What’s hilarious to me is a large part of the value of Twitter was the actual brand name “Twitter” and “tweets”. Those terms are recognized around the world and pronounced more or less the same globally. That is something no other social media platform has ever been able to reproduce. It’s always “posts”, “likes”, “messages”, and “comments.”
This is a literal destruction of value for absolutely no reason other than the fact that one guy think it sounds cool.
Throw this onto the pile of “Elon clearly doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing”
Anyone who can’t see that this is a bad idea is being willfully ignorant.
You make a really good point. The whole concept of a short form text was branded, like Kleenex instead of tissues. I guess Elon thinks that the user base is the most important thing and it doesn’t matter what it’s called?
In any event, “X” is sophomoric. It’s a silly rebranding that doesn’t make sense to me.
like Kleenex instead of tissues
No, this is like amazingly, monumentally more stupid. Pre-Elon (prelon?) twitter was getting free advertising on virtually every news cast and commercial in the US. I’m going to guess this varies worldwide, but twitter is for sure a brand that had probably about as much global reach as Apple, McDonald’s, etc.
There is virtually no stupider brand change/rename that I can possibly imagine. I thought Max dropping “HBO” might have been one of the dumbest of all time, but this is a whole other level. And I didn’t even get to talking about the new brand, which is also possibly one of the dumbest of all time. This post is merely talking about how incredibly dumb it is to drop a globally recognized brand, not even getting to the fact that the brand he chose is dumb for a thousand reasons.
Upvote solely for the portmanteau, stayed for the rest of your comment!
I think we are in agreement! Very true that Twitter was getting free advertising. But if “X” is still relevant, I guess the news will just give that free branding? Already the rebranding has caused a lot of conversation, which is also free advertising, to an extent?
The free ads they’re getting right now are like “wow can you believe how much oil BP spilled into the ocean?” Nobody is looking at that and going “I should buy more BP.”
It only makes sense when you you look at it from his perspective of making an everything app. “X” or “X corp” sounds and looks very cyperpunkish and it’s been his fantasy since at least 10 years.
sophomoric
Learned a new word today, thanks! ♥
Imagine if Google, whose search engine has even a verb - googling - associated with its usage, suddenly decided to rename its wholle search brand to something bland like “A” (so, not even something quirky and distinct that could easilly be turn into a verb like, say, “Pock”, but just the one letter)
A seems a little short needs more letters hell just name it the whole alphabet
Vine had vines which was kind of unique. Didn’t have quite the reach of twitter though and died by twitter’s hand.
Vine would have been a better TikTok. At the very least, it wasn’t Chinese-owned.
It never made sense to me why they shut it down because it got so popular so fast.
Because most of these things pay to get popular. I am a very tech savvy person. Have been using Linux since the early 1990s. I had sign-ins on every major instant message network and many people have never heard of. The first day I ever heard of Twitter. Was when they all the sudden started pushing it on cable news. Back in the late aughts. It was nowhere and then it was everywhere. And there was definitely some money behind the publicity. There’s a reason things like Mastodon get very little coverage. There’s no money behind it. Which is exactly the reason many people use it. But it limits who gets exposed to it. So if he pay a bunch of money to get your product in front of the eyes of a bunch of people even if it gets popular. It may not get popular enough to cover the cost of the advertising and money invested in equipment.
I guess we have to get used to people referring to “tooting” on Mastodon.
I like Mastodon and all, but I’m never going to call a Mastodon post a “toot.” It’s a terrible name for a post.
When I think of the word ‘toot,’ the first thing that comes to mind is farting. Maybe that’s just me though?
Not just you, everyone has the same thought.
Is it supposed to mean something else?
A mastodon is like an elephant and they toot with their trunks. Like how a dog barks or a bird tweets.
Well…
In germany its called a “Tröt” like the sound an elephant makes. It’s super fun to say. Try it! Tröt, tröt
It’s funny you say that, because “the trots” means diarrhoea in many English countries. So… Might be worse.
Haha, we call them “the runs” in the SE US, so the tots makes a lot of sense. Never heard it before now though.
🎺 🎺 🎺 🎺 🎺 🎺
Yeah, that makes me feel like it’s not a serious platform. I can’t imagine convincing any friend to use it by saying “toots”.
I refuse to believe that he’s this shit at business.
Like this has to be a money grab somehow. He just can’t be this fucking stupid. Can he?
I think he’s this narcissistic and impulsive but he’s always had some sort of buffer between his worst impulses and reality.
He was a VC bro that was able to sell a few unicorn ideas to employees and investors (which is no small feat). His investors at his other companies were able to help build competent teams around him and prevent him from pinballing between bad ideas and keep him relatively focused on their investment and ideas that would work.
As Musk’s weath grew, so did his power. His need for investors (and the need to listen to them) diminished. Also weath and power attract an entourage who are willing to do/say anything to stay on Elon’s good side.
Elon only only purchased Twitter because he was compulsively tweeting.
He signed a no due diligence contact because no one around him was there to say “that’s a really fucking stupid idea, there’s no rush to buy Twitter, take all the time you need.” But he signed a terms sheet that no homeowner should sign before purchasing a much less a multi-billion dollar acquisition. For reference, an acquisition of a small company with an annual revenue of less than $1M annually takes 3-6 months to go through due diligence, multi-billion dollar acquisitions can take years. That’s a seriously compulsive decision.
If he sold his stake after saying he was going to buy them, Twitter was going to sue his ass off for doing a pump and dump and intentionally destroying stock value. That would also open an SEC investigation. Both of those would show the public how fucking stupid Elon is in a court of law. That’s simply not okay for a narcissist. They must feed their ego.
Now at Twitter, he doesn’t have a large backing of investors that he has to listen to like in a normal VC situation, AND he thinks he’s actually smarter than everyone around him and we can see the emperor has no clothes.
After being a lucky VC that got forced out of his initial investments right before the DotCom bubble burst Elon’s main value was as a marketer.
At Tesla he was able to sell investors and employees a vision of a gas-free future. At SpaceX he sold his vision of exploring the stars.
Who is clamouring for the next great social media platform?
Who’s asking for the next ‘everything’ app?
Who’s asking a private company to be more involved in their day to day lives?
Users certainly aren’t.
Tl;Dr: Elon was a lucky VC, who’s main value was as a marketer and not as an ops/engineering specialist.
He can and antics like this show he was born from money and a silver spoon in his ass. He is stupid and talentless and uses his money to try to prove otherwise, but since Trump he went mask off and no one can pretend a single word form his mouth is intelligent anymore.
Lucky fucking bastard, i hope his luck runs out but he’s too rich to become destitute.
Spending billions of dollars to sink a business is the biggest brain cash grab I’ve ever heard of
This isn’t entirely accurate.
X.com was the name of the online banking company that Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho, cofounded in 1999.
They merged with competitor Confinity Inc, which was cofounded by Ken Howery, Max Levchin, Peter Theil, Yu Pan, and Luke Nosek.
What’s accurate however, is that they did pull a board meeting while Musk was in Hawaii, to kick him out and rebrand from X.com to PayPal
Every time I see it written down my brain just
Musk wasn’t kicked out over the name though, well not just the name.
The board removed him as CEO because Thiel literally quit the company. Since Musk demanded he rewrite Confinity from unix to windows(since the x.com backend and it’s stupid e-mail based banking was made for windows and Musk doesn’t understand unix/linux…(that’s why he doesn’t know about x.org for instance.)).
Confinitys better method and code-base was basically what Musk bought when they “merged” the companies. And everyone else on the board knew that PayPal wouldn’t get anywhere if they did what Musk said. So they had “secret” board meeting and replaced Musk with Thiel, and the rest of PayPal is history.
X.com was a name of a old DOS game. X-com UFO defender.
IMO I kinda like Twitter… Uhh, X blue? When you see the checkmark next to someones name you know that you’re about to see the absolute dumbest take that could ever possibly exist… or it’s an account that was “gifted” a checkmark to muddy the waters.
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The suspense is killing me.
become but
Is it ironic to anyone else that most of the musk spam in my feed comes from this community dedicated to stopping musk spam?
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I’m just gonna pretend they’re sacrificing themselves to contain the musk spam in this one place, where we can easily block it.
They have a point. We ARE going to see what they could have become.
Wrong. We’re going to see what they could have because
“Did you see that tweet?” fine
“I tweeted that” okay
“I’m going to go through all my old X’s” wut?
“I’m going to X it” huh?
“I’m going through all my old X’cretions”
“I’m going to X’crete it”
”Did you see my latest x?”
”One of my x’s went trending”
”There’s weird guys commenting on my x”
All this sounds so ambiguous. Sounds more like an old relationship getting weird.
How is that a real comment that someone wrote
It’s a joke, right? That’s how I took it. I actually thought it was pretty clever. Now I’m confused and unsure of myself.
Now that you’re saying it I can see it. Maybe I ate the onion on this one. Hard to tell for me now a days
I also read it as sarcasm. I’m pretty sure it’s a joke.
Yes, a random idiot knows more about branding that the professionals who do this for a living. What could’ve been.
That face when you shit so hard it comes out in the shape of an X
I truly do want to see what PayPal could have because.
XxPaypalxX
You forgot the obligatory 420 & 69 😅
Musk was never part of PayPal, no matter how much his bots try to shill that idea. Company that invented PayPal merged with company Musk was part of, company he was booted out from before the merger. He never had anything to do with PayPal. They later made PayPal and sold it to eBay and Musk has stocks, that’s it. They succeeded in spite of him. Just like he lies about founding Tesla, he did the same thing with PayPal and Neuralink, etc. That’s what Musk and muskrats do, gaslight.
I can’t imagine the life of someone who was a fan before and remains a fan today. What would such a person do through day? How would they eat?
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“He hated the people I hate” has become the main attraction point of conservatism these days
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Today, I 100% agree. But I mean, he’s been around a long time and has been a couple of different things at different times, in the public eye.
I made a comment a couple pages back in my history (cause this is a very new account) explaining what made me rumble him - the road tiles and roof tiles, a one-two punch of terrible ideas that made me check the receipts and conclude he was a simpleton, the very model of a modern aristechnocrat. My poor wife was the one who showed me the article and got the full force of my visceral reaction to how bad an idea this was, relative to what was already required for our descendents not to perish in fire. Up until then he was just the “founder” of Tesla, who strangely had not been mentioned in the early articles I had read many years before about the battery-powered sports car made by “a bunch of engineers”. I had kept a bookmark of one of the articles through the aughts and had offered it up as a retort to smug Hummer owners in forums once or twice. He wasn’t in it.
But there is a special and rare animal out there somewhere, cause, you rewind as recently as like, six months ago, maybe nine but no more than that, I could bring you to a few otherwise serious and fairly high-IQ [insert jackoff motion here] spaces where I hang out with other programmers/IT folks, and nine months ago I could have introduced you to people who hold more or less the same progressive [jackoff motion intensifies] opinions as a “hard left Democrat” who would, when I would call bullshit on this or that ridiculous thing he did, talk in very detached white dude tones about how “Elon knows what he’s doing, and doesn’t bother to tell everyone. I’ve asked him to coffee but so far he’s not answering.”
Near as I can tell, because I was not paying enough attention to even taste his PR let alone eat a full serving, the image that was sold to a credulous liberal public was that he was acting on behalf of the good, non-toxic future of humanity at the highest levels, and a lot of people who are smart enough to be the tech workers who make Hollywood go (I am specifically a Technical Director, which is a fancy job title for Python Programmer on Hollywood productions, I am one of many, nothing special, but I am speaking of my peers here), they drank that koolaid up. To say nothing of the executives who put him in the Iron Man movie to have his ass kissed by Tony Stark. A lot of people missed that, apparently, but it’s on youtube, “Tony Stark kisses Elon Musk’s ass” is the only accurate description.
I have gone into that space once or twice with a link or two in recent months to casually dunk on him, because I have taken my position that he is a simpleton with money for a long time now in clear and public terms and I was curious to see if anyone would speak up to defend him - so far, he has lost every fan I used to personally know he had; I cannot find anyone in my direct circle who will speak on his behalf, anymore.
So the creature, perhaps the cryptid, that I would like to behold and examine, for science, is the person who was an avid Musk fan one year ago, and remains an avid Musk fan today. I think these poor souls deserve both help, and study.
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I do categorically agree with you, but I have, and you might also have had, the benefit of a lot good environment that deliberate fostered my critical thinking, including being plugged into punk in the late 70s by an uncle who knew I would need it. But I’ve still got my heroes, some of them problematic ones, so I don’t hold the mere having of a hero who is not my hero against someone.
I also don’t waste my time with Trump fans or that ilk, because in the case of Trump I cannot identify how any of his fans are getting anything from what he’s offering, other than literally the much-vaunted “own”. Like, to explain the 2023 Trump fan, as far as I’m concerned one needs to reach for Plato or Nietszche and their conceptions of how mental slavery works. I don’t think anyone’s come up with anything that explains it better than either of those two; the only difference would be the degree to which they apply the principle.
Foucault might have something to say, but y’know, academic Postmodernism is a measurable part of how we got here, so fuck that guy…
But the circa-2020 Musk fan, that person is easier for me to explain to myself. That person has been steeped in capitalist mythology and deprived of a real picture of history, and statistically speaking, has not had their critical thinking fostered very well at all, and they believe that their life happens in a more or less static social world that does not have the upheavals and strife that happen in Those Other Places, because that is the reality that we North Americans have lived in for the last thirty years. We are so bored, in fact, we have nothing better to do than fuck up our own society with convoys and antivax movements that killed children with measles years before Covid came for us all.
So in the end, I see their current silence as indicative of thought taking place, and take good hope from that.
I likewise see the increasing loudness and escalating hyperbole of the right as a sign that they are at least becoming aware that they are losing; at some point, simple ignorant pride/pride in ignorance will explain whoever is left in that group.
At least celebrities are just doing their job usually. You don’t become a billionaire without ruining a lot of lives along the way
The obsession with either is weird but only one of them is inherently evil
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And?
That person just has shitty ideas. They’re still not responsible for fucking over many people’s lives like billionaires do
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I see it a lot from my friends who are aerospace nerds, because SpaceX does some pretty cool stuff. Their enthusiasm for SpaceX translates to Tesla, FSD, etc.
He definitely had the right eye for which props to buy.
I thought he was ok years ago. The shit he did in the year leading up to Twitter was enough to realize he’s an asshole
Sure, I would have known that had I actually read up on him, but it wasn’t a persistent thread in our society
But now? It’s so obvious he’s a huge childish asshole, a Nazi sympathizer, and a damned idiot
That last sentence is why he has so many fans though. There’s plenty of people like that and he’s their peak form
He looks fucking mad in that pic. Wildeyes.
🤮
Obsolete?
Obsolex? Xbsolete? Obsolexence?
It’s kinda hilarious how just adding an X in randomly makes it seem dirty somehow. Is this just an American thing, all English speakers, or is there something inherently naughty about letter X??
I think it’s just from x-rated and xxx content but I don’t even know if they’re real ratings or just porno industry marketing, I suspect marketing.
It’s a real rating with an interesting history. I especially appreciate the fact that Robocop had to be edited 10+ times in order to qualify for an R rating from the MPAA, which I learned from the Re-View episode by Red Letter Media. The X rating was then changed to NC-17 in 1990 to decouple it from the use in the pornography industry as a marketing tool as you said. The Wikipedia article on the history is quite good if you’re interested.
