News

Twitter Blue Subscribers Can Now Make 4,000-Character Tweets

Under the leadership of Elon Musk, the social media platform has introduced its longest character limit ever, but only for paid subscribers.

Published

4 years ago

February 9, 2023

Nour Nasir

twitter blue subscribers can now make 4000-character tweets

Twitter has added a new longer tweet feature, allowing paid subscribers to utilize 4,000 characters per post. If someone you follow uses the feature, your timeline will now display a “show more” button on their post to prevent the tweet from taking up an entire screen.

Currently, this new feature has a couple of limitations (aside from the fact you’ll need to pay for a Blue subscription to unlock it). If a tweet is longer than the standard 280 characters, it can’t be saved as a draft or scheduled for later. However, most other regular features should work as normal, including hashtags and pictures. In addition, non-Blue subscribers will still be able to interact with the posts as expected.

As well as writing 4,000-character Tweets, Twitter Blue subscribers will also be able to quote, retweet and reply with the same number of keystrokes, with the “show more” button hopefully preventing timelines from becoming clogged with multiple huge essays.

Also Read: Introducing Bard, Google’s Response To ChatGPT

Elon Musk has been promising to add longer tweets for some time, also mentioning that company developers were working on adding custom formatting to posts, including bolding words and changing font size.

Twitter’s current 280-character limit was set back in 2017, replacing the original 140-character posts that made the platform famous. So what exactly will a 4,000 character tweet look like on screen? Well, this article runs to 1,500 characters, so as you can imagine, there’s plenty of potential for some truly epic rants to be unleashed!

News

Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict

Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.

Published

4 days ago

September 24, 2026

Nour Nasir

Microsoft

Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.

“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.

The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.

The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.

Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.

Also Read: Egypt’s Mobile Wallets Are Booming, But Cash Still Has Power

The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.

So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.