Pay 44 billion for a brand, then change it. Pure genius.
Pay billions for a userbase, then drive away the ones that aren’t Nazis or bots.
Been saying it for a while, but his plan was to run it into the ground all along. Who is he buddy-buddy with in public? The Saudi’s and the Russians, who both have an interest in seeing Twitter burn to the ground. He started by laying off people, not paying their bills, and making stupid brand decisions. This has been the plan all along and there’s really no other logical explanation. 44 billion is nothing to the Saudis and Russian oligarchs if it takes away a key tool for organized dissent and the spread of western ideals.
@MeetInPotatoes You are giving him too much credit.
@boredtortoise And last, destroy the technology. Mission completed.
Don’t give him too much credit. Elon is transparently too terminally online to be destroying Twitter because that’s his goal. He didn’t even actually mean to buy it until he was forced to.
Pay 54 billion dollars to utterly destroy a platform which gave normal people the ability to effectively spread information about the wrongdoing of the upper class, and which often promoted that very information.
That’s why he did this, he knows it’s killing g Twitter and wants it dead.
Twitter and Reddit are both lessons in how to kill a community and a brand.
Lessons for whom? I have several things I would like to kill but lack the requisite trillions to execute my vision.
“Tired of running your massively popular online service? Call BrandWreckers™ , your one-stop shop for dismantling user loyalty and brand reputation. Call now and lose your first 10k users for free!”
You know I wonder if we could create a non profit that exists only to buy things and then donate them (IP, closed source, whatever) to the public domain. If you had a savvy board, such an organization could do a lot of good.
Something like this must already exist, right?
You can throw Warner Brothers Discovery in there while you are at it (HBO now stupidly referred to as “Max”)
HBO has changed their branding like 5 times in the last few years I swear.
They’re literally a household name.
I grew up poor in Australia, and no one really had pay TV around me - least of all the people I hung with. Over the years, you’d still learn through other TV shows and movies that HBO was the channel with the good stuff.
Why change that? Why lose such branding? Have they become associated with something that they don’t want to be? If not, leave great enough alone.
I just saw a trailer for an adventure time spin off on a youtube channel called “Max” and though it was a random channel that post trailer lol. Granted i rarely watch anything and while i know about HBO i don’t ever remember watching anything from them.
He really did buy it just to delete it.
Of course he did; he hated Twitter because of it’s ability for marginalized people to organized as well as give people the ability to share videos about his unsafe products.
Dude, he is a PR guy with Twitter being his main platform. There is no logic there.
I mean, it makes perfect sense. He’s a PR guy who wanted to own a platform so he could spin his own facts; the fact that people could post videos of his own products catching fire was bad for him.
This gives him way too much credit lol. He isn’t playing 5D chess, he impulse-bought a $44B company and is too much of a narcissistic control freak to stop touching it. Harming marginalized people is a natural consequence of essentially any action a billionaire takes by virtue of their existence.
Yep. And he saw “blue checks” as some kind of Liberal Elite^TM that was manipulating the media and public consciousness. He set out specifically to try to destroy that, but in the process is attempting to create his own version of that imagined cabal.
He’s also petulant child with a meme-poisoned brain that’s stuck somewhere in the body of an edgy 14 year old in 2002.
Headline to come one week later:
“After some backlash from users, Musk comes to a compromise: the new twitter logo is a blue bird with a giant Red X over it.”
Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just shut it down once he had it? He’s burning a lot of operational money to do this slowly. It doesn’t make any sense unless he really is that stupid.
When they start focusing on the brand, it’s over.
I was part of a “startup” that was all volunteers. We called ourselves Citizens Market, and the idea was to produce an app that let you scan a barcode to get ethical info on the company who made the product.
Like GoodGuide, but they got to market faster.
After a few years of effort, a marketing person joined our all-volunteer team and convinced the head to change the name to Fosfo. Why Fosfo? Because matches have phosphorous in them, and so it referenced illumination, and the illumination had to do with our mission of … you guessed it: providing information.
The thing failed. I mean, we were already failing because we didn’t have the profit motive cutting our decisions down to what worked. But the name “Fosfo” was when I knew the project was dead.
“Citizens Market” was the perfect name for what our app would do. But no, had to have some web 2.0 jackass giving us a facelift. That was our path to salvation: a rebrand.
That’s a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.
Out critical blunder was hoping to crowdsource the generation of the dataset we’d use to provide scores.
What we should have done was find existing data about company ethics and just build the feature of scanning a UPC barcode to get the data.
We tried to be the app and the data source, and we had a huge two sided marketplace problem, and no incentive for the volunteers who would spend hours and hours doing research.
Another reason why I won’t do a startup under volunteer conditions again. We unconsciously modeled everyone else as like us: willing to donate copious time.
What is Musks obsession with the letter X?
He’s a stunted 8 year old who associates X with edginess. X factor. X Men. X Ray. X rated films. XXX. All super fucking cool
He originally wanted “Model 3” to be called “Model E” so that the three (at the time) Tesla models could spell out “SEX”. Fortunately that name was already taken. He’s a petulant child.
Also, he’s an unoriginal dipshit. All he’s good at is buying things and slapping his name on 'em, he’s never had an idea of his own.
X.com is his product he owned, that is loosely associated with PayPal’s success despite it having nothing to do with the tech that it was merged for.
By “absorbing” twitter with his original X company that is older than twitter, he can pretend to be the founder of the parent company X, like he pretends to be the founder of Tesla.
