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.
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?
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)
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?
In germany its called a “Tröt” like the sound an elephant makes. It’s super fun to say. Try it! Tröt, tröt
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Is it ironic to anyone else that most of the musk spam in my feed comes from this community dedicated to stopping musk spam?
