LOS ANGELES – X marks the spot, again. Elon Musk has bought the Los Angeles Times and has promised to rebrand it as the X Times and institute a character limit for all online stories.

Musk, the billionaire famous for buying Twitter and renaming it X, joins another tech guru in the newspaper business: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Musk has also added to his personal fortune with other ventures, including Space X and Tesla.

The newspaper purchase price has yet to be released. The current owner, Dr. Soon-Shiong, paid $500 million for the newpaper in 2018. Most recently, the Times lost $50 million in 2024, as subscriptions cratered and staff layoffs reached 20 percent.
Musk, fresh from his stint heading up the quasi-government agency DOGE, said that he would insist on the X character limit of 280 for all of the Times’s online stories: “What they publish does not deserve more”. He also said, however, that he had no plans for such a limit on stories in print. “I’m proud to be in the newspaper business,” he said (in a tweet), “and I have absolutely no plans to so radically alter such an institution as the Los Angeles Times.” As for how the paper’s editors would conform to the online character limit, Musk vowed to govern from afar and let the staff work things out for themselves. He did confirm that the character limit wouldn’t include the headline.