Jones — so far. CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted last night that the Infowars host — who’s been banned by Facebook, YouTube and Apple this week for hate speech — “hasn’t violated our rules.” Dorsey said it’s the responsibility of journalists to “document, validate, and refute” the sorts of conspiracy theories and misinformation spread by people like Jones, “so people can form their own opinions.” Meanwhile, Jones’s app remains in the Google and Apple app stores, where downloads are booming. [Simone Stolzoff / Quartz]

Led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, a mobile short-form video-streaming startup called NewTV raised a $1 billion round with Disney, Alibaba, NBCUniversal, Viacom and others participating. The big idea is “easy, on-the-go mobile viewing, allowing today’s leading studios and creative talent to tell original stories in an entirely new way.” We’ll see.[Todd Spangler / Variety]

West Virginians serving overseas will be the first in the U.S. to cast federal election ballots using a smartphone app, a move designed to make voting in November’s election easier for troops living abroad. The state is introducing mobile phone voting in the midterm elections via a blockchain-based platform called “Voatz.” (Really.) But election integrity and computer security experts expressed alarm at the prospect of voting by phone, and one went so far as to call it “a horrific idea.” [Donie O’Sullivan / CNNMoney]

A surge in global tourism has led to a backlash in cities where residents feel overrun. Venice, Barcelona and Amsterdam are among the cities that have seen anti-tourism protests and graffiti aimed at visitors and tour ships. Largely driven by China, international tourism exploded from 500 million trips in 1995 to 1.3 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, millennial travelers are flocking to “microhotels” with tiny rooms and hedonistic lobbies and lounges — you can check out any time you like, but you may never get clean sheets. [Richard Florida / CityLab]

Top stories from Recode

The exec in charge of Magic Leap’s “go to market strategy” just left the company.

The heavily hyped “mixed reality” headset is supposed to go on sale in 2018.

This is cool

The booming business of luxury chicken diapers. And dog cloning.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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