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.
- 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.
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.
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.
