Comment by PeachMan@lemmy.one on Twitter is now X

Supposedly this is a temporary logo until they can create a more permanent one. It literally came from some random that tweeted at him (X’d at him? Lol). He asked for submissions and just chose one, maybe he accidentally laid off all the graphic designers.

Rebranding was so urgent that he didn’t wait for a finished logo? I have to admit, I’m baffled. With his other changes I can at least imagine a thought process behind it, this one seems to be something he just woke up and decided to do all of a sudden.

It becomes a lot easier to understand when you remember that he might just be kinda stupid :)

He’s not, though. He’s had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he’s become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.

I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn’t going so well for him.

He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn’t build anything he didn’t run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don’t get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it’s the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon’s involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.

If Elon’s an idiot who doesn’t do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How’s Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?

I think there’s a very clear theme of “I don’t like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever” going on here.

Because he’s a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn’t wreck them?

He didn’t build any of it.

While he obviously has some intelligence, he’s still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he’s not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.

People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!

I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.

Uh the just world fallacy it’s strong in you.

Offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion
Try to back out when Twitter says “ok lol”
Get forced to complete the purchase
Saddle Twitter with the debt you now have as a result of buying Twitter
Invite all the previously-banned bigots and hatemongers back on the site
Make your staff’s lives hell, including bullshit ‘performance’ stuff like checking how many lines-of-code they write, so most of them are either fired or leave on their own
Raise API prices sky-high, get ridiculed
Lock everything behind user log-in, logged-out users can’t see anything
Rate-limit how many things logged-in users can do
Break widgets
Was once the public square of the internet, now weather services are moving to Mastodon
“why are we still losing money >:(”
Initiate a half-assed rebrand to “X” but the logo, 𝕏, is literally just a mathematical symbol. Who needs copyright on your billion dollar company’s brand identity, eh?

Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!

It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.

I literally said in the comment that you’re responding to that Musk isn’t good at running Twitter.

It’s a little worse than ‘not going well’, is my point.

It’s far easier to be successful if you’re already rich.

He didn’t start off particularly wealthy.

Exactly! Who’s parents don’t have apartheid emerald mine money?!

The decision probably involved a big line of cocaine

Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!

Wow get this genius some venture capital funding

What other changes has a thought process behind them? Virtually everything he’s done at twitter has seemed like something that occurred to him while shitting and then he forced his team to implement by the end of the day.

Twitter was apparently losing a lot of money before he bought it, so laying off a bunch of staff is one reasonable way to deal with that. Same with charging for the API, getting rid of data centers and offices, and even login requirements to reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.

These were all things done as an attempt at solving problems. They may not have been good solutions, but as I said, you can understand the thought process behind them. “We’re spending more than we take in. So do things to reduce spending and boost income.”

I have no idea what problem this rebranding is supposed to solve, though. When Facebook changed to Meta, or Google changed to Alphabet, I could understand those because their name had become associated with only a very specific subset of what the company wanted to do. Twitter is still just being Twitter, though. Unless perhaps he’s got some big new project he’s planning for them to start doing that’s distinct from microblogging.

man, the whole elon musk/twitter situation seems less & less real the more it plays out

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