Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.
Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
As far as I can tell, it's the domain of the company he co-founded (X.com), that merged with the company that became PayPal (Confinity), that led to him briefly being CEO before Thiel took over and pivoted to focus on the PayPal service.
2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal.
Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
I was just wondering how in the world did Elon manage not to sell "x.com" to a porn company for shits and giggles. It being in the custody of PayPal explains that.
That’s the son - the daughter is “Y”
https://news.yahoo.com/grimes-says-she-changed-her-095553857...
Or, in the US, phonetically-mispelled names.
I guess my point is naming someone isn't really the place for wacky creativity.
That is my signature.
- X (PayPal)
- X (Twitter)
- SpaceX
- Tesla
That most European countries have a whitelist of names was one of the more shocking parts of moving here.
I believe this is very much wrong.
[0] I would claim that calling someone "Mat the fucking dumbshit" or "Poopface" is child abuse
> He stood there looking at me, and I saw him smile, and he said, "Son, this world is rough, and if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, and I know I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name, and I said goodbye. And I knew you'd have to get tough or die. And it's that name that helped make you strong..."
The approach of "you need to be prepared for the cruelty of the world so I will be cruel to you" feels like a parody of proper upbringing.
It was a Johnny Cash song -- he wasn't known for writing ballads of utopian suburbia.
------
Your head
Mr Cash was in no way endorsing the behavior...
So no, not endorsing.
Have you?
(See other respondent for proof you havent)
I said, "Father, change my name
The one I'm using now it's covered up
With fear and filth, and cowardice and shame"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FYkJuAb0mMk
;)
After you're 18 and after you've experienced some of the most intense social moments of your life.
It's like literally everything else with kids. Parents have a ton of autonomy but there has to be a line where they aren't allowed to hurt their kid further
Iceland has a very traditional name system which is enforced. I think the idea is basically that names won't evolve so they can preserve tradition.
Sweden on the other hand has a pretty vague "name can't be likely to cause child psychological harm" law, that doesn't really come into play unless you try to name your child something really outside the mainstream (there was a case a while back where a couple wanted to call their daughter "Metallica". I can't remember how that ended up going).
I don't see how the Swedish-style system would stop names evolving. There are still plenty of trends and new names that come and go just like in the US. I doubt extreme name choices like Elon's "x-ash-12" would inspire a whole bunch of children to be called that.
Based on what you said, let the kid have a proper name and then they themselves can change to weird as they wish later. Stupid parents have no right to give a stupid joke name to others.
- Parents may only choose names for their children from a list of the top 1000 or so names in whatever country parents choose
- It is permissible to change your own name to anything you like
Finally! Someone remembered us!
And don’t forget google’s X department.
He staged mock naval battles in the lake/canal behind Versailles.
Which, admittedly, sounds pretty awesome.
With-out, France was involved in a lot of wars.
Howard Hughes also had some mental health issues, similar to Elon Musk.
All the adults are clucking their tongues at him but presumably they'd be fine with him being a quiet entry in the Panama Papers and the Epstein flight logs with the other billionaires.
It would be "fun" if it only affected him. But there are real people who get caught in the blast radius of his "fun."
Who are these "real people" you talk of? I find it interesting in this age of diversity and acceptance of differences, that a "Musk character" can't exist without a constant deluge of backlash, ridicule and grumpiness!
Seriously?
OK, I'll give you an easy one: Google "Twitter layoffs."
That doesn't mean that people's lives weren't upended. You're arguing a completely different point.
If Musk were doing all of the same things, and much worse, without the culture war stuff attached we would never hear his name.
"I take full responsibility for this difficult decision..."
No one has a right to have a particular job, if it's no longer deemed necessary.
One might be lucky enough to have such a job.
But if it goes *poof* overnight then the appropriate take should probably be "It was nice while it lasted."
PS: And we can lament the gutting of their moderation team, but that comprised a small proportion of the total headcount cut.
Musk paid billions too much for Twitter. So at least a few of those real people you're worried about, are now very rich.
Companies have layoffs. Are you saying the thousands of layoffs at Meta, or any other tech businesses in recent times, are "good layoffs", but Twitter layoffs were "bad layoffs"? I don't understand your position here. You seem to have an emotional response about the welfare of tech sector people you don't know.
If you have Twitter on your resume, I'd expect it would open a few doors when job hunting. Your concern for their welfare is odd to say the least.
Would you have preferred every employee, including the most loyal and hard-working, to lose their jobs too?
Musk has multiple Epstein connections including having gone to his house, he’s exactly like the other billionaires.
And the people in my world who are upset about Twitter do not give anyone a pass on the Epstein flight logs and Panama Papers.
[1] mostly. there is the matter of the habitat destruction because SpaceX failed to listen to experts.
edit: formatting
the fact that one single app has that much influence means it ought to be destroyed. I was hoping Musk would walk into Twitter, pull the plug, and go home. Now I hope, maybe, he'll just grind it to dust.
Regarding your complaints about twitter:
> In response to a 2017 request from the Pentagon, Twitter kept online a network of accounts that the U.S. military used to advance its interests in the Middle East
It’s not so much fun when it’s directed against you, is it?
someone else posted a howard hughes comparison and i think that is quite apt, including the dating of movie or music stars, and the inevitable mental health issues
One, I was pretty impressed by.
The second? I’ve had less wind noise riding my motorcycle.
Still very hit and miss.
Doesn’t mean I’m not looking to buy one after they refresh them next year, but you definitely don’t get Lexus quality for your Lexus money.
Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=378
This lie seems mostly accepted only by non-technical people in technical fields from what I've found out. Leads me to believe Elon actually is one of those great people that will be more appreciated after his passing.
It's like they have a personal investment in Elon not having done the things that Elon has very clearly actually done.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat...
Elon Musk is what happens when a 17-year-old stoner is the richest man in the world. He builds cars and trains and tunnels and flamethrows and rockets.
Everyone tries to blame his money or his childishness, when the obvious answer is right there lighting up in public and blowing smoke on podcasts.
As a seasoned stoner it doesn't look like Musk has much experience smoking weed if the Rogan video is anything to go by.
So I have hard time accepting ad hominem arguments as anything but jealous, uninformed, or just plain conformist. Or maybe some people like to just speak untruths with the mindset that the billionaire can take it, but find that anti-intellectual and unnecessarily polarizing.
(This is a comment in general, not an attack on the parent comment but critiquing the generally hateful air I'd expect the HN crowd to be above of)
If you're going to defend him for this, you have to admit his distractions have be a hindrance to the cause. Rather than running Tesla and making sure its the market leader across market segments, he's been off on side quests. And now his side quest is making people not want Teslas.
I think he stated that his underlying big plan was to act in fields that he thinks will have the most impact in the future, being good business while not just profit-driven, after he got the PayPal money (Can't find a source right now though) in which he has succeeded, profiting from making the world better, instead, for example, lobbying against ICE's and then providing "just-good-enough" Environmental(r) ShittyCars(tm)
He also has shifted his focus accordingly when Tesla, and at part, SpaceX, were at dire straits. For his kind of personality, I'm not sure just working more would even transfer as simply to linear benefit on that thing.
You don't have to love Musk, plenty of reasons not to but jeez tone it down a bit. It's like if he was seen eating a taco suddenly tacos would be embarrassing and sad according to you.
Everyone else is on some random "responsible" profit driven train to increase quarterly profits by meager single digit % so they don't rock the boat. The west is on a downward slide of "responsible" and average behavior of do the least amount of anything whilst the world moves forward with actual ambition, childish or otherwise.
edit: and in the case of Errol Musk, a very genetics-driven opinion on the morality of incest, see Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love".
Something that I was wondering while I was reading about Heinlein and his books was why I hadn't read him. My school library was surprisingly well stocked in classic science fiction, which I explored and read a lot of. So I assume it must have also had Heinlein, unless he'd been 'censored' because of some of his more radical content but the library did have the Illuminatus trilogy, so I don't think so. Did I just never find his books, or did I find them and reject them? It's odd, because I pretty much read any science fiction I could find back then.
I'm much less tolerant of science fiction now, to the point of being somewhat intolerant. I often label people as suffering from 'science fiction brain' and I certainly apply that label to Musk for his beliefs in things like that 'Artificial Intelligence' is actually possible (I consider it only an idea to play with in books and not ever feasible in reality). That's why I found your comment interesting; as an insight to the roots of such a 'science fiction brain'.
Founded in 1999, ousted as CEO within a year, within a year after the merger with Confinity becomes CEO again. Insists on using Windows instead of Unix based systems, which causes tensions and Thiel (founder of Confinity) nopes the fuck out of there. Technical issues ensue and so, again, within a year of becoming CEO, gets kicked out only for Thiel to replace him as CEO.
All in all, sounds about like what I expected from Musk. I’m sure he’s got a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder about Thiel.
The next question is: “Is he really serious about the super app?”. The horror is that he probably is, but what business wants to deal with a mercurial leader who might stop payments, pay people extra, or impound money in your account for no good reason. What business is going to want to put an “X” logo up by their cash register when it means they are going to have arguments with customers. (I bet it will be a hit for “go anti-woke and go broke” businesses though.)
Trademark law requires registering for a series of categories where a product seeks protection, with each category being relatively specific.
At the same time, suing someone for Trademark infringement requires a judge to decide whether it could "potentially induce confusion in the user".
Could an app be confused for a sausage? Could it be confused for a sneaker?... I'd say not, but I'm no judge!
But why are you angry about the rebrand?
X... is not.
Watching Elon destroy the Twitter brand is like watching someone throw orange paint on the Mona Lisa.
It can pretty easily go both ways. The Mona Lisa have been a cultural icon for a long time, but Twitter has had a massive influence on culture since it's inception.
Apparently searching for hair loss treatments gets you put on the dick pill list.
>X.com was an online bank co-founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California
So he's returning to his roots more than arbitrarily changing to something random
Still, while the social network was presuambly the most valuable part of Twitter, gotta figure the brand was a non-trivial part of the 44 billion Musk paid to buy the company. Seems crazy to toss it after a few months.
Also, the new brand is bad. if someone told me to check out "x.com", I would assume they were directing me to a porn site. And the logo looks too much like the button you click to close your browser.
… which is exactly what many us do now whenever we hit the paywall.
Pretty sure apples own presentations used “OS Ten” not “OS Ecks”
So I don’t think he is trying to take actions that will improve Twitter, he is trying to morph it into something else entirely while maintaining at least some significant portion of the user base along the way.
I do think it will probably fail, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t have better odds than starting from scratch.
Although I do think it's doable if he somehow kept the fact that he is at the helm a trade secret as he gradually grew the userbase until reaching a certain critical mass and finally revealing that he's the owner.
I would still expect some hate from the sort of people who (rightly) complain about Google Reader being turned down. But normal people don’t care about that sort of thing.
- Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
- Making people do what he wants
The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lends itself toward making a thing that is better or more appealing for the populace at large.
As an example: The Boring Company. The pure engineering problem of "how do I remove mass from the ground and create a tunnel as cheaply as possible" is a great application of Elon's strengths, and a useful problem to work on, because humanity will always need to build tunnels.
Hyperloop, though, is completely f'ing stupid, because regardless of whether an evacuated tube and car system can transport people efficiently or not, almost nobody wants to travel like this, and the entirety of the system is completely inefficient - trains are better in every case and with every metric.
In both TBC and Hyperloop, Elon wanted a thing, and convinced people to do it. It's just that there was no consideration as to whether the thing Elon wanted was useful or not.
This is Twitter. Elon looked at Twitter as a strictly engineering problem. And yes, Twitter was horribly inefficient, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of employees were let go and the service mostly continues to function, but my suspicion is that it is riding virtually entirely on H1B employees who are bound to the job else they are forced to leave the country. People will grind themselves to the bone for advancing human spaceflight and (to a lesser extent, maybe) improving alternative energy, but I don't know of any rational person who would do the same for Twitter, even if Elon bills it as the defacto public square.
Not to defend Elon, because I can't, but to be fair, any person reading this, if they had experienced the successes that Elon has in SpaceX and Tesla, fighting and succeeding against all of the naysayers, would have a non-trivial ego. When you combine that with the echo chamber of Elon's fans who treat him like the second coming, and who seem to honestly think that Elon (personally) can fix any problem, is it any wonder that he starts believing some of the bullshit? When he built the sub that led to him calling the rescue diver a pedoguy, and did it because people asked him to, and so many people constantly lauded him with egostroking compliments that he believed he could. And even though he didn't do anything that ended up saving those kids, he was found not guilty of defamation, so he still walked away with a win.
Fast forward 7 years and when he's forced to buy Twitter, he still feels like whatever he does is the right thing, and will do it regardless, and he will convince people under his influence to do what he wants so that he walks away with a win.
So that's a lot of text to say, yes, you're right, it is foolish. He doesn't care, he wants to win, and he'll do anything he can to walk away with a win, regardless of how it impacts anyone else, because ultimately it's not about the people who use the service, it's about Elon feeling good about himself.
Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge.
This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lighting the world on fire. I mean if they make it easier + cheaper to build tunnels then I'm all for it. I've just not yet seen anything that suggests TBC is particularly interesting.
The original TBC at the tunnel across the street from SpaceX was a proof of concept that used essentially off-the-shelf tunneling tech so that the team could learn how the current state of the practice was accomplished, and that they could improve on it.
I don't know if you're familiar with tunnel boring (and if you are, sorry I'm explaining something that you probably know better than I do), but essentially the phases of digging, mucking, and reinforcing are not done concurrently, and I think that was the first things they were trying to do, and then move on from there. But yes, smaller tunnels were part of it.
Also, they did not do any real innovation, as you seem to be claiming. Combining those steps is 50-year-old technology, at least, and has been done at scale (ie not on tiny tunnels) many times.
I always thought Boring was a project intended for digging a base on Mars, fitting a whole Tesla in the tunnel would be even more than what's needed to connect some underground habitats.
I'm not sure that's true considering why he was (or the public story of why he was) pushed out of PayPal.
IIRC: He forced a port/rewrite of their platform to Windows (from Unix) that eventually led to a code freeze of the existing platform to allow the port to "catch up" to the existing platform. At the same time, they were hemorrhaging money due to fraud and they couldn't do anything about it due to the code freeze.
1) having money to throw around
2) having big manic swings that make the money seem attractive
Everything else is a hagiography.
I’ll have to go through the book(s) and check out the explanation again.
Except what people in America actually want to do, which is not ride a train outside of novelty.
The trains in the Boston - NYC - DC corridor seem fairly decent and useful, although I’ve only ridden them as a tourist (from Europe).
[1] TCO of an average car is ~$6,000-10,000/year of after-tax money, median US after-tax income is sub-$40,000/year.
The IRS mileage deductible rate is 65 cents/mile, and it's pretty close to operational cost of a vehicle. Parking and tolls and 10,000 miles a year will easily get you to these numbers.
Some call this freedom, but I call this a financial millstone around your neck.
-----
(Not to mention the mountains of public[1] and private money that get spent on automobile infrastructure, parking offsets, etc, etc.)
[1] Most of which comes from the general tax fund...
Oh, and about $5,000/yr in gas.
Are you in Europe or the US?
My insurance at age 20 with an accident under my belt was under $3,000 a year. My 50k mile Corolla cost less than your annual car payments.
> Oh, and about $5,000/yr in gas.
That's $100 or two sedan sized tanks every week at US prices. At 30 MPG that's over 30,000 miles a year.
Of course this is very situation dependant but under my exact scenario you can probably imagine why I’d spend tens of thousands per year on a car. Of course I don’t, and the number is actually closer to $4k, but even then the time saving makes up for that in like a month.
And I say tens of thousands because car amortization/maintenance, road maintenance, oil subsidies, environmental cost (gigantic) probably clears 4 figures per year easily.
I live in the second largest city in the country.
In order from me to get from north of the golden gate bridge in the SF Bay Area (in Marin) to say, Cupertino, which I did regularly when I worked for Rancher Labs and MariaDB, I'd have had to take 3 separate modes of public transportation which I would need to weave together in a weird way, and was surprisingly expensive. It would also take 4 hours with appropriate adjustments in variation in route timing. Each way. So 8 hours in commute time alone. I didn't even try. The route would have been Home -> Ferry -> Walk from Ferry Building to King St -> Caltrain -> Cupertino'ish, then bus or walk.
OKOK, maybe I should have to live closer to take advantage of the marvels of modern public transportation...
When I worked at Docker, the Golden Gate transit bus stop was right outside of my house (less than a block.) It was $15 each way. The bus ride took an hour+ and dropped me off 2-6 blocks away, depending on the location of the office at the time. So 1.5 hours each way or 3 hours a day + $30 in fares.
Taking the bus was very limiting. Not only did I have to get to the bus at a specific time in the morning, but I had to leave before a certain time at night. What ended up happening was I would take the 5:45am bus, arriving in office around 7:30am and often take the 4pm or 5pm bus back, on average. This was the time I'd get to the office earlier than everyone, work away for a few hours without anyone there, but also leave earlier than most (but arrive home around the same time)
If there was an event in the evening, a spontaneous outing with co-workers, anything, which would happen after work, the busses were no longer running so I had to take the ferry which would take my across the bridge and ask my lovely wife to come pick me up (in a car) from the ferry terminal.
The ferry was shorter in terms of travel time (30 mins across the bay) but you have to get there 15 mins early to park and get in line to board and there's a variation in the schedule. Factor in potential traffic getting to the ferry terminal, and you're leaving to the Ferry 45 minutes prior to departure (for a 30 minutes ride.) So all told it's not much better, all in, but I am already in a car, driving. So no car savings in this scenario.
Even later (past 10pm, oh no!) I'd then I've to call an Uber, and it was incredibly expensive ($120+) in addition to being inconvenient for the Uber driver to have to drive so far away from their normal operating place.
I've tried to like Public transit. It was not time efficient or cost efficient in any way for me personally to do any of this. It was far too constraining, despite the benefits.
I don't think my situation is all too different from most people living outside of a major city or the suburbs of a major city in the united states. Trains and public transportation is definitely not the answer for me. Getting more transportation infrastructure in my area to make it more efficient is not appealing to me in the slightest.
HOWEVER, because of all of this, I am such a huge proponent of remote work. Remote work eliminates all of this shit, and, if you don't want to have a car or commute or have your car on the road, you don't have to.
I've put substantially less miles on all of my vehicles since 2020 as a result of the pandemic and the shift from remote work and I could not be happier. I started my truck and drove it for the first time this year today. That's amazing.
Using public transportation - for me - and a lot of America where population density is LOW in such a case is a waste of time for all of the reasons I listed.
It's not like there's a convenient alternative to be chosen, it's a country where for a lot of people the choice is either to have a car or to starve (by proxy, not being able to get to your job). Doesn't sound much like a choice about what Americans want to do.
This is obviously all the technology that Elon thinks is necessary to colonize Mars, and in each case he's doing the best he can to develop it on Earth. However its usefulness on Earth is a secondary concern.
Think the fact that the engineering problems Musk demonstrated some aptitude for finding solutions to were also vaguely related to his stated aspiration to colonise other planets actually perfectly fits the armchair speculation that Twitter is just an addictive distraction from hard science which he's pursuing out of sheer hubris, not because of any grand vision but because he said he could do better than the people in charge and people liked his posts
But, then again, "woke mind virus"--the cope, it's real.
Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.
The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.
Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.
That would be foolish if that was the point, but that's just a strawman.
Maybe he sold it to the holding company of the company formerly known as Twitter?
Elon is driven by emotions not rationality but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes back to the Twitter logo and brand after he realizes that nobody cares about his new logo and brand.
Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
The solution to getting Apple pointed in the right direction was (eventually) to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back. So, the solution here would seem to be - buy Bluesky and bring back Dorsey?
PayPal. SpaceX. SolarCity. Tesla. Boring. Elon Musk has a signature characteristic of building 10x-ethos companies from first principles at great personal & financial risk.
It's the Muskian Cycle: Innovate, try to garner investment, be laughed out of the room, make it work anyways, laugh all the way to the top of tens of thousands of millions of dollars of net worth. Then stuff all the capital into the next Big Thing.
Steve Jobs said something like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." As far as I can tell, each of Musk's successful ventures has inculcated iterative or multiplicative innovation into the fabric of technology, society, and interaction.
PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
SpaceX, with its obvious contributions to the fields of not only rocketry but every second-order industry around it, including testing/software, etc., has been a game-changer. Again, second-order, competition arises, humanity wins.
Ditto Tesla; not only the AI/ML/CV wizardry in the stack but plenty of other non-primary-field innovation and progress comes alongside (manufacturing, battery tech, etc.). I personally am not convinced EVs are some solution to the "climate problem," given the net-impact of mfg and power consumption, but it is a pre-requisite to self-sustainability that we move toward renewables, and with that optimism I move on.
I don't know a whole lot about the Solar operations at Tesla, but SpaceX + Starlink has made one of those incremental improvements in the internet access game. I've got my biggest gripe with this venture - based on Kessler Syndrome, I'm afraid of trashing our space-way by means of junk, though admittedly this fear comes from Stephenson's "Seveneves" and not facts or reality. Orbital tracking remains a significant challenge to the exploding private space industries.
Bringing us to the Boring Co. Literally nobody is complaining about that, but it's such a banal and useful and imperative tech to develop for the overall goal of Martian exploration, and it's not abstract - it exists and is doing what it needs to do.
Certainly 𝕏 (neé Twitter) and Xai are integral to Musk's overarching vision. For years, I've posited that someone should, or perhaps already has, been meticulously analyzing the entirety of Twitter's data. This data, rich in semantic analysis, interaction templating, linguistics, and more, could be instrumental in training and researching emergent systems. The rapid, mostly unfiltered, and bite-sized nature of the medium provides a unique lens into the human thought process, offering a potential approximation of how "thoughts" might interact.
It's possible we (humans) are destined to reclaim our collective consciousness through technology. It is also possible Elon is the anti-Christ, and we should be looking inward, meditating, and removing blockages to our lineage that has shrouded the collective consciousness, muted our heart and soul, and reduced us to a low level of being, what the Buddhists might consider Naraka.
There are a lot of FUD-spreaders about Neuralink, too, but listening to the technical discussions and grokking the science has me convinced they are approaching another sea change. There are hard engineering problems and there are impossible problems. Elon's companies take the hard ones and just work really hard, then get the solution. I see no reason why this approach to software platforms and dynamic interactivity interfaces would be any different.
People don't like change, and they love to complain about something. So I obviously understand why these > angry and disappointed types are out of the woodwork.
But the thing is, we should celebrate and adore the scientific progress, commitment to science & innovation over pure profit, and - in my opinion as a USA chap - dedication to as much free speech as possible.
Cringe, hate, love, whatever - the guy is objectively successful and objectively delivered on some cool shit. I wouldn't argue he is the most precise or accurate predictor, but he's quite the visionary. When the Starship gets to orbit, there'll be some more creative press and commentary, but I will be watching and as excited as when the Roadster Spaceman went to Mars. Or when I saw the first booster landings.
Everyone fails, we are defined by how hard we try.
Musk was removed as CEO within four months of his company merging with Confinity, who had already developed and written an MVP for PayPal.
This is a bit of a stretch. After that point, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal appears to largely have been cashing dividend checks.
Not that he does in all cases. Not even that the X looks bad. But the Twitter bird was both iconic and cheerful, and there was nothing wrong with it. Kicking it to the curb is the action of a foolish fool.
The 'vote' was for money, not for any sort of trust in Elon's leadership
I didn't follow this too closely so I really have no idea if internally the Twitter directors thought this was going to be good or if it was a 'dump it on the billionaire' thing
What I mean with my original post above is that Twitter is such a recognizable brand it must be worth multiple millions of dollars - to throw it away for the most bland and un-googleable thing "X" is... hard to understand
How does "x dot com" work to prop up the brand in daily communication and will people actually do it?
Because if they don't do both, then none of the content on x dot com matters, right?
Twitter needs nothing extra, no 'dot com' in any fashion, the brand lends itself exceedingly well to verbal and digital uses while consistently establishing and reinforcing the brand.
Really, he tanked most of the brand value if not all of it, it just doesn't "work".
Social media doesn't age well. Look at myspace. This will be controversial, but Google didn't get where it wanted/needed to be with Google+ and they ripped the cord out of the wall; it seemed like it was just google being google but it may have been genius.
I was also critical of FB/Meta buying Insta, I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate. FB is now for old people and Insta is probably at its peak. I will not be shocked when Meta launches a new video oriented application similar to TikTok or YouTube but somehow different.
Twitter has been toxic from day one, in fact I think the very idea of reducing discourse to something the size of a tweet is bad for the world. Lately it has been a cesspool, I get targeted political content that I absolutely never sought out, very obviously biased. That aside, do you somehow "rehabilitate" twitter? Or do you scuttle it and have a newness? Rebranding seems like the most realistic Hail Mary option, it can possibly be new without rebuilding everything. I don't think it will work and I don't really want it to, personally, but it's a bold play that is way better than continuing to watch it erode. I've heard 2 or 3 different media sources talking about twitter in the last week, partially about the "X" but also very openly about how it isn't the same thing and they don't like it. It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
I'm not a super active participant in or consumer of "social media" but I can't remember one having a second act, once it was no longer "cool" it seemed like the party was over, did I miss one that reinvented itself? Twitter is not cool anymore.
I'm still salty that they pulled out the Foursquare location backend and replaced it with Facebook's... whatever it is they replaced it with. Eleven years later and it's still less often correct than it was when Foursquare was providing the data.
The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.
Sure, sometimes those public announcements of events were "I hate minorities" or "yo look at my dick", but the platform was a global notice board that served a positive purpose in that narrow definition.
Would it have significantly less engagement and be "less successful" than Twitter? Absolutely no question. But it wouldn't be as much of a ridiculous hell of shitflinging and people arguing about stuff with a small character limit and less than ideal amounts of context
I'm sure it was not.
> but it sure was helpful for example for getting alerts to breaking news stories and such
Yes, presumably the breaking news that the government-corporate propaganda machine wanted us to see.
Seeing earthquakes and mass shootings and the like a few minutes before legacy media was an interesting novelty but not much actual practical value and not something that will bring down capitalism/billionaires/fascists/etc.
Nytimes is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They pretend to be better than something like Fox News but they’re the same thing. Their css and layout plus their history would have fools believe they are a good source of unbiased news. But they’re just as fake as the other news and cater to the left instead, which is anti-Musk for reasons.
Also with twitter and AI threatening to displace journalists I can’t imagine they’d like it much.
Not necessarily disagreeing with any predictions about what becomes of twitter/X though..
^ I think you need to read that
Throwing away powerful branding is just a hilariously bad call.
Perhaps it's not foolish. People have been leaving Twitter in a huff, slamming the door on their way out. "Twitter" was ruined according to numerous articles and memes. Rebranding might be going with the flow rather than fighting against the grain of "old Twitter".
It’s for Wall Street so he can take this dumpster fire public again, but with a whole bunch of buzzwords.
The wealthiest huckster in the whole entire world has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out and wielding his power in unaccountable ways, like any billionaire, but in obvious madness.
He broke. But nobody can do a thing to help, because billionaires are so powerful that the man is completely unaccountable to anyone or anything. It's worse than Ye. Elon broke, after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
There are reasons why societies don't set individuals up with this kind of power.
How do you know what he’s doing? Even if he’s said something positive about it and/or used it in the past doesn’t mean anything. I have positive things to say about psilocybin but haven’t done it in 20 years.
So if he's just endorsing its usage in a clinical context, that is way different than railing lines.
> Musk takes ketamine in small doses to treat depression and uses higher doses of the drug at social events
> huckster
> has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out
> after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
Do you have a credible source for this besides “trust me bro”?
I would be surprised if this wasn't in the billions of dollars.
And all discarded...
"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."
So searching for "xvideos" on google or DDG is going to be interesting going forward.
xvideos.com's account is @xvideoscom and is dated 2010.
He has no plan. How is that not painfully obvious at this point
Second of all, so what? What does that have to do with him just picking a Unicode character at 4am on a Saturday?
Your argument was this logo change was planned.
Okay, so he’s planning on turning it into a finance platform, and you’re saying it was “part of his master plan” to pick a logo at 4am that can’t be trademarked (because it’s just a Unicode character), such that any one can setup a login page for using the logo, to harvest X.com credentials, and they can’t do anything because they don’t own the trademark?
Brilliant plan.
Hey isn't he still majority owner of SpaceX (Jesus, there's the X again, somehow that hadn't dawned on me yet)?
Doesn't a huge proportion of their income come from government contracts?
Aren't there... you know, some laws about that exact thing?
Oh who'm I kidding, only the peons have to sweat about their lives being ruined by getting high on the weekends. Rich people are too good for that, of course.
Besides, he's probably got bullshit prescriptions for most of it.
Which by definition makes one an alcoholic.
Maybe because of the placebo effect. Chances are that if you were actually microdosing but didn't knew about it you wouldn't even notice it.
And he did it all so capriciously. There still doesn’t seem to be any reason for it.
Seriously, fuck that guy.
Flaunting your wealth attracts supporters in this day and age. People *like* rich assholes. Its fashionable, or at least it was in the 2010s. The pendulum of society is finally swinging back and demonizing this outrageous display of wealth but we're still in an age where people literally worship wealth. Not the "figuratively literally", I mean literally literally worship as per the prosperity gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology).
Its not just Elon Musk, but also Arkk's Cathie Wood and Bill Hwang.
----------------
The outrageous displays of wealth is proof that you've achieved God's good graces. Its basically Mandate of Heaven (Chinese concept) except the American version of it.
Once you make $999,999,999.99 dollars, congratulations you have won at life!
All future income you make beyond $1B goes to helping society.
You should probably get a say into where the money goes (so it aligns with your values, whatever those may be) but that's it. You are done enriching yourself personally.
I kind of like that (although I'm sure plenty of people hate it).
The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.
The problem in Norway's case is that the a lot of the richest people just moved to Switzerland or wherever...
Rabid liberalism is expensive.
Helping vaccinate the 3rd world and fund the WHO, I can see a changing the world. Ranting on the internet 24/7, not so much.
Most are just far more considered and cautious in how they go about it, because getting it wrong _hurts_everyone_, including themselves.
Most people getting into that group donthat by focussing their time on making money. This usually requires quite some dedication, which is a character trait you can't simply replace for going to the beach.
There are exceptions, but it's rare. And then there are the ones who got spoiled as a kid and were lucky with some decisions, like making some good real estate deals in Manhatten or finding the right partners to build some online payment service, who never learned about responsibility.
Even Zuckerberg who made his fortune with social media seem to post less than him. I have never even heard of Bezos posting while Gates probably only post as PR for his foundation.
You don't have to make change atomically. Eventual consistency is sufficient and very practical.
for some relevant humor.
> Anyone looking for a little horror story?
>
> I'm one of the only two in-house designer in the whole Twitter corporate, and I wasn't told anything about this rebranding...
2: (gone)https://kokoholt.com/
3: (gone)https://jp.linkedin.com/in/koko-watanabe-holt
4: (privated)https://www.instagram.com/kokoholt/
It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
The issue is when it becomes generic which is a difference concept.
"What kind of coke do you want?" "Dr. Pepper"
the best meme I have seen so far, is musk has out Gavin Belson'ed, Gavin Belson.
I think "Relentless" isn't terrible, but "Amazon" is vastly better for international branding.
May be in certain cultures. I have never made that connect. I am from India.
Sounds plausible to me.
(See _A Wind in The Door_ or _A Swiftly Tilting Planet_)
They are never going to change to the X logo.
People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.
If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app
Remember when everyone got pissed off because they doubled the characters? How many is on Twitter now, 5000? Markdown support too. And now they are planning banking, latex, some linkedin copy cat stuff...
In reality twitter is trying to become Facebook. Facebook only didn't had banking because FED/EU didn't liked the Libra idea.
This is just basic old man 101: trying to regain the glory days of your youth.
X is full of Xcrement
However, in Russia, Yandex is not just a search engine. It does everything and then some — search, cloud storage, email, maps & navigation, music streaming, a voice assistant with Amazon-Echo-like speakers, news, online advertising, event tickets, a marketplace, taxi, food delivery a-la Uber Eats, car sharing, online grocery store, e-scooter rentals in major cities, and this list goes on and on. And that Dzen ad-filled cringy blogging thing no one seems to like. But Yandex is literally inescapable, it's everywhere and you'd be somewhat excluding yourself from the society if you refuse to use any of their services.
This is an x-bird!
pretty much everyone I know on twitter is like "I don't feel like using it anymore." and only stays around due to the remainder of the network effect and the fundamental issue of transferring followers to another platform being hard.
and that it's a pretty bad branding doesn't help either, I don't want to eX my friends, imagine saying to your spouse you want to eX them etc.
and I mean people often act stupid but it has limits and if you first go around claiming you will buy twitter to protect free speech and then aX anything which tried to protect free speech in twitter from the inside and have way higher censorship numbers people might wonder if buying X products will aX them and their values and their health at some point. That he aXt anyone believing him to be a serious reliable person due to his public appearances probably won't help either.
It's funny because I was just explaining to my kids how we owe the internet definition of "spam" to Monty Python.
Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data)
NBA teams are about to start paying middle-of-the-road players $60M per year, hiring a full-time mod team to support an official mastodon instance should be a drop in the bucket for them.
Not saying that this would be better/worse for the public/players, but I certainly could see why the owners/companies would want to silo the players voice into platforms they themselves own.
> man what would be a great name for a new and fledgling platform?
> IDK, Mastodon sounds good.
Same people criticizing X for being a bad name. (it probably is, coz i dont know how they'll replace tweeting and retweets and all that, but still)
In the Europe case it serves as a central official communication hub. Since many public officials around the world are using twitter kinda like this I think it would make sense.
It could be using anything else as a platform but Mastodon is kind of an all in one package that would be easier to work with and interoperate.
It's talking about replacing all of the Twitter accounts of government agencies with accounts on a central mastodon instance for the government, that would serve the same "information broadcasting" purpose. I'm not talking about people having to create mastodon account or choose an instance or even use mastodon.
I think far more than .1% of people can read a public mastodon feed for information from their government
Government regulation and call for facist authoritarianism == evil
Europeans do not have free speech and it is making it populace much poorer. Don't hold it up as a standard to aspire to.
> #EU
> 5 people in the past 2 days
I see it's going viral.
Make it as easy to spin up as slack or discord for an org and you’re golden.
The usefulness would be a feed of official information, like what is being posted on Twitter by these same agencies right now.
But if they use something like Mastodon, everyone is free to read this information publicly or comment on it or do anything really.
X Corp - Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) - UAP Technology X Corp is one of the largest multinational conglomerates in the world. It is headquartered in the Western Hemisphere and was founded after the consolidated mega-corporate merger between ApostleCorp, The Allied Spacecraft Corporation (ASC), and Tyrell Corporation. It is currently the global leader in the retrieval and reverse-engineering of non-human intelligence technology (NHI).
Compare to our real-life version of X Corp's CEO, Linda Yaccarino:
Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.
(yesterday in what we used to call a Tweet, https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683213895463215104)
She must have been the previoius CEO at MONDO.com! You can do ANYTHING at Mondo.com!
Dammit, thanks, it was ZOMBO!
* Primary logo in top left of web changed to X
* Favicon still old Twitter logo
* Search bar says "Search Twitter"
* Meta title still says Twitter
* Tweet terminology still in use
* Footer updated to © 2023 X Corp.
* Dialog for upgrading to Twitter Blue now has a blue X logo but copy refers to Twitter Blue
* Communities still called Twitter Communities
What's the plan here and why so inconsistent?
He owns X.com, which was supposed to be his “everything app”. Has that plan been scrapped or is this a phased launch?
The x.com domain just redirects to twitter.com, not the other way around.
I can't imagine continuing to care about the designs, consistency, feature quality, etc. since it would be a futile and impossible fight.
def print_localized_string(str):
str = str.replace('Twitter', 'X')
print(str)That kind of brand exposure is literally priceless. Throwing is away is absolutely bonkers... it's just next-level idiocy.
We might be witnessing one of the greatest branding mistakes of all time.
The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).
I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.
If you haven't read The Founders by Jimmy Soni, I'd recommend it. Musk has had a fascination with "X" for a long long long time.
This is just his latest attempt to make a platform that does everything. It's what he wanted PayPal to be.
He's not going to sell Twitter as "X.com" because X is his grand plan.
It's riffing on the idea that Elon thinks "X" sounds cool but it actually just sounds like a porn site, that the valuation of Twitter would need to drop substantially for a porn site to be able to buy it (and that this rebrand is likely to further devalue Twitter), and that it would still be a terrible waste of money for Elon even if the fictional "plan" succeeded because he'd be selling at a substantial loss -- but in the context of the joke, it's implied that Elon wouldn't see it that way, he'd see it as a success.
It's meant to satirize Elon's plans for Twitter (and common defenses of Elon's mistakes that show up on HN) by implying that the downsides of "X" are so obvious that Elon would need to be aware of them and would need to be incorporating them into his "plan"; but even so he'd still be the type of person who would make a plan with obvious downsides (ie, selling his company off at a substantially lower price than he bought it for) and just not realize that those downsides exist. The joke frames itself as if it's going to be a defense of the rebrand, but then just goes on to describe an outcome that would be terrible for Elon anyway.
---
The actual non-joke reality is likely pretty much exactly what you say -- Elon has owned "x.com" for ages and has always wanted to name something "x.com" and he has a grand vision of an everything "brand" that probably mostly just seems cool to him and that he's convinced would seem cool to everyone else as well. But he's unable to see that to everyone else it just looks like he's rebranding into a porn site.
He's convinced himself that this is a master plan that could lead to his Everything App dominating the Internet. But to everyone else outside of his bubble, the downsides are obvious and the plan just looks silly.
And thanks for the book recommendation, I'll add it to my list :)
----
[0]: This is not a criticism of HN, I am myself much more prone to missing jokes than the average person and I regularly rely on context clues to figure out if someone online is joking -- and those context clues are usually missing from HN. So very much no shame to anyone for not catching a joke, I get the confusion and I also regularly miss the exact same jokes.
As an aside, I tend to only like the joke that Elon Musk is Phony Stark, the rest of the jokes just don't land with me for some reason. I've never really liked the guy and I'm happy it's a lot less difficult for me to articulate why now.
But yes, he wants X to be WeChat.
He could have sold x.com for a huge amount or built his own OnlyFans.
Also keep in mind the opportunities to regain advertiser trust by pivoting the content focus; many advertisers may prefer having their products shown next to pornography instead of nazis.
As I write this, it hits a Godaddy parking page. According to this[0] tweet[1], it's been a Godaddy site, a dead link, a redirect, and now a godaddy site again.
Shambles.
[0] https://twitter.com/rothschildmd/status/1683289016723202050
[1] No, I'm not calling them X's. That name is saved for those who broke my heart, made me cry, and left me binge watching Notting Hill.
Also the Twitter sign-in page says "X - Sign into Twitter".
When they manage to serve a redirect instead of a free GoDaddy domain parking page, the redirect was to ".twitter.com". Complete with broken leading dot.
Some people have assumed this is just him trolling, but I have no idea anymore...
Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?
Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
The non-technical tech sphere hasn't really moved though, but maybe my circles are quite different to yours.
(The dynamic is very different when it's voluntary and feels like supporting a community, though, and in practice it's going to be a few whales making donations)
Not everything has to be about making money, you realise.
That's not really how it works. Federation happens ~by default in general; restriction is reactive, not proactive.
But you still breathe, right?
Why pay (as much) to advertise to an empt(ier) room?
I think this is pretty optimistic thinking. "Oh no, I can't pick my way through a bunch of bigoted garbage to which the owner responds 'Concerning' or read Marc Andreesen being deeply weird or see 30,000 reply guys to Paul Graham hawking shitcoins, whatever will I do?" is, I think, probably okay at this point.
Having the thinkfluencey types before the spam and impersonation taps were turned on to full was probably valuable; now Twitter is getting the stink on it and that's hard to wash off.
Personally speaking, Bluesky picked up pretty much everybody I care to talk to and remaining on Twitter in a material capacity is a flag that I probably don't want to hear from you.
The conversation was about X being built from the ground up and attracting new users which is much harder.
BlueSky only started gaining traction after Musk started pissing people off, doubt prag would have done the same.
To you.
Verification was serviceable, now it is harmful. There is a big difference there. Even if formerly was not perfect.
Instead of the top replies to popular posts being tweets that have been boosted by a signal that arguably indicates quality (views, likes, retweets, replies of their own) tweets are boosted by a signal of the opposite - the poster's willingness to pay for visibility of content that couldn't rise to the top on its own merits or that of its poster.
Replies to popular content are now a wasteland for interesting content or discussion unless you've mass-blocked Twitter Blue subscribers - definitely harmful.
There isn't a "good" chance. It's extraordinarily, extremely rare that someone makes such a genius play that other experts consider it foolish. These events in sport buisness or other areas are often stuff of legend because of how rare they are. Sure, if this play works out and turns to have been undoubtably right, it will be studied for years in buisness schools around the world. But up until that moment, we can be reasonably sure that this isnt one of those exceptionally rare cases
API rate limits for external API clients sure. API rate limits for their own application is insane (caveat, super high rate limits to prevent against truly exceptional use would be fine, but anything that impacts even the 98% user is nuts).
There’s no argument for it. Every goal of these sites is to increase time on site. A rate limit that kicked normal users of the site off in 10 minutes is… well, a truly and unambiguously bad choice.
> By December 17, Twitter was blocking some links to Mastodon as being "potentially harmful" or "malware".
Other top contenders
What's everyone's timetable for either shutdown or sell-off of twitter, 18 months. Ad revenue will continue to shrink, effective 'cost per' rates will decrease while Ex-Twitter will try to squeeze out stable or higher, likely push brands toward longer term campaign spend, engagements so as to reflect long-term dollars on a balance sheet.
Only reasonable counterpoint would be if this is part of a strategy to convert X to a portal with Ex-Twitter being one app/platform tied to central identity graph with other services/platforms to be connected later.
I’m sure he could raise a few billion via text message by the weekend if he wanted to.
Given Musk’s success in other ventures and no prominent Twitter competitor for journalists or government orgs to share quick breaking news updates, the show goes on.
If Musk gets bored and moves on though, then I think your timeline is spot on.
He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings and hailing a taxi.
I do agree though, it doesn't feel like renaming it to X is the right approach if this is the longer term vision. Personally I would have thought about Twitter X with these additional services and a much slower migration to X to align with the Everything App vision.
This was after he took over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
This was before.
Trivial, yes, but does show how it can be an annoyance even through simple things.
This has happened. Impression count has been decimated for anyone without a check. Bonus points if you've ever blocked Elon or posted with a sentiment he disagrees with.
I’m not convinced, this is a bit complex, conspiratorial and nonsensical for me. When the simpler explanation is that Elon has just mismanaged the company.
This is qanon-level stuff man, come on.
Twitter also allows for the real-time dissemination of information unfavorable to corporations, like during outages and accidents, and the widespread dissemination of less time-sensitive information by journalists who aren't beholden to corporate media gatekeepers.
Elon Musk's various ventures rely heavily on buy-in from the government - SpaceX relies on NASA's resources, Tesla has only been profitable because of generous renewable energy grants, and even Paypal benefited from lax oversight from financial regulators. That there is likely a relationship is less "Pizzagate" and more "Trump and Russian interference." And if you're going to pretend that that's not a damning analogy, all that does is expose how unserious you are about the matter.
All of that aside, there is also the matter of Musk 1) having had a checkered history with Twitter as it was, including its users, and 2) not having actually wanted to buy Twitter after his initial due diligence. Considering that his actions after completing the deal included firing most of the workforce, stripping users of multiple privileges, and stripping the company itself of its branding, it's not at all farfetched to conclude that he has no intention of simply renovating Twitter, but instead means to strip it down to studs or foundation and build a gaudy temple to his own warped sense of entrepreneurship. This is, after all, the man who insisted that the model names of his cars spell out "S3XY".
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-govern...
Again, I am certain this is incompetence rather than conspiracy
In any case, they would rather have a tool they can control (just get Twitter to shadowban tweets about democracy) that their population uses seems better than a void.
It would be like Google changing the Google name to Alphabet, or to "A.com" or something. Imagine throwing away "to Google something" in an effort to popularize a big, story-less, meaningless name.
I think that describes nearly all of his public behavior over the last few years.
tweet -> excrete
Honestly, not a bad idea. If you are the world's richest person you might as well have a company that can actually make money.
(I also don't think that hypothesis makes a lick of sense -- Apple+Google, not any particular app, is the "WeChat of the west".)
That being said, Wechat payments are also rife with every form of scam, irreversibility, and fake QR code issues that people in the West warn about. That (and the AML stuff) is why it seems to be getting more scrutiny by the Chinese govt.
For p2b, Apply Pay lets me tap my power button twice and hold it next to the payment terminal. Hard to get lower friction than that.
For p2p, the space is already saturated (Zelle, Venmo, etc.) It's unclear why I would want to use Twitter -- sorry, x -- for this in particular. Also, with the launch of FedNow, the days of new entrant intermediaries in the USA are coming to a close.
Finally, as Goldman Sachs just learned, consumer banking is a brutal business. I think the closest they got to building anything like breaking into consumer credit/banking was becoming the bank that supported the Apple-branded credit card.
There is a massive distance between an idea and its successful execution. Most of the success comes from execution, not the original idea.
But who would want those qualities in a bank? Banks should be boring.
It’s more like hours or days under Elon. Maybe weeks but certainly not years.
People in this thread are all saying this is part of his master plan to get Twitter/X to be worth hundreds of billions and then to sell it and walk away. I don't see any reason why he would sell and walk away if he manages to pull it off.
This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frustrating to watch people continuously buy into his complete lack of vision or execution.
"Hey, look over there! I'll make the 6 Million Dollar Man!"
I'm pretty sure he just watches 80s TV for vaporware announcement ideas to use when there's bad press to suppress.
Tesla and SpaceX and StarLink are really impressive from a "had a vision for something on a broadly positive world-changing scale, successfully executed it" perspective.
With Twitter, I'm not sure he actually has a vision.
The best realistic pro-Musk argument you can make is that he can be a real ass, but he's an ass whose companies tend to do amazing things. With Twitter, the best I can come up with is that he had a personal grudge against the platform, and the means to take pattiness to unheard of scales.
I would hazard a guess that pre-Musk Twitter, for whatever reason, had fears around bringing payments onto the service, particularly in the case of sexual content and resolving that, but this led to a situation where other services spring up to fill that void.
However, Twitter Blue was a case of having your cake-and-eating-it-too where I think Musk wanted a story on cash flow not dependent on ads ASAP. In truth, Twitter Blue should've exclusively been a service tier for creators who want to monetize content on Twitter; a case naturally requiring verificaiton. That would've given an incentive and a rationale to the extant pre-Musk creator class that bemoaned its introduction, but Musk really fucked that up by trying to exploit Right wing allegations of Twitter being biased towards the Left (which it never was, rather, the reverse was true[0]) to make up for freaking out advertisers.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
I'm not sure what you mean by its niche. There are way more Instagram users than Twitter ones, and they are way more exposed to products. It sounds like a much better fit for Instagram than Twitter.
Look, everyone makes mistakes, but the whole Twitter thing, from the beginning, has been the equivalent of hiring a fry cook and then he sticks his fucking hand in the fryer, on purpose, on day 1. Then he sticks the other hand in.
You wouldn't say that dude's a genius chef—or, if he ever was, he's either gone nuts or is on way too many drugs to trust with anything. Or both.
Musk is cramming the social media app with all of those useless buzzwords that Wall Street loves. When he IPOs it, you can bet it will have AI, Finance, and depending on its standing then, Crypto in the prospectus. It will be hot trash but the markets will lap it up as they always do.
You are literally not the audience for these shenanigans.
As for looking like a fool, I think we can all agree that Musk is past that.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
That doesn’t mean this twitter thing is going to succeed, but your always “dumb move” comment is not very well founded based on musks history.
The entire tone of voice of this thread is exactly what people said about Tesla 5 years ago and why so many were shorting it. Turns out - that was a bad move.
But EVs and private space flight are useful things with demand and large government subsidies. There's little demand to whatever he wants to do with Twitter
A reminder that Elon had to be sued into buying this company.
In the normal world, this is called being really stupid and bad at business
The stock was absurd -- cars with QA issues and lots of recalls outperforming stocks like Ford or Toyota, companies with decades of making reliable vehicles.
Everyone knew it was overvalued by a long shot, and if Musk sold it would crater. So create a headline grabbing buy that would justify shedding tons of shares, then back out and keep the $$$. When TSLA later has a correction he can just ignore it -- got his money already -- and launch some buybacks on the cheap.
Except he couldn't back out.
Seems easier to do that without buying Twitter. He has enough reach that anything he talks about gets fanboy traction, there's no value into Twitter's infrastructure for this, and converting tweeters into everything app users is possible, but a stretch.
Plus the ship has sailed for an everything app outside China.
And as someone who thought it was awesome he took a drag on Rogan: I hope the government retracts his security clearance and he has to divest his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla. Or Tesla finds a way to separate their identity from Musk. Maybe the FSD fiasco will create a path to that.
I hope and believe, at this point, SpaceX and Tesla are thriving despite Elon and have proper adult management.
Not sure if the person 'embarrassed' to drive a Tesla has looked into the history of other car companies.
It seems like the market will remove him from power soon, but the state could probably do it more efficiently.
As for the rest -- I don't think his choices are consistent with CEO leadership roles across the companies he's in. Twitter & Tesla have issues, Tesla's largely revolving around AutoPilot & FSD -- and eventually the market and/or Boards and/or his creditors will see a change in the risk and ROI of his leadership.
SpaceX seems to run pretty smoothly. Elon's halo is massive, and the lift he provided to Tesla and the EV market, in particular, can't be underestimated. But, IMO, there's no way this ends smoothly and happily, 10 years hence, given how he's acting in at least the Twitter corner of his field.
As for the previous leadership at Twitter and their censorship / collusion with governments -- yeah, that sucked, but it grants Elon nothing at all. Different shit, different day.
Another example of that btw is Julian Assange, he was praised as a hero until he revealed some corruption in the side of the 'good guys' since then he is a russian agent and evil....
I mean what does the man even do all day while his companies are running themselves? Make bad Elden Ring builds and rampage on Twitter like he’s in the depths of a coke binge, I guess. In terms of actual responsibility for designing and building the cars themselves, he has very little to truthfully speak of.
Then he started fucking around with trying to fool the financial system by pumping and dumping stocks/cryptocurrencies, and started calling people pedophiles randomly and I'm guessing it was somewhere there I started to see him differently.
Edit: I'm ejecting this thread, Musk discourse is so divorced from rational conversation, the hatred (and admiration) is too overpowering for too many.
Everyone has a need for acceptance and is driven by their ego. I think Musk's issues may lie a bit beyond those.
I don't understand the tendency to portray Elon Musk like a civil rights leader.
He thinks that every idea he has is a good idea, simply because he had it, and therefore his ability to think on his feet and come up with and try new ideas is a virtue; he doesn't understand having to build and maintain something, to provide stability and consistency, because that would mean not using all of his new great ideas.
Unfortunately, all of his ideas sound like he came up with them while sitting around in his mom's basement getting high and saying "wouldn't it be cool if...", so I guess we'll see how this all bears out. My biggest hope is that people see him for who he really is: an insecure and entitled man-child who's never been told no.
Either way, despite how polarized it may have been, it was valuable for many groups and a large number of genuinely grassroots social & artistic movements originated there or effectively used it. Destroying those doesn't seem like a clear cut positive for humanity, as you're framing it.
You can't have an actual discussion with such a small character limit. However it's easy to spout off nonsense bullshit in a small character limit. And then no one can really argue with you because it takes more words to actually back things up. Thus it's really easy to spread bullshit and the people who are more susceptible just eat it up as they can only stay focused for a few sentences anyway.
TikTok was kind of the same way and it drove me crazy up until the last year, because the comment limit was so short (and the fact that you can't really see a thread properly, just like twitter.) The user base of tiktok seems to have vastly changed over the last year (or maybe they keep improving their algo so much I just don't encounter it) but I've gotten used to the limit because people aren't arguing as much they are just genuinely commenting on a video.
I was always a fan of Reddit (until recently) because it was just a message board- you could actually read real thoughts and have a formatted threaded discussion (like on HN).
I think social media itself is the problem, not the post length.
Letting everyone talk is free speech. On the street you walk away from the lunatic, but with social media they find their kind and yell together.
Which one would the social media algorithms promote?
I credit algorithmic timelines as one of the primary factors in today's hyper-polarization. Twitter was one of the more influential ones, especially when coupled with a short character limit that prohibits deep discourse and as others have mentioned a lack of comment threads or other tools to organize ideas. The whole thing promote vapid sound bite meme-think, which best fits fanaticism and trolling.
Facebook and YouTube are the other big mass-lobotomizing engines. The mechanism is largely the same-- promoting things that maximize engagement which means the most inflammatory or ridiculous ideas.
It also might have been an impulsive decision to become relevant in “new tech” at the same time (why would he care so much about this, boredom?). Ultimately he probably just wanted to get out of that impulsive deal again though but it was too late.
Lastly he probably also had/has some WeChat ambitions.
We can see how most of these potential goals are now falling apart spectacularly due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego.
He seems to have succeeded in the first case though, the “moderated”/“mostly sane”(?) free speech “town square” basically destroyed and replaced by an increasingly irrelevant echo chamber for his greater brand.
My own account is still in a banned state for telling Microsoft they suck for making their OS bloated. Before I was off twitter, because fuck deleting a reasonable tweet to appease some censorship bot and its review team, twitter was less and less 'free' for anyone not worshiping that rich ass-hat.
So while Twitter is indeed a toxic hellhole, it is oftentimes the only way you can directly attempt to communicate with "the right people" in an organization.
they even censored the president of your country but no Musk is the evil lol. Somehow I can understand that the average joe is deep into politics and biased because they want their team to win but in HN, between engineers, that like facts and concepts that are abstract can't we just say that censoring the POTUS was something unseen in any kind of social media platform and that was probably the biggest event that ever happened? whatever we think of the guy, he got trough where he was through the voices of millions of american and just banning those is a danger to freedom and democracy
You have to view these billionaires as toddlers. They never hear a simple “no”, and when they do they go apoplectic.
I think it's a relatively universal human trait to resent dissent, these guys just have more resources to make their distate known.
Most people when they hear “no” feel a little upset and get over it.
When a narcissist hears “no” he suffers a narcissistic injury and seeks revenge.
When a narcissistic billionaire hears “no”… well, buckle up. 1/6 showed us how bad that can get.
Which is also the story of Twitter and Musk.
I think it didn't even scratch the surface of how bad it can get. But it was already plenty bad.
Just saying yes as a parent doesn’t help them learn to cope with it. Rather a close similarity to GP’s point!
A few times a day.
> I find it pretty common to get a visceral reaction when I disagree with people,
I only find this common with people who are very sensitive (not that there is anything at all wrong with that). An interesting corollary I've found as well: very sensitive people tend to think the rest of the normal world is equally as sensitive (something I've picked up from having a very sensitive partner for over 5 years now; a partner who has many very sensitive friends); they somehow seem to forget that countries like Germany have people that are super direct as the norm.
> I think it's a relatively universal human trait to resent dissent
I hear far "worse" from good friends on the spectrum or from Germany or Russia and it's rather easy to chalk it up to them just communicating in a different way.
None of this should ever apply to any even moderately-adjusted individual beyond childhood. Certainly not as an adult.
One they are billionaires, hearing no is likely exceedingly rare, however to get to prestige, I'm certain they heard no many many times (or the equivalent, say "no way you can do that") so they're so used to people objecting and they succeed anyway - Tesla, SpaceX come to mind here - that no just makes them want to double down on what they're doing, combined with the fact that their inner circle at this point likely isn't saying no very often, if at all, directly to the person at hand, it makes them very resistant to real feedback
It doesn't have to be just billionaires, one of the startups I worked in had a leadership culture like this. I ended up leaving after the new person I was reporting to took this to an extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
It looks like this isn't a rebranding so much as making an "everything app".
> On October 4, 2022, Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app".[28] This has been linked to x.com.[29] In conversation with Ron Baron a month later, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world."[30]
Well, it'll be interesting whether he succeeds or fails. But this does not look like it is impulsive.
A rebranding would make more sense at the point where you actually roll out those everything features. Him being a marketing engineer, I guess he just had to stay in the conversation this week.
those who are already looking at him skeptically will not care and were already on the way out / not using the app.
dumb, but riding the hype train is really his only play IMO.
The impulsiveness and crowd sourcing writes the headline itself.
I’m not implying it’s a super calculated masterplan, more that he just knows it’ll grab headlines and mindshare cheaper than any paid marketing launch ever could.
Elon's company merged with Confinity. Confinity was already well underway with PayPal (owned trademarks, patents, and the domain name) at the time of the merger, and notably, had a working MVP.
I say "notably" because when Elon was initially selected as CEO, he spent his tenure trying to throw away this working MVP because it was written in Java on Solaris, which he didn't know, so he wanted it rewritten in Classic ASP so he could better understand the codebase.
A few months (four, IIRC) of stubbornness about that, and the board had had enough, and removed him as the CEO.
Believe it or not, with all that being said, it still looks like it is impulsive.
Years ago I remember reading something about the Chinese microblogging sites and it was mentioned "these sites also have a character limits. However, b/c in Chinese a character can be an entire word, the 'word limits' are much longer."
Moving to the 4000 character limit feels very much a response to the above.
What exactly is it meant for then if not serious discussion?
> We have blogs for that.
You mean the one sided discussions? Also not every thought is worthy of a blog post, but is worthy of being put out there.
> Nobody wants to read it for an interesting article about geopolitics- foreignaffairs.com already exists
Geopolitics isn't the only thing longer convos are for... The problem with pre-Musk/4000 char limit Twitter is that nuances are heavily lost because of the lack of characters and that nobody wants to do thread storms.
> Know your audience.
Ironic.
All other types of discussion. Promoting serious discussion elsewhere.
Whether or not that was what the platform was meant for, it was what it was. And as far as I heard, our country was not the only one where this was happening.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-yo...
They made Unicode code points below U+1100 count as 1/280 of the character limit, and code points above it count as 1/140 of the character limit.
> due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego
Unfortunately, I think it's worse than that. My belief is that it's manic phases caused by bipolar disorder. If you squint and chart these 'manic' decisions, it seems to be about every 4-5 months. In between he'll often (though not always) post some self-reflective and more 'down' things and be generally more quiet (remember the diet-coke and gun pics?). Then, like with many bipolar sufferers, he'll get 'manic' again and do these kinda things to his businesses and to those around him who care. His personal life is famously a mess.
I want to be clear, I'm not a shrink, I have no degrees in this, and I'm 'diagnosing' this very far removed from the guy. But I do have a few bipolar people in my life and, to me, the parallels are very striking.
I feel for him in that way. Despite all the money and fame, the disease that I suspect he suffers from (with, again, low evidence) is a very tough one to accept. Of the people in my own life that suffer from it, none have moved past a confirmed diagnosis and started the long road to recovery and acceptance.
Does it seem like manic? Yes. But when this behavior is persistent, not sure bipolar is the diagnosis per se.
> Sunday, on Twitter, Musk was also asked if he was bipolar, to which Musk replied, “yeah,” but then he explained further, saying his psychological highs and lows are associated with actual ups and downs in his life.
> “Maybe not medically tho,” says his tweet. “Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-tweeted-bip...
Mixed episodes are no joke, I've experienced a couple and hope to never do so again.
We’re not morally responsible for the fact some of us may have mental disorders (some like OCD which I have won’t leave us entirely), so stealing which we would be morally responsible for is worse than having a mental disorder.
However, having a mental disorder would be worse than stealing in terms of its consequences (we just can’t get rid of it no matter how much we try).
(At least I think it makes sense to accept both of your statements that way since I think having a large ego is morally bad independently of any consequences.)
I think that Mr. Musk is an undiluted asshole and one of the worst douchebags to ever grace our planet, which he has proven again and again.
But analyzing his mental condition is sure as shit not up to me or to anybody else.
After all, he proved again and again what a sad excuse of a human being he is.
But I don't think it's OK to judge his mental state as an outsider.
Curious; not trying to bust your balls.
Why not? Am I unallowed to suggest that Howard Hughes had OCD? That Kurt Gödel was paranoid?
Submitting a hypothesis about some’s mental condition is a reasonable thing to do, given that you have a substantial body of evidence in the form of behavioural reports.
I don’t find the above argument convincing, but only because it’s vague and lacks specific examples - not because it’s ”not okay.”
I don't like Musk, nor do I trust the things he says, but I usually err on the side of granting people some humanity.
Cool your jets, man!
Musk has done plenty of good, for the country and the world. I can think of plenty, plenty others who have accomplished nothing but feel entitled to run other peoples' lives.
X.com, a payments company, was Musk's second company formed in 1999. In March 2000 PayPal was formed by the merger X.com with Thiel and Levchin's Continuity. Musk was the initial CEO, but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia. October 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for US$1.5 billion
Musk repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017
In October 2022, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world"
Other notes:
- Musk is a fan of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin
- Starlink is an independent internet backbone that can be access from anywhere on earth
- Starlink plans to separate from SpaceX and IPO. Funds from the IPO is how SpaceX plans to pay for the Mars project
He's not or rather he's in favor of being able to say anything he wants and shutting up anyone who says what he doesn't like (such as his jet's location or anything he views as woke).
Actually, he's also fine with government censorship as long as they're not censoring him or people he likes. Twitter obeying government censorship requests have gone way up since he took over.
Twitter honoring censorship requests from the Indian government has gone up from 20% to 90%:
* https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
Musk defended censorship of the Turkish opposition saying he "had no choice". Jimmy Wales disagreed:
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/musk-defends-ena...
These kinds of stuff always surprise me, like are you so scared of the CEO that you can only replace them on vacation?
What do you think now ?
Yes -- once, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But for creating a highly successful company twice, luck can't be a similarly major explanation, since it isn't "bound to happen" that someone who was highly successful once will be highly successful again. Because the number of people with one highly successful company is very small, unlike the number of people with zero highly successful companies. (If you throw a die ten times and get a six ten times, that is massive luck, which means that you almost certainly won't manage to do it again.)
So when people have one successful company, that may well be partly due to sheer luck, but if so, on their second attempt they almost certainly won't be so lucky. That's exactly what Jeff Bezos shows with Blue Origin. He started earlier than Musk did with SpaceX, had more money, and still is far less successful.
It totally is bound to happen to someone. They get the right people involved and find the right contracts and make the right decision, it’s mostly timing.
The Amazon.com e-commerce store, Kindle (category-defining), the Amazon fulfillment network (rivaling UPS/FedEx), and of course AWS. That's at least 4 distinct very successful companies. But the way in which one success enabled the next is more obvious, so you don't want to separate them.
The comparison to Gates is just pathetic -- instead of Twitter and private space programs, his second act has been focused on things like food security, HIV/AIDS, and polio.
> The Amazon.com e-commerce store
This was mostly a copy of eBay which used the existing Amazon market dominance.
> Kindle (category-defining)
Kindle came after the excellent Sony e-book readers. The reason why Kindle was so much more successful was the existing market dominance of Amazon combined with the fact that they used a proprietary Kindle-specific file format to squash the competition.
> The comparison to Gates is just pathetic -- instead of Twitter and private space programs, his second act has been focused on things like food security, HIV/AIDS, and polio.
SpaceX was not a "second act", except if you count PayPal as his first successful company. SpaceX was founded before Tesla. They do offer a global satellite network which brings Internet to remote areas around the world. That's quite different from a mere "private space program". As for the Gates foundation: This is not a profit driven company, so it is difficult to estimate how successful it is relative to the funds it has. I was talking about Musk's abilities as a founder and manager, not about altruism. (He definitely did things which people might classify as altruistic, such as paying for Ukraine's Starlink access for several months.)
They literally are separate companies. There's no debate to be had here. Your assertion is just not true.
> I was talking about Musk's abilities as a founder and manager, not about altruism.
Gates doesn't fire and forget. He plays an active role in his foundation.
You can also be lucky several times.
He is, and the success of SpaceX compared to Blue Origin is explained by the difference between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
> You can also be lucky several times.
Yes, but that's very improbable.
That one specific person will be very lucky multiple times is indeed improbable, but that someone will be lucky will over time be expected.
For all we know she is "running" SpaceX in the sense that she handles most smaller day-to-day decisions, but there is no evidence that she makes the large and important decisions about Starship and Starlink. All the evidence points to Musk making those decisions. It is even doubtful if she is more capable by herself than Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, since she hasn't started a large successful company, unlike Bezos. The situation is probably similar for Linda Yaccarino, the new Twitter CEO. For the big decisions, Musk remains in charge.
Elon is self described with Aspergers Syndrome. This is from an interview :
“Other features of Asperger's syndrome include difficulty interacting with peers, inappropriate social or emotional behavior, and engaging in repetitive routines. Both children and adults with Asperger's syndrome are at an increased risk for depression, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mood and anxiety disorders, and other mental health disorders.”
Maybe he is really being paid by the Saudis to intentionally ruin Twitter to reduce the freedom of speech
This is giving me "homophobes are actually raging homosexuals" energy.
Not sure what kind of rationale could arrive at ur conclusion
Because the sell the whole time was to let people roleplay as famous people. And that would have worked a bit more if the actual celebrities didn't immediately respond with "ew, no"
The features are ... pretty crummy. Longform tweets nobody wants to read, up to what ... 40 hour videos that nobody will watch. A basic functionality like edit?
And now the funniest one: getting paid to tweet, which the biggest accounts on Twitter got joke RPM to entice people to sign up for blue. I feel really bad for anyone who thinks they're going to make their $8 back.
He can't get any of this right and he seriously is already talking about becoming a bank or payment system? Good luck.
Conspiracy theories aside, one has to wonder how all the geniuses running the sovereign wealth funds and investment banks that backed his Twitter takeover missed all the red flags. It's almost as if they don't have any idea what they are doing. Or they really bought into a cult of personality rather than a business strategy.
https://i.imgur.com/aL0ap8h.png
I'm clicking the X but the modal won't go away
Looking forward also to the news outlets having to talk about famous people and politicians having X'd about a topic on X.
X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.
SoftBank - time to double down !!!!.
> text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.[1]
Twitter does public messaging and DMs, but is not a chat platform and doesn't have any of the other features of WeChat.
To become a SuperApp, X will need a lot of additional features: X will need enough features to both convince new users to join the platform AND keep them using it for most of their daily needs. That would mean Twitter would need to replace WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram when people want to chat with friends and businesses.
That would require a lot of new Twitter users! Twitter is noisy, but quite small for a social media.
Based on the track record of Twitter acquisition and subsequent changes, I don't see how Elon is going to massively increase the user base to have enough critical mass to make this happen.
Wechat is successful and became a de-facto "everything app" in great part because it's extremely useful to the Chinese government as a way to monitor and control its populace.
Anecdotally, in Japan and SEA we have Line which tries to be an everything and fails everything but the messaging itself because individual components are simply better elsewhere. AFAIK it's losing market to Whatsapp and Telegram pretty badly these days too.
Launching a different app is not that much more difficult than going to a different window within an app. It's almost like we already have everything apps in the form of app stores and web browsers huh!
I recall that LINE's infrastructure wasn't built for multi-device use, and since the focus is needed for reliability, the underlying infrastructure wasn't touched or improved. There is a session at LINE Dev Day 2019 [1] that addressed this issue, though I still don't see much progress ever since
* Fire 90% of the workforce
* Get clowned on every day on the very platform you own
* Lose half of your advertising revenue because you insist on platforming fascists
* Destroy any brand recognition you had, including having created a damn verb out of it
* Have your puppet CEO spout some vapid shit about your new platform being all about AI
* Have your logo be blatant copyright infringement of a well known typeface
Eagerly awaiting Paul Graham to tell everyone how Elon is a complete genius and that he puts rockets into space, making a WeChat clone can't be this complicated.
Every single one of them, clowns failing upwards
Even Zuck knew that after the company rebranded as Meta, Facebook is still Facebook.
Well the good thing is that there is room for a replacement, although it's going to be tougher than 15 years ago because the tech and legal landscape has changed and VC are much less inclined to fund social media. Threads had a huge start but it's already shedding users and Bluesky is already ultra partisan.
"Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic"
> X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered > in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking...
How do we call videos from X? xvideos?
It's a funny joke, but is actually one of the main reasons I stopped using Twitter. The onlyfans spam got really bad.
Go to the Twitter.com on mobile in a private browsing window or basically be not logged in. The standard popup will come up asking you to logon.
In the top left is a small X you can click to close this popup and continue to twitter without loggin in. In the center top left is the new X logo which is just slightly larger. I immediately clicked on the larger X and of course nothing happened. I then realized it was the smaller but very similar X in the upper left hand corner I needed to click to close the popup.
How is the basic design this bad?
Actually the X logo itself is good on it's own terms. And would be great for a newcomer startup, but not for Twitter. Twitter is the household name. This looks like a midlife crisis.
Not to mention that we speak of "tweets" and "retweets", not "mini-posts on Twitter" and "shares on Twitter"...
But they certainly are throwing away the Twitter brand.
I remember when Facebook turned into Meta. Made it much easier to ignore them.
Lately I've been mostly supportive of things Musk was doing with Twitter, but this rebranding thing is just insane. I almost think it's trolling to generate buzz and the name change will be reverted in a few days.
Elon seems to be trying hard to break that rule, as he seems to be working to achieve all of this in a single generation.
I guess this kind of rebranding must be very appreciated by competing platforms.
Good luck with that. I was permanently banned from Twitter for reporting Russian terrorist content.
If you fancy being locked out of your money for apparently a thought crime, then X (or rather Z) is for you, comrades.
The entire banking system is for you*
It's quite different from payment apps (my father used PayPal once to collect a 7k payment, spent 3k in lawyer fees to get the money).
I can't picture it. So far it looks like they're acting like a FAANG in a "fake it til you make it" move to try to attract money. But not only do they not have the scale, Twitter is also losing its place as the reference app for live text updates.
Problem is that the CCP is basically intimately tied to it so WeChat has massive advantages there.
The problem for Musk is that the US, EU, UK, AU etc are not remotely interested in a mainstream commerce platform that takes a lax approach to KYC/AML.
And despite Musk's delusions the "blue tick" program is not a suitable verification foundation to build payments on top of.
I've switched banks 3 times over four decades, ISP more times than that, comms channels a couple of times as well (most recently due to Musk's acquisition of Twitter) and will probably do so again at least once. Tying it all together with an 'everything app' seems like a stupendously stupid move to me (from the consumers perspective). Especially with an unhinged guy like Musk at the helm.
We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3].
But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjJaFG63Hlo
[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/opena...
> "everything must be controlled by me, not by you"
Right, the end goal I had in mind for "the everything app" is the control of the software (including communication), the data and the payment system by the same company.
Few companies have achieved that outside of China. I'm thinking, Apple, Google, Samsung in Korea maybe? And no one I know personally is fully tied to one ecosystem. My friends only use the individual services they need. Becoming WeChat will not happen.
Even the idea of Twitter growing into a Google size company seems completely unrealistic. Meta struggles with achieving this and right now they're more popular than Twitter.
Nobody (in power) want's a (foreign) app that can essentially ban a citizen from live arbitrarily.
Regulators are no longer asleep at the wheel when it comes to tech, as can be seen on the HN front page every other day, and in this case it might be better to have nothing than something controlled by Elon Musk.
Such an App is a political risk and the only reason it works in China is because it's basically an extension of the governemnt.
It is an X-company!
Well, it's...it's, ah...probably pining for the fjordsI think Twitter had among the best brands across social media, similar with HBO in entertainment. To use a generic letter instead of all of the goodwill that the brand and accompanying verbs had seems really ridiculous.
I had not been using Twitter much before he bought it, and I use Mastodon a bit, but ironically I started using Twitter/X more after he bought it.
There are a few things that give me hope for the future: Twitter/X strongly supporting free speech, and the presidential campaigns of Kennedy and Cornel West. I think the corporate-democrats and the corporate-republicans are a sign of a ruined country. Our country is being looted as we watch.
That is just my opinion, which is only important to me. I am not trying to tell anyone else how to vote or how to think.
You know that he has had his children vaccinated, etc., right? I took the time to listen to his long interview on the All In podcast and it seems like his big complaint was rushing the Covid vaccines. You might want to look into Pfizer’s interactions with the Indian government recently. They wanted some limited efficacy double blind tests and Pfizer decided to ignore the Indian market.
Anyway, I am an old man, and I was happy getting the Covid vaccination, but I always thought that everyone should get to make the choice for themselves.
There are really too many people in the world who are hung up on telling other people what to do.
PG got his account disabled just for mentioning his other social media presence. When most people are thinking about the thresholds for speech they most certainly aren't drawing the line around whether you can talk about competing products.
This is coming from the guy who thinks it's fair play in speech to repeatedly accuse an emergency rescue worker of pedophilia, which he clarified as having sex with underaged Thai boys.
This yet another company is trying to horn in and "claim" stuff that is fundamental to language. A company cannot own a letter, for goodness sake! It bothers me at how much common, everyday stuff that big brands are trying to steal from the lexicon. Meta, Apple, Sky, etc.
These are things that belong to the public. They don't exist for the sole purpose of some company to hawk its wares - the word does not exist solely for them to swoop in and claim it for their stupid VR-branded neckties.
Use your family name. Make up some goofy nonsense word. Make up a phony sounding "foreign" word if you have to (Starbucks cup sizes, etc.) I'm fine with all of that! Just don't call your company some everyday word like "Dog" or "L" whatever. That's ours.
It's not right that companies would take these very basic elements of language. It's cheesy, and lame, and tedious. If I remember correctly, Sony tried something like this with trying to trademark the word "blue" for Bluray. You don't get to own the word blue, for goodness sake! It's aggravating.
What fooled a lot of people (including me) was SpaceX but it's become clear that SpaceX has succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Someone in the SpaceX leadership has done an exceptional job of insulating SpaceX from Elon's terrible and random micromanagement. Some might say Tesla. I think the jury is still out on Tesla. The business doesn't justify its market cap but irrational hype can last a very long time. Just look at Bitcoin.
Eventually these fail-sons make a bet so large it costs them everything. It's why wealth rarely lasts more than a few generations. It's why the wealthiest people in America aren't named Astor, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan or Carnegie. Eventually some fail-son destroyed the fortune their forebears built.
Elon wants to turn Twitter into WeChat, basically. An all-encompassing destination and platform. Chat, banking, etc.
Elon has done the Mckinsey or Private Equity thing of just raising prices and cutting costs without regard for long-term consequences. His actions have caused a huge drop in advertiser revenue, one that won't be recouped at $8/month. He has to come up with the money to cover interest payments and the Tesla board and shareholders have limited patience for him selling Tesla stock to do it. Should Tesla crater, Elon could well go under.
To paraphrase something I saw on Twitter (sorry, "X"), Elon has thrown away a 15 year old household name for a delete button.
I'd expect more nuance and less bias from Hacker News contributors.
dig +short x.com AAAA 2606:4700::6812:11d5 2606:4700::6812:10d
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="//abs.twimg.com/favicons/twitter.2.ico">
<link rel="mask-icon" sizes="any" href="https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/icon-svg.168..." color="#1D9BF0">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="192x192" href="https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/icon-ios.b1f...">
Wild. I was expecting they'd use the obvious domain name.
Does this rename include retaining the original trademarks (name, "twitter blue", etc etc?) - or can someone now clone the site and restore the original functionality?
http://x.com used to return a single uncached "x" as a reply. I used it countless times as a quick connectivity test. Alas, simplicity always fades...
Everything he does with twitter only makes sense to me given the assumption that all users have to stay and they can not possibly leave.
How many people are like "I don't want an everything app, I just wanna read silly tweets"? This demographic apparently doesn't exist in his mind.
I like that. Permission to re-use?
Of course, go wild.
- Quick, we need a new icon
- X
- Rushing to change all birds svg to x svg
- Uhh sir, we broke the layout..
- Also, it still says twitter in the text next to it..
- No problem, search replace-all twitter to X
- uhh sir, the frontend isn’t communicating with backend anymore!!
- Uhh I think we broke the site!!
Rebranding then could just be more complicated though and could kill the potential user rush so in a way this might be the right thing, even though it will look foolish in the case that X.com doesn't take off as hoped and will be easy to make fun of. But I do appreciate the attempt, one can't say it's done due to a lack of courage.
Not that Elon will exactly be quaking in his boots, but the search engines will notice me and others doing the same. Death by a billion hyperlink cuts!
Of course the trademark system is not that simple.
Rebranding requires careful thought and planning and even then is often unsuccessful. This name change hasn't even been given a second's thought.
https://youtu.be/hS57I6swXcc?t=59s
More seriously, at least it's not an unforeseen step. Musk actually mentioned his longtime plan shortly after the acquisition: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-elon-musks-x-the-every...
He's also a classless egomaniac xenophobe who never had a tough day in his life.
Where all the 'cross' people hang out.
I don't know, I think the rebranding is a bit silly, but I also think Twitter should have gone bankrupt years ago. Musk paid $44 billion dollars of other peoples money for what was a billion dollar company at best. Trying to turn that around probably require someone as reckless as Elon Musk.
The dream of the everything app just seems to fare way. The potential early adopters shy away because it's Musk. Unless his own branding (as in "Elon Musk") is enough to get other businesses to jump onboard I don't see how it will ever get off the ground.
Someone in the branding team will make a juvenile tag line of "X marks the spot" and ironically it might catch on for the sake of people calling the platform "the spot". "Did you find 'the spot' for it?"
Twitter by itself is a valuable brand, why ditch it for a letter which he embeds in apocalyptical darkness?
And regarding the logo, would it give him OCD if he realized that he could have elongated one side of the stick into the center of the area in order for it to also symbol a line crossing a plane?
No any other assets have changed, which means the logo change was mainly to highlight on the vision. I actually appreciate the sloppiness. Twitter is now like a dorm startup. Change the logo? Sure, <img src="new_logo.png"...>
This, together with the Reddit debacle and the whole Threads privacy thing really puts a spin on social.
What a time to be alive.
The nerve of this guy to call his company "Tesla" after a genius that could vividly model his ideas. A genius that invented radio, AC power to homes, etc.
"X" sounds so stupid and he picked it because it makes people think "his" things are bigger than they actually are. My advice is to not use his products as he'll only produce further garbage.
No where to run wokists, the Xtermination has begun!
All because of the whim of one person.
I think X represents closing a dialog/window or deleting things.
We'll see which one is more apt in the near future.
It's a bit similar to the X Window System. Who owns that these days?
Which has the added bonus that it's pronounced in modern Greek as an aspirated soft S sound. I'm all for pronouncing the new Xitter as "shitter".
Official Notice
Post Immediately
X x
X x
X x
X
x X
x X
x X
First, a little history. The X window system escaped from Project Athena at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated publicly that “MIT assumes no responsibility…”. This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Digital Equipment Corporation, where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this organization.
After sabotaging Digital Equipment Corporation, a sinister X consortium was created to find a way to use X as part of a plan to dominate and control interactive window systems. X windows is sometimes distributed by this secret consortium free of charge to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of X cannot even be guessed.
X is truly obese — whether it’s mutilating your hard disk or actively infesting your system, you can be sure it’s up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read this, the X source distribution and the executable environment is being maintained on hundreds of computers, maybe even your own.
Digital Equipment Corporation is already shipping machines that carry this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed.
This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant window system must be destroyed.
Ultimately DEC and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous software crime, brought to justice, and made to pay for a software cleanup. Until DEC and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals.
Don’t be fooled! Just say no to X.
X-Windows: …A mistake carried out to perfection. X-Windows: …Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X-Windows: …Don’t get frustrated without it. X-Windows: …Even your dog won’t like it. X-Windows: …Flaky and built to stay that way. X-Windows: …Complex non-solutions to simple non-problems. X-Windows: …Flawed beyond belief. X-Windows: …Form follows malfunction. X-Windows: …Garbage at your fingertips. X-Windows: …Ignorance is our most important resource. X-Windows: …It could be worse, but it’ll take time. X-Windows: …It could happen to you. X-Windows: …Japan’s secret weapon. X-Windows: …Let it get in your way. X-Windows: …Live the nightmare. X-Windows: …More than enough rope. X-Windows: …Never had it, never will. X-Windows: …No hardware is safe. X-Windows: …Power tools for power fools. X-Windows: …Putting new limits on productivity. X-Windows: …Simplicity made complex. X-Windows: …The cutting edge of obsolescence. X-Windows: …The art of incompetence. X-Windows: …The defacto substandard. X-Windows: …The first fully modular software disaster. X-Windows: …The joke that kills. X-Windows: …The problem for your problem. X-Windows: …There’s got to be a better way. X-Windows: …Warn your friends about it. X-Windows: …You’d better sit down. X-Windows: …You’ll envy the dead.
He's obsessed with making it "a thing", but he's forgotten "Fetch will never be a thing"....
Probably the website was used for pr0n, or the dev who made the blocking rule use a wrong regex.
On the other hand, a name change together with new product announcements is standard for American CEOs if they don't know what to do and have to show to their investors that they are doing something. I believe Musk has a number of Saudi investors.
Let's see what he does. If he goes into streaming like with Tucker Carlson the renaming may be appropriate. Perhaps he'll buy Fox News, who knows.
I have little hopes for the payment processor. I've avoided PayPal and I sure will avoid this one.
Something as generic is X is bad for an "everything platform", and something where lots of the existing use has specific connotations is worse
I don't find this a smart move for such a big brand.
s/contratian/delusional
I fully support this motion. But who in their right mind would want to take over at this point?
While you all very well may be right about his future failure with Twitter, I think it’s important to highlight that Musk is very different from most people in that he looks like he’s failing until he succeeds, and he’s done that with just about every company he’s run.
Twitter make look like a dumpster fire now, but based on past history, I’m betting he’s going to make a ton of money here (but it won’t happen over night).
Is that true? When I look at very old SpaceX or Tesla posts on HN the comments are generally very positive on product direction.
SpaceX only exists today because he somehow found enough money to launch one more time (his 4 launch attempt) which finally worked.
Even after that, people thought he would fail at landings rockets and also fail at reusing them. He upended the entire industry.
Tesla was considered bankrupt and a fraud so much that well-respected shortsellers gambled tons of money that it would go bankrupt.
The Boring company is still considered by many to not be a success despite raising nearly a billion dollars last year.
Solar City (now part of Tesla) was ridiculed for its battery approach to power grids, but that approach now is being emulated by numerous competitors.
Tesla posts pre profitability:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317921
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=534198
SpaceX posts pre profitability:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409653
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320362
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317918
(Please excuse the low comment counts. That's not because I'm cherry-picking, old HN was just a much quieter place.)
It seems you’re correct and that HN has generally been more positive than my recollection. I’ve been focused on the titles of posts that appeared, but of course those can be very different from the comments as you pointed out.
I really don't understand why Twitter really wanted to sell it to Musk. It always felt like a bad idea.
I understand that it was probably a matter of money and law or whatever, but I wonder how the former twitter execs are feeling about all this now.
I never really used twitter, to be clear, but to sell anything to somebody who clearly seems unfit for it because he just made an arrogant, seems quite like a bad decision. I wonder if they regret it.
Although there is one benefit in this story: it shows that Elon Musk is a clown, and as he initially did not want to buy Twitter, it seems like he is taking revenge by destroying it, which is an even better proof. Capitalism is really really awful. This story is a good example why capitalism often doesn't work.
I'll start, for some semblance of "full disclosure", by writing that I was never a fan of Twitter, and I quite dislike Musk in recent years for a Thai-cave-system-sized set of reasons. Nevertheless:
1) It was the money. And, to your point about capitalism, it was "brilliant" within that context. "Free money" wasn't going to last forever, some were already beginning to prepare (more actively) for inflation and interest rate changes, Twitter always had significant trouble with the whole VC and ad-based model* and had continual challenges with profitability and "expectations", etc.
No one ever had a great plan for turning Twitter into the kind of economic power that comparable companies, in terms of a certain importance to the information ecosystem of the net, were. A particular challenge in the kind of gray area occupied by a social media company so dependent on the writings of experts, journalists, etc. that led to importance and power yet created serious "conflict of interest"-like challenges (beyond those of systems where user fame and economic power and such were directly coupled to that of the system etc.).
So, "exit strategy", particularly in the context of the very "pump-and-dump" (and pyramid-esque, in outcome if not exact implementation) economic model "Silicon Valley" enabled**, was of significant interest to people with that mindset who still had "capital" 'trapped' in Twitter [1].
As for how former execs might be feeling, most are represented by this clip here: https://youtu.be/0Z2JTPalv_s
Some, like Dorsey***, are probably actually mildly unhappy about events. But, even people who were trying to run that company - when Musk walked in with a sink like the class clown on the first day of junior high school - felt more relief to be freed of the burdens, after the initial shock and unpleasantness of the lead-up wore off.
2) Other factors involved in the mess likely include Saudi Arabia (nice chunk of money from them), and their sadistic authoritarianism (looked up - Saudi dissidents twitter - and similar terms for info), China and their continuing work to have more of a say in global affairs, various billionaires annoyed at journalists who depended on the platform (including Musk), etc.
3) Capitalism often does work. It works incredibly well, crucially WITH adequate regulation. There is no way we have the kind of material and other wealth (distributed far too unevenly, but existing and distributed nonetheless) without "capitalism". That written, it undeniably has every bit the potential for harm, corruption, etc. as just about every other system, technology, etc. we've come up with or discovered with similar reach and power. I loathe numerous aspects of it, yet, have no better system to offer - and that is primarily because it isn't systems, technologies, ideas, or anything else really, that causes problems. It's people, and no system, technology, etc. can fix that underlying problem.
* More so than most other comparable companies in terms of name recognizability, "importance", etc. & with origins somewhat clustered in an "era" of opportunity within the "internet framework"
** Motto: "This ain't your grandfather's 'Gilded Age'"
*** It was his baby, if it was anyone's, in more recent years
[1] Recent article on exactly what anyone with some degree of brain power and hanging around "Wall Street Bets" and its more curated and expert offshoots has known for years: https://www.businessinsider.com/venture-capital-big-tech-ant...
It's because he's a fucking moron.
Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform.
The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposite. He’s not beholden to private equity masters. He’s supposed to be a product genius. He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures. Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge.
He drank his own cool aid.
Several times?
Oscar Wilde wrote: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Something of the kind, with an opposite sign, could be said for repeated business success. And in this case it's more than 2 times, and not just some small successess either.
Isn't it more like "He's idiosyncratic and often erratic and/or has political views I don't like" that people translate to an absurd "he has no business talent"?
Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies?
If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Well, this is why we have to look at the numbers. And it depends on the odds. If it's one in a billion and the rich get ten million throws and the poor get 1 each then the fact there are a lot of non-rich people isn't as impactful.
> Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
Yes, like having cash to throw around and a safety net to rely on so that those shots can be taken as well as easier access to potentially important connections and resources.
> I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
Well yeah. But he got there partly because he had some money to invest in the first place, and partly because he had useful connexions.
This hypothesis is somewhat testable statistically.
There are approximately 25 thousand people worth 100 million dollars+ in the world, with more than a third of that number residing in the US. [0] I think we can safely say that people worth 100 million and more are rich.
If it is easy to get lucky several times with a rich family, you would expect some nontrivial share of Musk equivalents among them or their kids. Say, two hundred?
Not observed. Either the willingness to risk own money in engineering startups is < 1 per cent among those, or it is not that easy.
[0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/money/2022/10/18/us...
Maybe? The thing about having a rich family is... you're already rich.
That removes one of the prime motivations to take serious risks, of the sort that paid off for Musk; namely, to become rich.
I'm sure you get a lot of people who invest, or toss some money into this or that.
But I'd be surprised if a significant number invested their entire net worth and time into a single endeavor.
AFAIK Musk was a relative nobody in the millionaire world when he poured a majority of his wealth into SpaceX (2002). They were very close to bankruptcy during the Falcon 1 experiments and if the fourth launch failed, they would have joined a fairly extensive graveyard of defunct space startups, together with Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and a few hundred others.
Then $100M went to found SpaceX.
But that does seem like a very large bet that millionaires don't often make.
Smart people, who are cutthroat, and who are driven/motivated have a much higher chance of success if they start out rich than those who don’t.
I get the argument and it has certain logic in it, but surely they all cannot be 100 per cent lazy. And if the non-lazy ones have it relatively easy to succeed, we should see a lot of successes from that cohort, even if they are in a minority compared to their lazy peers.
He's a talented motivational speaker, he can inspire as a leader, he can paint a vivid future of great accomplishments , not in the least bolstered by his extreme confidence of expertise and knowledge (often not actualized). Everything he talks about is at least about the entire planet, sometimes multiple planets, and with xAI even for understanding the entire Universe, and this helps him attract two key resources:
- Capital.
- Talent.
And then when he puts talent and capital together... yes he got lucky couple of times. But he's always been a terrible manager and this is visible not just with Twitter.
He IS? In what contexts? Because every time I see him speak, it's painful. His delivery is so stilted/awkward, that I think he's one of the worst speakers I've ever seen.
We're ready to forgive a lot if we suspect behind the awkwardness hides a genius. The trope of the distracted professor, the autistic savant is at least centuries old. He leans into every such trope, and he's very careful in cultivating an image of a "founder", of an "inventor" of an "engineer". Most people by now know he hasn't founded Tesla, or PayPal (was fired from it in fact), he hasn't engineered the SpaceX rockets (although he had a hand in those that blew up), and he in fact has no engineering degree despite claiming otherwise.
So I'd say all this means he's building this image very intentionally, and he's trying to turn his weaknesses into strengths. The more he stutters and repeats, the less we notice how much of what he says is kinda... vapid. Trump has some similar patterns by the way, you can ask him a specific question and he'll say he has great ways of answering that, some of the best people told him he has the best answers, his history of a businessman speaks about long experience providing great answers to all kinds of questions... and he won't answer your question in the end.
Trump and Musk are very different in some ways, but very similar in others.
From that point on we have a choice. Accept increasing chaos and corruption, or build up the missing guardrails we thought were there. However, from what I see, things aren't going strongly in the right direction as I see it, so far...
A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Exactly. A significant number of people want to see "Iron Man" in him or that he is playing 5D chess and they will fill the gaps to rationalize that image they have made of him.
"I alone can fix it"
I’m wondering if my experience was only my experience, was Elon Musk surrounded by good marketers who made sure the right things were said 10 years ago but he somehow lost them along the way? Because he is definitely not the man with the mystique he used to have for me.
It's a bit like how in Big Brother and other reality shows people first try to show their best side, to show restraint. But over time, and with stress, despite all the cameras, despite the knowledge the world watches, you slowly revert to being yourself.
Hah, I'd never have considered the parallels between Big Brother and Twitter before but you're spot on here - even more so when you consider the existence of Celebrity Big Brother showing that celebrities are - of course - people who act like people do. Musk isn't the only famous person who's been unable to stop revealing who they are on Twitter, but he's certainly the one who's taken it the farthest.
So someone can be very effective and charismatic while turning off a non-trivial percentage of the people: I've seen this in company executives a whole lot. The people that dislike the CEO will bounce quick, and in the end you end up with a workforce that is very loyal, via self-selection.
So is he a talented speaker? Just by by how many people react well to him, the answer is yes, regardless of how well he might convince you or me.
If anything it just shows he has enough money that it’s okay when some of his extremely ambitious projects fail. A less wealthy person couldn’t even attempt any of what he does much less fail as often and as publicly as he has. Elizabeth Holmes went to prison, for example.
One could say similar things for other well succesful businessmen:
Remember NeXT? Remember he got kicked out of Apple? Remember the G4 Cube? Remember MobileMe? Remember Ping?
He got that very reliably. When that kind of work aligned with success, he was successful.
Your rebuttal doesn't really make sense. Only NeXT and getting ousted from Apple were personal events for Steve Jobs. MobileMe (now iCloud), the G4 Cube, and Ping were all initiatives of Apple as a company which was far more people than just Steve Jobs.
Just saying. Overall I certainly think Steve Jobs was anything but a failure.
Wasn't that the computer that the first web browser and web server were developed for and on? And a bunch of famous video games were developed on it? It was never a consumer computer company, but for its niche it was pretty successful.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW, and wrote the first server and browser while working for CERN.
If somebody wrote the "first web browser" on BeOS it make it any less of a failure as a business venture.
Maybe if Tim Berners-Lee had, BeOS wouldn't have been a business failure. Or at least successful enough to be purchased for $400 million?
You mean the basis for Mac OS X?
> Remember he got kicked out of Apple?
You mean by John Sculley, who basically nobody remembers as having been associated with Apple? And then how Steve Jobs came back to Apple and led it through most of its golden years?
> Remember the G4 Cube?
You mean the spiritual predecessor to not only the Mac Mini, but the Intel NUC and other small form factor computing platforms? A platform that only suffered from the failing of being before its time, rather than a fundamental design flaw?
> Remember MobileMe?
The service that eventually transmogrified into iCloud, which, if not a driving force, can hardly be considered a minor player on the Internet today, if for no other reason than the number of @icloud.com email addresses?
> Remember Ping?
No, I honestly don't, but hey, not every idea can be a winner. At least Steve Jobs' bad ideas failed quietly. Compare and contrast to some of Elongated Muskrat's more… questionable business decisions, like buying Twitter for $420.69 per share just for the lulz.
I mean the company and OS that failed to leave to Jobs expectations, company pivoted to sell the OS on PCs, failed on that too, and was only spared bunkruptcy because Apple was desperate for an OS and Jobs.
The rest is meaningless retorts in the same vain, when all of the above are failed projects associated with Jobs, just like Musk has his own, which was the point.
My point is that when you put Musk among the pantheon of Silicon Valley CEOs, he doesn’t especially stand out for anything except being lucky. Compare him to Bill Gates, who, for better or for worse, revolutionized computing? Or Larry Ellison, who has somehow despite the odds miraculously managed to keep Oracle afloat and somewhat relevant for decades—no mean feat indeed?
Elon seems to be little more than a charming, lucky idiot. Make no mistake, charm and luck will take you far, but only so far. Sooner or later, one or the other will run out, and for Elon, it seems like he has depleted both resources at this point.
This is selling him too short. He's also a sort of cult leader, one who keeps an eye out for who his next population of acolytes will be.
I'm not sure how one can consider Larry Ellison more savvy and impactful than Musk.
What was meant to be an affordable alternative to the Apple II, became under Job's supervision a method to take control of the Apple line of computers. He ended up making a less feature-rich Apple II, which rivaled it in price, killing the idea that the computer could compete with other cheaper computers on the market.
All to stroke his own ego.
$1,298 for the Apple II $2,495 for the Macintosh
It completely destroyed the progress they'd made. Jobs took this project opportunistically at a time when Steve Wozniak was recovering from a plane crash. If he'd approached the project more strategically, it could have positioned Apple to take a place in the market share of cheaper PC's of the time.
You mean NeXT, the company he sold back to Apple for $400 million dollars?
I would argue that the majority of design flops from Apple in the past twenty years were more Jony Ive than Steve Jobs, based on history and design style. That said yeah not every idea the man had was rock solid, but comparing Steve Jobs to Elon Musk is laughable.
Elon was wealthier than 95% of the people in the United States, the second he was born. He's been playing with a stacked deck this whole time.
Whenever someone says "oh so-and-so is so successful" only two questions enter my mind:
1. where did they start? 2. how much help did they get along the way?
I would argue that in Elon's case he's been successful despite himself.
So like 16,595,000 other US citizens?
I think it's weird to compare failed products within a company (and minor products at that) to failed companies. I think you may have not even listed some of the more notable ones (The Apple LISA, the iPod HiFi). But he wasn't betting the company on the Cube, or MobileMe, or even Ping. These were low-stakes (and arguably low effort) bets taken within a company that was simultaneously having insane success in other departments. The G4 Cube came out between the iMac and the iPod (2 years after the iMac, 1 year before the iPod). That seems like a damn good product-line, and if you could choose any one to miss on, it'd be the niche prosumer device, not the two consumer devices.
> Remember NeXT? > Remember he got kicked out of Apple?
These could be interpreted either way. It seems all part of the larger "Apple story arc", and more comparable to Tesla's shaky middle period, than as binary successes and failures void of any surrounding context. However, I do mean that it could go either way. I wouldn't fault someone as judging them as true failures separate from the later Apple success.
An idea, not a company
> Remember boring company?
Still a company.
> Remember solar city?
Acquired by Tesla, who remains a major supplier of residential solar panels.
Which is typical Musk conduct: he lies a lot, people believe him, and he somehow makes it through until the lies do not matter any more. See robotaxis, self driving, etc.
==Acquired by Tesla, who remains a major supplier of residential solar panels.==
Tesla bought Solar City for $2.6 billion in 2016. In 2019, they targeted 1,000 installations a week. In 7 years, Tesla has installed a total of 3,000 solar systems, getting to about 20 installations a week. Add in the fact that he purchased the company from his own cousins and the story looks worse. [1]
==Still a company.==
It is still an existing company, but that doesn't make it a success. Founded 7 years ago, has built one actively used tunnel. They also had to change the entire idea (it's actually just Teslas driving underground).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thud_(media_company)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/tesla-has-installed-3000-sol...
GP was merely trying to dunk on Musk and didn't have a real argument.
I'm very aware of Musk's failures. Heck, they are the very things that define his companies and enable their successes. Every rocket explosion was a failure on the road to success. Every over-promise drives his people to work that much harder.
But you want to dunk on Musk a little more, fine, let's get this out of the way. (Not a comprehensive list.)
Bad:
- Twitter looks like a bad deal (so far), and is a public opinion disaster
- FSD did not deliver the promised value to its original customers (future remains to be seen)
- Boring has under-delivered and is not growing explosively (but they are still in business)
- His general skepticism of any COVID precautions (I think his entrepreneurial bias is behind this)
Worse:
- The handling of the cave rescue aftermath
Arguable:
- His political statements
- Twitter layoffs
- Personal life stuff (not really our business)
- Work-at-home policies (his track record says he knows what he is doing here)
There. Can we pin these somewhere so we don't have to keep hijacking every Elon post with these "revelations"?
If he’s lost his own money on stupid projects, that’s fine ? Hitting it for six once an over is still a good innings…
He can keep throwing darts at the board as long as he maintains his ability to rope other rich people into his delusional self-confidence. Twitter might just be what breaks the spell.
Failure is precisely how we learn. To be afraid to fail does not lead to success.
With such a large population, we expect some people to just be stupidly lucky many times in a row, right? Especially since they aren't really independent events - if you get a lucky break, it keeps you in the game longer, making your second break more likely.
And it would make sense that the lucky outliers would be some of the wealthiest, right?
No, that's not how business work. This is not coin-tossing, the "being lucky" includes attracting VCs and investments, building a good image, picking a good niche, delivering, getting buyers, and several other things besides.
You can get lucky with one of those, but not all of those, and several independent times.
Else skill doesn't mean anything, and you could make the same argument for any human venture.
Which is to say, don't think in terms of inviolable rules - that's useful for engineering the system, but can sabotage your ability to understand the system - and think instead in terms of what is possible and at what rate you expect it to happen. Then try multiplying that by 8 billion.
> Else skill doesn't mean anything
Skill matters, it just isn't the only factor.
> You could make the same argument for any human venture.
Luck profoundly effects every aspect of our lives, yeah.
Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
Notice that the above have nothing to with statistics. It's just handwaving based on the "with 8 billion people trying, anything is possible".
>Think about, say, professional gamers. Are they skilled? Doubtless. May the winner of a match be decided by the RNG? Definitely. If we're talking about a tournament of the best players, they're going to be pretty evenly matched, and it becomes pretty likely that luck will determine the winner.
That has already shifted the goalposts, to "luck among the best players" as opposed to "he just got lucky".
I was suggesting a thought experiment. I thought the way you were approaching this was rigid, I was encouraging you to see this as more of a scientific phenomenon than something rote.
It was just a suggestion, it's your business if you don't wanna take it.
> That has already shifted the goalposts...
Just trying to give you an example where both luck and skill matter. No goalposts were moved. I was responding to your objection, wherein the goalpost was, "does the existence of luck imply the nonimportance of skill?"
The point that you are missing is that these are not only not independent times, but in fact extremely highly correlated. Especially for someone who already comes from an extremely wealthy background and has social connections to other wealthy elites.
With enough people in the world, someone will eventually get lucky in several improbable ways and may look like a genius thanks to survivorship bias.
I'm not saying Musk is that, but maybe his primary talent is risk-taking and fundraising rather than product innovation.
It’s not exactly rocket science to employ smart people.
Oh, but it is based on how hard it is for corporate America to even accept such a notion without going for 'egghead' in their internal vocabulary.
I think I disagree.
To employ, no, but to get a stream of important innovations out of them, that might actually be harder than rocket science.
The vast majority of smart people around the world are stuck in mediocre jobs. Hotspots of technical productivity like Bell Labs or SpaceX or NASA of the 1960s are pretty rare and rarely last for more than approximately a generation.
How to get smart people to be actually scientifically productive is a major question of history.
An example: 100 years ago, several very important innovators like von Neumann were Hungarians; nowadays, Hungary is a scientific backwater. (With the exception of Katalin Karikó, the mRNA lady.)
This is a ridiculous statement if you've ever run a company. "Just hire smart people and your company will be successful!"
Great, glad you cracked the code.
HN is trully a trove of business wisdom!
I don't know if Musk's success is down to luck or not, but to answer your implied question of "Do you really think it could be luck to succeed on several different occasions?" the answer is yes. To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old "it's been heads 9 times in a row, it must be tails next" gambler's fallacy. Someone could succeed in building billion dollar companies largely on luck many of times in a row. It's very unlikely, but it's not impossible, at least as far as any company's success is down to the luck of the founders.
I don't think you understand how this fallacy (and logic ) works. This is only a fallacy because the coin toss events are trivially expected (and assumed) to be independent chance events in the first place.
Business success are not supposed to be independent like that, unless you take for granted what you're supposed to prove.
And to do that, you'd have to ignore some pretty big factors different to coin tosses, like the continuity of an agent making business decisions, their promotional and organizational skills, their connections, their reputation with VCs and the press, past performance as part of their image, their experience, and several other factors besides, which makes repeated business successes nothing like independent coin tosses.
I don't think you understand how similes work.
There's no way to really know what extent luck is involved when a business succeeds, but it's probably not zero. It's entirely reasonable to suggest Musk has been lucky many times over. That doesn't mean he'll be lucky again, nor does it mean the lucky events he's had so far have been trivial. Believing that Musk will (or won't if you're not a fan) be lucky again in his next business because things will fall in Musk's favor again is the gambler's fallacy - the belief that past events influence future events. No doubt the things Musk can influence will go his way, but there will be things outside of his control that he might not be so lucky with. Even big, important things. Nothing about the gambler's fallacy says anything about how trivial or otherwise the lucky events are.
Get one coin flip right => get 10 flips for free.
There's no fallacy here either, the implication is he was repeatedly successful due to his business skills, not luck, which he can be reasonably expected to apply to his future ventures.
To suggest otherwise would be falling for the old HN 'but technically' fallacy.
Yes. @notacoward had a perfect comment about this a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
The argument was that Musk was just a lucky incompetent person, not that he was skilled but "only" among a "limited" ten million plus people in the US alone starting at the same wealth levels...
Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth starting points had the chance to throw their darts, and Musk just happened by chance to hit bullseye on a major company sale/exit/buildup 4 or more times in a row, including turning out the richest man in the world by mere lucky darting?
That wasn't the argument. The argument was about luck, not competence
> Or you still mean the first, that those say, 10 million Americans at similar wealth
You're assuming all those wealthy Americans decided to throw darts, or threw the same amount of darts. They did not.
If you follow his successes, you can see a repeated cycle: "invested millions or billions of his own money, kept the company afloat for years". You don't get to do that on competence alone.
All of his companies were on the verge of bankrupcy at one point. And lookey lookey, on "competence alone" NASA awards SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar contract after a single successful launch (after three failed attempts).
As an aside, "Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors".
Same for Tesla. It existed for 7 years before it delivered its first car. And even by then it was at least 70 million of Musk's own money. And then a huge infusion of government money.
SolarCity. Failed, and bought with Tesla's money.
Neuralink. No idea if it's a failure yet, exists due to Musk's money.
BoringCompany. A non-entity that existed only because of Musk's money, and then due to unlimited investor money (what the US mistakes for "innovation"). It really exists only due to anti-public-transportation lobbying.
And so on.
He exemplifies the quote I posted.
Yes ? Not only there is no reason for it not to be the case ( it's not like rolling 6 two times in a row is impossible... ) but anyway once you've achieved your first success it's easier to buy the next ones.
People that are wealthy very very very very often, fail upwards.
Say there are million people with 1 million to invest.
Then 1/100 chance to get lucky. Do it 3 times (1/100)^3?
Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
It’s easier to do when you can be bailed out by friends and family after the first failure, compared to people who end up sleeping on the street. Considering that even succeeding once is a rare event, it is not that surprising that the final population is heavily skewed.
> Maybe the general idea was nor bad and he got lucky in recruitment? Recruiting young people believing in his idea and getting overworked to reach them?
There is certainly a bit of that. And to be fair, it is the best strategy: a single human has only so much bandwidth them handling all the aspects of a large-ish company is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention, a single point of failure, so the company’s dead the moment anything happens to them. It’s been the same with Jobs, one of his talents was to hire the right people.
Yes. Capital tends to make it easier on each iteration.
[1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.
[1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI
[2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Icon:_Alan_Mulally_...
That's the joke in the end: there are no companies (and there is no government), just a bunch of chaebols [2], at least South Koreans don't lie to themselves.
[1] "Ford previously took out a $5.9 billion loan under the program in 2009. That loan was fully repaid as of last year (2022), according to the DoE. [3]", https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/business/ford-department-...
He has a talent: self-promotion.
People can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone can be simultaneously a genius and an idiot. In the real world this is very common.
I like to put it this way: how many musicians do you like who are geniuses at composition, drums, guitar, vocals, or some other musical skill but are absolutely intolerable assholes and/or complete lunatics in the rest of their lives? Can you still enjoy their music? Does their music cease to be good when you learn about their personality flaws?
IMHO much of Elon's success can be attributed to two things:
(1) He is at least a good enough engineer or has good enough "engineers' intuition" to hire people who know what they are talking about and get them working on the right things. He seems much stronger in physical areas like rockets can cars though, not software.
(2) He doesn't listen to pessimists and nihilists who say things are impossible if, when reasoning from first principles, they can be shown to be quite possible. Example: ignoring people who said you can't land a rocket or that an EV could never do well in the market. Ignoring pessimism can be a superpower.
I do think Elon shows signs of chronic burnout at this point. The far-right / conspiranoid brain worm infection he's developed is IMHO a symptom. Opportunistic infections take hold when the immune system is weak.
Lmfao your opinion is literally the popular opinion on this site. Talk of bubbles within bubbles within bubbles!
Note I am guilty of using that qualifier once or twice prior to stating a popular opinion on HN...
Just leave that sentence out. It adds nothing to the discussion.
Basically, they had other people to help guide it vs just Musk doing it himself.
That myth (or rather propaganda) that they are some übermensch that work more than you could ever imagine and are so productive and it’s all thanks to the magic of powernaps or whatever bullshit they make up to sell you the temporarily embarrassed billionaire tale is thoroughly debunked. They are ordinary people who got into a very lucky situation and didn’t fuck up too bad.
Bro, do you even HN? That's like the gospel here...
Denpok: *gulp* ... no.
Gavin Belson: Thank you Denpok. I really needed to hear that.
This is an actual question, I don't know the answer, but it does seem extremely unlikely to me that this would be the case.
No of course not. Philosophy is a progression of original insights built upon the prior progression of original insights. But the key word here is "original", aka a leap of intuition that reveals something about existence not previously recognized. Not regurgitated, un-credited, pop-philosophy.
I feel like "Sapiens" and Eckhart Tolle cover a large percentage of what he's saying (though admittedly I haven't checked out his latest musings). I wonder if anyone's crowd-sourced a "top 5" of what the underlying worthwhile books to read would be.
Some brief searching turned up this "reading list," [1] though it looks a lot like one of those book-lists people make to show how they smart they are.
[1]: https://www.kevinrooke.com/book-recommendations/naval-ravika...
Yes-men: Oh, yes, sure, etc.
Smithers: Right on, sir.
It's true, lots of people did fall for his Tony Stark act, but the past year has really opened people's eyes to the fact that it was all narcissism. The signs were there long before, but they were easy to ignore in light of the success of innovative companies like Tesla and SpaceX. But now people are wondering whether the success of those companies was really because of him, or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory.
The "raising money" part is the inarguably most important part of any startup. Given enough money, you can ride through absolutely anything - and the kind of projects that Musk provided with money always need a crapton of them: Tesla to even have a tiny chance at surviving against the established behemoths, and SpaceX because (prior to them) spaceflight was something for rich developed nation states only.
He's playing with his own money, no different than Bezos losing money and 500K subs on the WaPo.
Real stellar performance.
And in fact this X.com renaming sounds like him dealing with personal baggage and vendettas from back then.
Basically the opposite of the stoic and calculating personality one expects a giant of capitalism to be.
So I actually just wonder if it's more than there was a 10 year period of Musk... getting lucky... by surrounding himself with some competence. That, and the investing world after 2008, with its intensely low interest rates and high tech-sector profits made it easy to "swim naked."
The efforts of a narcissistic showman Dunning-Kruger personality like Musk... are a great place to dump your money as long as you're not the last one holding the bag when shit hits the fan (aka Twitter).
That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.
It’s more recent. The Sacks-Chamatch-Calacanis axis didn’t go into gear until Covid. Somewhere between the election of Trump and lockdown, the rot set in. That suggests it’s still excusable.
Musk's success in Zip2 and X.com was mostly realizing there was a market opportunity and working long hours personally on the code to get the sites up and running.
With SpaceX and Telsa mostly his value-add has been looking at things and saying "This isn't elegantly designed enough" sort of like Steve Jobs but for internals. And he seems to be right often enough to be successful.
But he seems to think that he has this ability for software engineering and user interfaces too, but he doesn't. Which is why he was canned at PayPal and why he's making such a mess of Twitter.
All people are composed of both strengths and weaknesses. The important part is finding a position which plays to your strenths. Sadly, I think critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess.
He absolutely does. We’ve seen it in his prior reversals, when fortunes at his firms were down and he changed course savvily. The sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, namely, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, do not. And that’s rubbing off on him.
Shouldn't a person with a high ability for critical introspection be impervious to and deeply suspicious of the influences of sycophants?
More like when he gets called out on his lies and abuse, he buries what he previously said. When was the last time he talked about Hyperloop? Did he ever apologize to the person he accused of being a pedo? Robotaxis?
He lies to pump his stock or ego, then hopes people forget what he said. That’s not “savvy”, it’s just sleazy.
That wasn't his value add for either case. In both situations he brought together teams of extremely passionate and talented individuals and gave them a greenlight to employ a "move fast and break things" mindset that they otherwise couldn't in extremely conservative industries. Elon didn't send people back to the drawing board because he had some vision of a more elegant solution, they went back to the drawing board after the most recent iteration exploded.
With SpaceX and Tesla, I'm not as sure about the facts - I believe there is / was a strong component of "Jobs", but also (especially at Tesla), plenty of pissing engineers off with really BAD proposed solutions. I.e., plenty of "thinking differently" (which can be very valuable, and Musk has had some notable successes here and there), but not enough "filter".
I would say, though, that as his value** has fluctuated on the technical side (and, I personally have the sense has likely never been that high), he did build some real strength in "branding" and selling / marketing. He created / built a personal brand, especially, that was quite important in raising money / funding for R&D etc. at SpaceX and Tesla, especially.
Ultimately, his arc is ... an archetype. His arc is a great example of a pattern that is seen frequently (enough) among ambitious people who become very successful through drive, risk-taking / (some degree of) unconventional thinking, etc. You see this with people like George Lucas, and part of it is the "yes men" trope alluded to in another comment.
Basically, early in their careers, their impulses and "visions" and the like are tempered by others and organizational structures of various types. This tempering is a key additional filter which helps keep their creativity and problem-solving skills etc. more focused / ~"pointed in the right direction". But, over time, they gain more and more power - more and more freedom to do what they want, to not have to listen to anyone else. The decline in quality / success / etc. of their projects and companies seems to very closely mirror the degree to which they are unfiltered / unconstrained / no longer (so) dependent on others.
Basically, classic human "ego stories" (that don't necessarily depend on "big ego", but even the simple blindness of "ego" we all have) recognized and well-explored by the Ancient Greeks, in particular (e.g., "Icarus", "Odysseus", etc.).
* Not really pertinent / germane to this discussion
** To the degree I have any ability to judge, particularly as regards actual knowledge of much of this history (similar to the vast majority of people)
I find that many many people in software think they have a knack for thinking what is a good user interface, even though they are just users and not experts in the field.
Oh come on.
At best, it's hard to take someone seriously when they intentionally lie about the obvious. At worst, it makes it seem like you are part of a pr campaign.
Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I genuinely interested. Maybe your experience on hn is different from everyone else's.
I see more people complaining about hidden posts than hidden posts (which I do read every time, and I have seen once or twice a hidden post that should not have been). It’s difficult to take seriously people banging on about a down-voting cabal being after them because they’re so edgy and right.
Then he slowed down once his companies got big-enough and stable-enough to run themselves. His transphobia (combined with his hatred of the COVID policies that were hurting his bottom line) led him down the worst internet rabbit-holes and now he's off the deep end.
You’re rebranding information from the article as your own speculation?
Twitter was first going to be a safe harbour for free speech. Then it was going to the launch site for De Santis' presidential campaign (ignoring the irony of championing politicians who can't sign censorious bills fast enough).
Now it'll be a payment platform? People don't want to come to Twitter to spend money, it's reality TV for the internet -- nobody's paying for that. It would be like purchasing a sports team, and setting up a credit card signup booth at the stadium.
You don't need to "speculate", because Musk has literally said this.
Removing the tweet limit was a massive improvement (something I'd wanted for a decade). Showing view counts is also nice. I don't like the login-walls and selling blue checkmarks, but I understand that the company was financially struggling prior to Elon. In any case my impression has been that Twitter has improved more since Elon than prior to that. My Twitter usage is definitely higher than before, though admittedly that could be unrelated to Elon.
"The character limit for subscribers in the U.S. is now 4,000—more than 14 times the existing 280-character limit, which remains in place for all non-subscribers and Twitter Blue users outside of the United States".
I wonder what the motivation is for making the service less useful for non-Americans.
"Restrict peoples' freedoms", good lord, as the kids say you might need to touch grass. What an absolutely absurd (and incorrect) thing to say. I just said I had never seen it, I didn't pass judgement for or against longer tweets. I think people that pay for that are silly but comparing that to restricting freedoms is just a new level of disconnected from reality.
What a strange limitation, if the character limit is a problem, won't that just drive away users who see the service as racist now?
It wasn't. It's been profitable every quarter except 2 since late 2017.
Musk chose to load Twitter with massive debt when he bought it which is why it's now financially struggling after the buy out. That's not due to Twitter, that's due to Musk.
Musk's LBO of Twitter should not be expected to be going well.
The essence of Twitter is precisely that the tweets are short, bite-sized thoughts. It's what drives interactions and engagement, removing the limit shows a lack of understanding of what makes Twitter Twitter. And I assume that most people aren't even using the limits even when they're paying Twitter blue, precisely because they know that it's not how you use Twitter.
> Showing view counts is also nice
I don't know if they have fixed this, but those view counts were fairly inaccurate.
> I don't like the login-walls and selling blue checkmarks, but I understand that the company was financially struggling prior to Elon.
The login walls and the blue checkmarks are again a massive mistake that is driving away brands and institutions from the site. Now their statements aren't visible to everyone, and people can't even be sure which one is the official account because the already existing symbol that said "this account is who they say they are" now just means "this account paid for Twitter".
Yea hard disagree there. I spend more time and get more value and depth from reading Twitter threads than random tweets. Twitter threads however are an abomination UI-wise and annoying to write. Longer tweets make more sense.
In any case if you prefer shorter content that's fine, but there's nothing to be gained by restricting content type. Give people freedom and let the users decide what they find worthwhile.
It's funny to me that everytime I'd mention increasing the tweet length all the replies I'd get would be people telling me I'm wrong and that Twitter should keep the same smaller character limit. It's like vocal people on the internet fear change.
> massive mistake
Whether it's a mistake comes down to how much revenue Twitter makes in blue checkmark fees vs. how much revenue they lost from advertisers bailing. I'd need to see some hard numbers on that before being able to call it a mistake.
From a user perspective however I don't care at all. If anything making that more egalitarian instead of some mythical status symbol makes more sense.
For the record I say all of this as someone who hasn't purchased a blue checkmark.
Well, as I already said what people find worthwhile is the shorter tweets, it's what generates more engagement. I do agree that one gets more value and depth from longer tweets, but Twitter isn't really a place for value and depth, but for shortness and content density. And also, while threads are not really the best UX, they have a very interesting advantage for Twitter: they allow users to engage and amplify the part they find the most interesting, and that drives more engagement than waiting for people to find the interesting part in a five paragraph-long tweet.
> Whether it's a mistake comes down to how much revenue Twitter makes in blue checkmark fees vs. how much revenue they lost from advertisers bailing. I'd need to see some hard numbers on that before being able to call it a mistake.
Well, we don't have the exact numbers but Elon Musk already said that ad revenue fell 50% and cash flow is negative. IIRC, Twitter was cash flow positive when he bought them if you didn't take into account some one-time expenses.
I used Twitter for a decade, and frustration was the primary emotion associated with the service. I had about a thousand followers but barely any engagement to anything I ever posted. There was never any positive reinforcement to an insignificant little guy like myself.
I don't really see how longer tweets or view counts do anything to help with that fundamental problem. (View counts only make it more obvious that nobody cares about my tweets, which is presumably why Twitter had previously hidden them under the engagement metrics UI.)
It's a platform dominated by big accounts. As the owner of one of the biggest accounts on Twitter, Musk doesn't experience or see the problem and can't fix it.
People seem to have forgotten that social media is for friends. If you make friends on Twitter, they'll care about your content because they care about you.
If they were struggling before, they're circling the drain now.
Sure but Notes (long-form tweets) began public testing in June 2022, 4 months before he took over.
(at least that's my memory of it, admittedly it's been a while so could be off)
Musk is a business genius alright, but not what I would call a product genius like Jobs was.
True in the sense that it's made it worse. The "giant touchscreen and fewer knobs" UX sucks once the novelty wears off. Then there are things like the "yoke" and the retracting door handles...
I think many Tesla fans confuse novelty for improvement.
Edit. The 'top selling car' figure is contested (see below) and depends on how you define single model. However multiple news sites (including reuters/The Verge etc) have reported this story without retraction. We also have more recent stories saying the Model Y is the highest selling car in Europe for H1. Whatever way you look at it, these cars are selling very well.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a44600661/is-tes...
Make it look like a business... "accident", publicly say twitter actually never had a chance to get out of debt, Sell the assets, refinance the whole thing at a fraction of the original buyout price, threw a few millions to the creditors and get away with the whole thing.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/876661/0000876661220...
> The merger between Twitter, Inc. and X Holdings II, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings I, Inc., wholly owned by Elon R. Musk became effective on October 27, 2022. Each share of Twitter, Inc. Common Stock was exchanged for USD 54.20 in cash, without interest and less any applicable withholding taxes.
And if you think he is smart, think again. He tried to "smartly" get off the deal but the other party was smarter. He is clearly not the smartest man in the room.
Well, the other party sold their company to Elon Musk to run into the ground, so smarter isn't quite the word I'd use for them, either.
Yeah, I get that, but in doing so destroyed a thing that lots of people found value in. So yeah, they made more money than the thing was worth, great business decision, but I'm not willing to award "this nice thing is worth more as scrap than it is on its own right now" as being called "smart".
Boring Company / Hyperloop existed mainly to stop California from building their own high speed rail, and The Tesla Truck existed mainly to rebuild hype around the Tesla brand at the time, and it's probably never going to go into production. Both were "built to fail".
Once he realized that he couldn't get out of buying Twitter, I believe he's trying to apply the same script to make sure the loss is way smaller than 44 billion dollars.
Regardless of whether "truck" here refers to the Cybertruck (https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck, for which you can place an order) or the Semi (https://www.tesla.com/semi), are you really suggesting it is just fake and there's nobody working on these vehicles?
I will throw in the new Roadster (https://www.tesla.com/roadster) for good measure too.
Also, I wouldn't call it fake outright. Something more along the lines of the Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato[1] or the Porsche 911 Dakar[2] - which are like... yep, they're real cars, but it's more of a limited run branding exercise than an actual vehicles range.
[1]https://www.lamborghini.com/it-en/modelli/huracan/huracan-st...
[2]https://www.porsche.com/international/models/911/911-dakar/9...
The URL is still twitter.com, and it looks like they're haven't got rid of the Tweet button yet. That's a powerful marketing verb. But now the platform is X and you still tweet? Seems like a mismash of the old and new brand. Still in progress perhaps.
What are you talking about? There has been more change at Twitter in the last year than in the last ten. From editable comments, subscriptions, revenue sharing, blue checkmark for sale, alternative check marks for govts and org, culling of old accounts, API restrictions, forcing people to put parody in acct. I noticed a lot less spam as well. A year and a half ago I remember every top reply being crypto scams from fake vitalik accounts
I get you prob don't like the guy but saying the product is unchanged is just delusional. Maybe some of the changes are worse but there have been a lot of changes
I'm sure there's more. I stopped using the service because it was never great but now it's one of the worst properties on the internet.
Almost surprisingly, blocking him does still appear to work. Though it will sometimes have him in the list of suggestions to follow, even if you've blocked him...
* everyone's DM settings got changed to only allow DMs from blue checkmarks/Musk sycophants
* There are now rate limits on DMs unless you pay for the checkmark
These changes of course are justified with spam reduction. IMO the best spam reduction would be to allow me to hide all tweets from people who pay for a checkmark and didn't have one pre-Musk
Alternative check marks and forcing people to put parody in the account were both caused by the idiotic decision to put blue checkmarks for sale. There's no need to conspicuously identify government/business accounts as "no really, this is for real" if you haven't completely devalued the "no really, this is for real" symbol of your platform. And there's no need to put "parody" on an Elon parody account if you can clearly see that it's not verified.
Are you saying that API restrictions is a good thing? You seem to be suggesting that, but I don't know why you'd feel that way. Revenue sharing just incentivizes inflammatory behavior, which is an obvious net-negative for the platform as a whole. Culling of old accounts is neutral at best.
And the DM spam problems were basically unchanged until just the past week when he forced everyone's DMs closed. He did manage to introduce new spam problems though, because now every large account's replies is full of the most braindead nonsense, just because the user paid $8. I'll gladly take crypto spam instead this.
Also, the text you quoted said "no product improvements", but you're saying that the product is not "unchanged". I agree the product has been changed, but I would agree with the GP's statement that there haven't been improvements.
As for revenue sharing, take musk out of the picture and if I were to ask about a social platform that is primarily supported by subscriptions and content generators get paid, you would be all for it. Do you apply the same criticism with YouTube sharing revenue?
Come on, I can't take you seriously for criticizing a social network for sharing revenue with creators. We're just so far apart on basic values nothing I can say could change your mind
The kind of toxicity and algorithmic pushing of content on Twitter isn't quite like other platforms. Users are regularly exposed to content from deliberately inflammatory users. Your timeline can be filled with retweets, suggested content, or replies to accounts you don't follow by accounts you do. Adding a monetary reward for being inflammatory before addressing the toxicity is the problem. Adding revenue share to Twitter is like throwing money into a mosh pit; it wasn't done thoughtfully enough to not make things worse.
If Musk wanted to expand revenue share, he could have done it in thoughtful ways. Expanding the subscriptions feature would have been a good start.
So he thought he is a genius and can make this one work too. He realized his mistake (tried to get off the deal) but when the deal stuck, he thought he could run this thing; and turn it over to a massive success.
His latest money (valuation) came from his Twitter pumping/dumping shitposting. That's why he wanted to have Twitter and that's what he is doing with Twitter right now. He is obviously burning Twitter to the ground and with it Tesla, which has a 800bn valuation as of today...
I just hope Space X survives all this madness.
Let's not forget that the initial plan of SpaceX was to meet and get drunk with Russian leaders to buy missiles from them and resell them to US market.
Imagine the nightmare if it actually had worked as planned.
Regarding implementation in SpaceX, the success is mostly due to very good engineers and to a less bureaucratic process, where you can move fast and break things.
The NASA is a big boat that cannot steer due to political issues. It works ok but it is extremely slow and expensive.
The story I've heard is that he wanted to buy a single missile, but regardless.. where is the 'nightmare' in disarming Russia by buying up all their missiles in a firesale? It seems doubtful that such purchases would have effectively funded the construction of new missiles since Russia is/was so corrupt. I think the money would have gone into the hands of some oligarchs, and not been invested back into new missile development.
Even if that plan had gone through, it would have been child's play compared to the ESA and NASA as well as numerous western corporations buying rocket rides from Russia since the mid 90s up to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine a few years ago. Go down the lists of Proton launches on wikipedia and mouse over each of the payloads, you'll see that most of them since the mid 90s have been for American or European organizations. Even ULA and Orbital Sciences have bought hundreds of engines from Russia and used them to launch US payloads. I don't see many people raking them over the coals for this. Has this even proven to be a nightmare? Western money has kept Russia's space program alive, but has that funded any successful 'Wunderwaffes'? Russia's military is still running off the fumes of the Soviet Union and their supposedly amazing wonder weapons either don't exist or aren't relevant. Most of that money probably went up their noses.
Ah those pesky "political issues" commonly known as "process", "due diligence", or "laws".
These days it would be harder to pull something like that off, investors would be demanding better books from day one.
Currently, Tesla makes each car with a profit of almost 10k USD. That is insane compared to competitors, VW is at 973USD. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-teslas-unrivaled-pr...
It was really bad in the beginning, but now it's stellar, second only to Ferrari and other luxury cars. I don't like the guy, but this is not just luck.
There would have been other places for investors to stick their money.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4573601-tesla-gross-margins...
I don't see how that negates everything I said. Tesla can and does ship directly to buyers, so kudos to them.
Should SpaceX even threaten to go off the rails, the US government can and will seize it faster than Elon can go crying to the Supreme Court.
Space access is too much of a national security risk.
Let's hope Musk's vision for SpaceX will not devolve into "Twitter, but in space".
I doubt it will have much impact on marketing. It's most just a domain name and some corporate heading stuff.
The only utility and potential confusion is a single letter domain for linking to tweets until people get used to it. But on sfuff like imessage, SERPs etc it pulls in the <title> tag above the domain so it's not the only signal
Leave Twitter as is otherwise, add search and cut opex. Twitter was great for what it was from a user perspective.
That problem really must be bad because I don't think I've seen anything of major value on Twitter in my entire time using it.
Edit: Example of the first Tweet thread in my favorite list that's valuable and hard to find elsewhere: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1683301667733663744?s...
Edit2: To be clear, I'm not saying Twitter needs better recommendations. Maybe they do, I don't care. I'm explicitly saying search.
Twitter wasnt profitable or sustainable so he s going to experiment in whatever way possible only to realize what everybody knows: mass media is not profitable in the financial sense, but in the political
Twitter as a platform and product works better today than it did a year ago. Less bots makes a huge difference.
It's also not hard to imagine why they lost 50% of their advertisers. 50% kind of lines up with the percentage of "woke" (horrible label, but whatever) companies out there who basically "had to" pull their ad dollars to not piss off the camp they put themselves in.
Prognostication is fun, but to be honest, we don't really have any idea whether or not this rebranding and redirection will work. Time will tell.
I, however, applaud people willing to take moonshots.
Musk used to be political Teflon. He threw away that bipartisan edge for no gain. That was one of the beginnings of his Howard Hughes analogy.
SpaceX, sure - but what he's doing to Twitter is straight from a private equity / corporate raider textbook.
Source, please?
That's false though. Some of the improvements are gated behind a subscription, but HD video streams with more options and longer durations (allowing full movies to be distributed on it), longer tweets (reducing the need for "threads" which are obnoxious to read on Twitter and have led people to write bots that put them together), view counts, bringing back the chronological timeline and increased transparency are all net improvements.
What makes this surprising, or sad, or funny depending on your perspective, is that among the rapid product improvements, he sprinkles odd, impulsive decisions with little context and controversial messages that alienate a bunch of people. I guarantee you that without that he'd be hailed as a genius by the people who are calling him Elmo and pretending that revolutionizing the car industry and satellite Internet was "just luck". If there's a lesson to be learned there it's that social media addiction can spoil anyone.
40 billion dollars is just two years of Gazprom profits.
Imagine the discussion if the idea was presented in a public company with the CFO in the room "Rather than spend money trying to attract churned users, we decided to use it instead to reward loyal and highly engaged users even though we are pretty sure their engagement level would be high no matter what, and in fact they would happily pay us to use the platform".
It's just acknowledging that on Twitter there's an implicit division been content producers and consumers, and that the content producers are getting close to leaving and taking their followers with them now that there are viable competitors. Paying them to keep producing content is hardly novel.
In contrast, most people are on Twitter to read tweets produced by a tiny minority of Twitter users. These users are directly analogous to YouTube content creators (and indeed, many YouTubers are also active with large numbers of followers on Twitter). It doesn't take great business acumen to see the parallel, all you have to do is look at the distribution of follower counts.
Now he is full of himself and he doesn't know how to move forward. So he stumbles repeatedly. And then regrets it. But never is humbled by any of that.
He is also no longer surrounded by people who are intelligent. He is surrounded by sycophants.
To me it looks like everyone who‘s trying to take him seriously by now with all this are making themselves laughing stock. And Musk couldn‘t care less.
For me the only problem is that I‘m a Tesla shareholder and I‘ve seen a sort of dilution and all his suffering first-hand, where a single share of mine has already turned into 15 since I bought it. Thus of course I have skin in the game, but I still consider this all as a big meme-like joke.
Soon we‘re all dead anyway, so let‘s not think about things too serious and money is just money for most people who have it. It‘s no bigger than life. Have fun and enjoy the ride, our 100 years on this planet are a sliver so we‘ll all be enjoying it in our own messed up ways. Elon does it this way.
This is how I see it.
My understanding is that manipulated numbers would have been a legit reason to exit the deal but it turned out that Musk couldn’t provide that and thus was forced to go through with the offer. Am I misremembering?
If he had evidence that his offer to buy Twitter was based on false information, he would have gone to court to fight it. Instead he caved before the court date, presumably because his lawyers persuaded him he stood no chance.
I think he complained about bots on twitter before he made the offer.
And so, X. Which doesn't mean anything in particular.
Dying platforms are often the result of negative network effects, superior competitors, and self-centered founders who believe early successes make them brilliant business leaders and experts in everything else they touch.
Have you followed his twitter account? Watch his interviews. Read his SEC filings? He's been pretty open about his intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.
> Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam
That's not what 'Death by Private Equity' is or looks like.
> and a weird desperate-looking rebrand.
Desperate weird rebrand? The rebrand happens months ago. It's not a new thing.
"The concept for X solidified in October 2022, when Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter is "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp.
Elon is doing what exactly what he said he was going to do but you are twisting into some bizarre 'Death by Private Equity' that doesn't make sense because you don't like elon? Isn't that the gist of it? The anti-elon pr campaign is no different than the anti-zuckerburg campaign.
Exactly. It was going to eventually be rebranded as soon as he acquired it. Not sure why HNers here are seemingly very surprised about this and still screaming at the changes?
But it is quite funny to see lots of HNers here already showing signs of memory loss in less than a year since he made that comment with lots of emotional reactions to the news.
> The anti-elon pr campaign is no different than the anti-zuckerburg campaign.
Absolutely. I remember when the 'anti-zuckerburg' campaign of HNers and the media all screamed and attempted to prothesize the death of Meta Platforms when it's stock plunged to $90.
Even before the layoffs, Zuckerberg was the 'villain' somehow and is somehow called by the most angriest of people a 'Nazi'. Now it is 200% up in less than a year and now the media's opinions have changed like the weather and are now cheering him again.
Today, Elon is somehow now the 'villain' of the year because of the layoffs and buying Twitter and now they are even angrier that Twitter / X did not 'die' immediately before 2023 as incorrectly predicted. So every speed bump Elon makes to Twitter / X is now 100x magnified from now on by the media.
Either way, the predictions of both the deaths of Twitter / X and Meta Platforms by the media and on HN has always been greatly exaggerated.
So he's scrambling. Trying to find any way to make it pencil out, using all the stunts he can think of. "X" is just another one he'd kept in his back pocket for decades. He'd obviously always liked the brand, since "X.com" was part of his PayPal story, and he named his space company "SpaceX", and one of his Tesla models, and his kid.
Have you taken the time to understand?
> No product improvements
I disagree. Musk owns Twitter for less than 9 months. Just off the top of my head:
* view counts
* revenue share with creators
* fewer bots
* long videos
* improved spaces
* no censorship
> This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform
Inept MBAs do whatever it takes to bootlick advertisers. Not the case with the today's Twitter.
> He’s supposed to be a product genius
According to whom? I've never heard anybody saying so. However, here is an anecdote from my personal experience: I recently purchased Tesla and the UX was as simple as buying shampoo on Amazon–just a few clicks from the app.
> He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures
Isn't that what he is trying to do? X is the experiment to launch an exciting new venture. Give him a chance?
> Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge
I'm confused on this analogy–cannot see the connection. Please, elaborate.
P.S. Your reactstudio.com certificate is not valid.
The whole thing detached from the deteriorating human reality, a pervasive lack of empathy for our condition.
Not clear how we could / should respond to this grand fiasco. Somehow tech needs to be reinvented. Much more grassroots, more authentic, more focused on real problem solving.
There are power players and centralization, and the above freedom exists for marketing/product people as well and imo this is where most of the fraud comes from.
But ultimately - no one controls pushing a new app onto a blockchain. for a lot of reason, idk if blockchain will solve or help solve the centralized internet issue. But it’s got a lot of freedom and oddities like the 90’s internet did.
This is a result, not a cause. This is learned helplessness in the face of not being able to vote for change, and having no say in the policies of our country. The US government has become 100% beholden to the deep state and the oligarchy. We squabble over left/right social issues while both parties are in almost total lockstep with spending and foreign policy.
I mean, I'd love to be proven wrong in next year's election, with some definite outsiders trying to muscle into the circle. And, even if one of them does get elected, we've already seen how one supposed outsider fared against this machine already. If both Vivek and RFK run as independents, it would at least be a BONKERS election cycle.
There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.
Was it extremely valuable? I know a lot of people (myself included) viewed blue checkmarks as a "company PR account/mass-media journalist/celebrity account maintained by SMM" sign. The most interesting people I followed on Twitter were not verified.
A verified account of a newspaper is probably better than a fake one, spreading false news about the war in Ukraine, for example.
Managed by PR or not, a verified account stood for the person behind this account, and guarantees this is their (proxy or direct) opinion or a real fact about upcoming event, or information about a past event. Right now a verified account means nothing.
But you are absolutely right, that trust was very important.
And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.
Ugh, have you seen Telegram posts by the real Dmitry Medvedev (ex-President, ex-PM, now chairman of the Security Council)? I guess the line between real and parody is pretty thin here.
Besides, anyone falling for the nuclear war announcement on Twitter deserved that. Social medias aren't the trustable channel despite any verifications. What if the real account got hacked?
I believe what you just did is called “moving the goalposts”.
So the elites who we should trust as opposed to commoners that we shouldn’t
Yeah no thanks…
Imagine a bunch of nominal liberals advocating for royalty, and you have the blue check whiners.
This is the angry-for-the-weirdest-reasons thing I will read today, and it is 9:10 AM. Coupled with your post elsewhere in the thread that somehow justifies this as paying to be "part of the conversation", and it only computes as "'tis cope".
It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
Most people are average, many are below average.
The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.
One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."
If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.
Not even remotely true. At best, most humans are good at something. Not exceptional. That's massively rare.
I'm sorry, but most people have nothing, even the tiniest exceptional thing, about them. There's no latent kingfu master, hidden in pandas.
Then there's the objectivist train wherein no expectations are allowed, one must duly profess their ignorance and make baseless measurements in estimation and comment on the distribution of faculties per individual and the degree of resolution to which these measurements are allowed to take place - and it isn't to the degree which any great conclusions can be drawn, I assure you. There is no means by which you can splay out a person's whole and examine them. Time spent with one or two is time spent neglecting some other specimen. Not to mention the interference added by environment. And even in the best of cases that time spent may only be revelatory of some minute fraction of the whole, where again only some shallow conclusions may be drawn and they're only conclusive insofar as the observer has decided they are at some point in the context of time and space within their ever-evolvong system because there's hardly a tape measure suited to the infinite degrees of freedom that exist in the world.
Just look into the endless pit of nothingness, the void that is a myriad of vacant, rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms, that is the average person's eyes!
There is nothing there. I think they're all chatgtp clones!
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
The curse of dimensionality doesn't imply all skills are equal, only that finding meaningful exceptions in high dimensional data by just data analysis is hard, but we as a society don't find and filter for exceptionality in a data driven way like that, we have a very limited set of dimensions we assign to "success" (financial means being a big one). Someone making a great cardboard bed on the street will never be one of those dimensions.
After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality?
That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
But I give him credit for scale and gtm. I just think he doesn’t get social software
There was zero way Twitter could have survived on the path it was going; if not for drastic changes he instituted - mainly in dramatically cutting costs and overhead - they would have been dead anyway. They are no longer bleeding. They have lots of debt, thus they still need to do something new to pay it off, but at least they aren't accruing more debt like they were before.
Twitter was a niche player anyway - it was disproportionately used by techies but was far from having a broad penetration so why not move in a bold, new direction? Its current model is already known to be untenable long term - even before Elon bought them.
The real issue is ads are no longer going to be enough to sustain the tech giants (ads were mostly a scam of bot farmed clicks, over promised results, etc.). I wouldn't worry about Twitter now X - it will survive, whether this crowd feels it's for them or not. What I'm really interesting in seeing is how Google, Facebook and others are going to remain relevant. In the near term I would expect layoffs to accelerate since that's the lowest hanging fruit for these companies, but at some point they are likely going to have to come up with something more substantial and of actual value.
elmu's current wealth is owed in large part, perhaps the most, to wealth he received from his rich, apartheid African jewel mine owning parents: that is the money with which he was able to get the rest of the money
If I had multiplied the advantage provided by my upbringing in the same way that Musk had, I'd be massively wealthy (but not nearly as wealthy). From a relative perspective, Musk is still a massive success.
I haven't come close. I'm ahead in some ways and behind in others.
though, don't get down on yourself and where you started vs. where you are: the relationship obviously isn't linear: the richer you are, the easier it becomes to turn 1 dollar into 2 dollars, especially when your family is wealthy, too
I definitely would have not done that. I am not that ambitious and I guarantee I would have been happy to achieve practically nothing while enjoying the comforts of my upbringing.
I understand and acknowledge that, and tried to account for it in the full sentence, of which you only quoted half. The relevant portion is italicized below:
> if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
If everyone had the exact same head start he did (or didn't, it seems disputed), we all wouldn't have achieved what he has. Just because he had a head start that we would all have liked to have doesn't mean we all could have accomplished what he has.
It'd be like dismissing an MLB pitcher throwing a perfect game because his parents could afford to send him to private coaches.
why would it? You aren't everybody, or anybody else but you, so saying you wouldn't want to do it doesn't really have any affect on the point (especially since we're discussing ability, not ambition)
How much wealth was he gifted with? Order of magnitude would be a sufficient response.
I'm going on memory here, from what I read/heard online. I think people just want to write him off, tbh.
And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?
Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.
Founders aren't the ones with the money. They're making it for someone else and then being paid for that.
In any case, it's what happens on average that matters, not minuscule exceptions. Money makes money.
I don't think its possible, or fair, to reduce success to a single digestible dimension.
And somone had to come out the winner in a stochastic Market. It just halpened to be Musk. No competence requirer, at all.
Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. I think he's done good things, but in other ways he's not a very good businessman.
Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.
And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play".
If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
nitter.net works wonderfully!
> DM limits
I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that.
You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you".
"Thanks Elon", indeed.
Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
"Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue."
I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.
IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party.
Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban.
However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
Doesn’t seem to know anything about tech though. And he’s burned his reputation to the ground this last year.
There's a reason he was lauded before this Twitter/X debacle.
This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time.
The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
I didn't know this one and just read more about it. This is so absurd.
“Slapping a name on other people’s work” is something leaders do. They also typically are the ones who gather those people together and create the environment in which they can do their best work.
…that said, yes, I think Musk is an idiot.
There’s an episode of the podcast On With Kara Swisher where she goes into detail about who he was and how he went off the rails. The date is 2022-11-14. I found it really helpful to square this circle.
I’m not as familiar with Tesla, but I’ve been following SpaceX pretty closely since around 2014. He’s not in the trenches doing CFD to optimize cooling on the latest iteration of the raptor engine, and who knows whether reusability was originally his idea, but he knows his shit. When you hear him talk about rockets, he sounds very competent, unlike when he talks about software. And I’ve never heard any actual rocket scientists say Elon doesn’t know shit about rockets.
(He does sometimes move fast and ignore established wisdom though, as with the concrete pad that got obliterated during the last launch. But sometimes that’s how you sidestep decades of cruft)
I do wish Gwynne Shotwell were more of a household name. She’s the one running SpaceX while Elon is off Eloning.
Well I do. Or at least I did.
He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it.
Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things.
But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.
Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
Maybe you should review these pages and get your facts straight:
If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.
I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol.
There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so.
I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX...
I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.
What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.
Incidentally, Atlas V used/uses Russian engines. Pretty bad idea in retrospect but at the time a lot of people thought it seemed reasonable.
> cost effective
That's another matter entirely. It would have been cheaper to use conventional disposable rockets. Even better than that is reusable conventional rockets; the economic sense of which has now been demonstrated by Falcon 9.
When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.
For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.
On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.
I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".
My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs.
If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).
What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.
The Space Shuttle would like a word.
The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.
What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.
The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.
True that.
> He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over.
Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team.
These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success.
Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.
PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.
Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.
The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.
His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.
I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.
Honestly, this may be one of the good things he did. The entire population has gotten way too comfortable with free and it would be ideal if we could get away from this model.
Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.
It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does.
> Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because
Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.
> human social structures don't endure like friendships do
IOW, the donation-based instances are not sustainable. If you want to have a service that you can rely on, you will need to resort to a professional service.
Also there are occasionally overt ads for companies funded by said VC firm inserted into the list on the front page. You can recognize these because they have the comment sections disabled.
The fact that there is someone with deep pockets that see this whole network as an opportunity for building their branding does not mean that they look at a balance sheet, or find "advertisers" in case their fund makes an expected loss, or anything like that.
Let me repeat. HN, by itself, is not a business. It is pointless to talk about its "business model", "funding", "revenue" or whether is breaks even or not. HN is not a core part of YC.
Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are at its core social media networks. They wouldn't exist as businesses if they are not expecting to get any type of revenue based on their social media offering. There is no way to compare any of them with HN.
Who said HN is a business? I never said that, you seem to be reading between lines, words I didn't write. To reiterate, you asked if HN is funded by ads. I responded that HN is an ad (an ad, not a business), and furthermore often contains overt ads. And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Anyway, if you want to argue with the version of me that exists in your imagination, you obviously don't need the real me here for it. So peace out.
And that is a ridiculous statement.
> And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Then you interjected without any relation to the context of the conversation, and instead made this flawed and unrelated argument about "HN as an ad".
However, beyond the general development Twitter has taken since Musk took over and especially how the premium memberships were rolled out - the conflation of paying for the account with being verified has killed that as an option for me. Nowadays the blue mark rather is an anti-pattern to many. This is what you get when you sell "reputation".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Acc...
I've turned the corner on this. I think he's turning twitter into a place where blue checks publicly talk to other blue checks, and people willing to pay a recurring fee to try to be included in that conversation can try to get their attention. What it's going to be is a massacre of reply guys (who are going to lose visibility) and sockpuppets (whose new/unused accounts will be useless.)
I'm honestly interested in that. I don't even post on twitter, I read, so I'm not giving the perspective of an active twitter participant, but tbh 99% of non-blue-check twitter participants only cost twitter money, are dumb and their accounts should be nuked from orbit. Their only purpose was to make the room feel crowded, and thus to attract more broke users. Not that most of blue check twitter isn't terrible, but that's the terrible that people are actively looking for. Terrible with a fanbase.
So, in the future, you should be paying for twitter or have an account at least a year or two old in order to harass journalists, politicians, and people you watch on television. I could see that being appealing to almost everybody.
Here you are advocating a literal pay for play, and you're identifying certain classes of users as being "worthless" and advocating "nuking them from orbit."
That seems way more radically elitist than wanting to know if something is a parody account or not? Help me understand here?
But charging in pursuit of removing "worthless" users from the platform - you see what I'm saying there right? That's literally constructing an underclass, deciding they are unwashed and unacceptable in refined company, and then charging money to keep them out.
It's the business model of a country club. Maybe it's a cheap country club, that's a difference of degree.
I've paid similar amounts of money to join closed forums before and found them to be enjoyable and relatively free of trolls. I'm not opposed to it in principle. What I was asking about was the contradiction.
For him there is. Twitter at $44b cash was not a business decision, it's something he arrived at through a level of reality-deflecting hubris and vindictiveness that remains unmatched by anyone since.
Remember how he appealed to Trump to return to the site, and Trump ignored him and stuck to Truth Social? He then tried to back his rival DeSantis with a campaign launch on Twitter, which failed miserably.
It's not 2016 anymore, Twitter's lost its pull as a political kingmaker and/or disinformation platform. That was the one thing Musk could realistically have expected his acquisition to still be able to deliver. Now that users and advertisers are fleeing and news sites are using Twitter sources less, he may as well bury the site, as it's outlived its usefulness to him.
Feels like Musk has caught some of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 'Introducing Monday' nonsense. At least we could attribute that to the dotcom madness.
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
So great it inspired a song.
The corporate PowerPoint visuals just adds so much.
It's like someone read about Time Cube for too long and then tried to port that reasoning to the logo redesign.
Holy crap, to be a fly on the wall in the room when this was presented lol
Could this be a way to secure a global payment system away from a potential tyrannical alternative? Probably not. But if you were more in the know and were an insane billionaire, you might want to try..
Good, never liked these massive social media conglomerates. Give me back my forums.
This is a straw man - like many other of the comments here. Full of emotion, but vapid in real substance.
Good.
I've got to say, the verified list was not very valuable
Almost everything else is more important than some rich brain parasite’s midlife crisis dressed up as 5-d chess. The brain parasite feeds on attention whether positive or negative.
If we only get angry at this one guy, we usher in the next set of his replacements
I’m sorry but that seems like a very fragile system to me - waiting and hoping the next commanders will have a sounder mind and heart, or expecting their wisdom to be beyond our comprehension
Claiming that these things are “unnecessary concepts” is a significantly more extreme position than you make it seem. What are the alternatives that actually work?
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
However besides just sharing that Graeber and Wengrow have documented realities in human history that explored answers to your question (and post discovery of agriculture, and scaled beyond dunbar's number), I'll also share this alternative response from Graeber's earlier works that predate a lot of the really exciting anthro and archaeological discoveries in recent years (the cutting edge research covered in their last book and papers):
“Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.”
So you have zero evidence (aka much stronger true believer) of what you say working and you want to restructure the world based on fairy tales spun by the likes of David Graeber?
See ya.
As such a system would never give rise to Twitter in the first place (hence problem solved).
Or such a system will forever reside in the Platonic ideal universe forever avoiding any real-world flaws or criticism.
maybe you can disclaimer your post that you have the perspective that “By the time we exhaust Earth, we will be a space faring species.” You have a true believer's faith in the current thing
We are all true believers. I believe in a system that has real-world evidence of working and has some flaws that can be fixed over time.
You are a true believer in a system that has scan real-world evidence of working (but a lot of cool armchair theories) and you believe in throwing an entire system in favor of yours.
Btw, good on you for looking up my post history, you did more evidence-finding work than David Graeber ever did ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union
Things change. You'll get over it.
I just don't really understand why nobody is angry at the old Twitter board for signing the deal in the first place. Yes, Musk was trolling and yes, they have apparently an obligation towards their shareholders to get a good deal for the invested money. But still, the investors in Twitter valued money first and "Twitter's role as global message board" had a lower priority.
Because when some idiot billionaire gives you a premium on an already overinflated stock you sign that deal or you get sued into oblivion by the institutional investors who will use their giant pile of money to bury you for letting the deal of the decade get away.
The company lost an estimated 2 billions by the time Musk bought it, with about 200 million lost per year. It also managed to break GDPR laws, and have some of the largest data breaches.
I understand that some people got value from the platform, but a quick death might be the best for everyone involved.
You seem to be on path to victory my friend.
I don’t like Twitter, nor do I like Elon Musk, but it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan. I doubt he gives two shits about what Twitter is or was - when he bought Twitter he acquired a lot of talent, and a place to start to launch his platform - of which he envisions the world being beholden to, and he will be the king of that castle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he will have some kind of X crypto, X digital wallets, X online shops, he’ll probably even have his own X-onion sites too, for all the people who want his X branded LSD and MDMA.
I highly doubt that because he originally didn't want to buy the thing in the first place. He's just making one hail Mary pass after the next to try to get it to turn a profit and failing so his last card - the one he always seems to play at some point - is to set it up for acquisition by one of his other companies to bail himself out.
That may work, or it won't, in which case Twitter (sorry, 'x') may well end up taking the rest of his empire with it.
At some point, you have to just admit that he might not be playing 5D Chess, but 1D Connect Four, and he's still losing.
I think we're down to noughts and crosses.
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Why not? Maybe, just maybe, if you're re-launching a brand it's best to do so when there's actually something to change aside from (one of the) logos and (one of the) copyright marks. It's like if Reddit bought HN, said "We're going to change this into a platform similar to Reddit", and simply changed the logo from Y -> Snoo without any of the other changes or promised features ready to go.
While the change isn't set-in-stone BAD for users, I don't see how it's good or useful at all conversely.
Similarly here, are y’all really that naïve to think the branding matters at all compared to the user base?
Twitter today is freer and on the path towards improvement, much like the original twitter. Who remembers the Iran revolution and the "stop or i'll tweet" motto?
We all know why certain people seem to like Musk, they just won't admit it because they know the reasons make them look bad.
Also, there are still scams, still fake accounts, still tons of bots, etc lol.
Flight trackers are not allowed on Twitter. Why? That's clearly free speech, and it's not political in nature at all. Elon just doesn't like it.
Censored in Türkiye because like every other platform he will crumble to government pressures.
He's doing the same shit that he tried to call out in the "Twitter Files", the ONLY difference is which views he supportive of compared to say Zuck.
And overall it's fine with me. A platform built around free speech absolutism is doomed to fail. No one wants to be associated with the most extreme voices, unfettered and in some cases even promoted. It's just more embarrassing when Elon says he wants to establish true free speech values, then his platform doesn't represent those values, and he tries to lie to your face telling you it is.
The flight trackers thing (from what I understand) ended up being a security risk with NON PUBLIC information beginning to appear there (people actually following cars and reporting). Not saying I agree with it, but in those circumstances I'd imagine most social networks would have done the same.
Turkey thing is not a choice of his. Not all countries have free speech like America, either they comply or get banned. The real test is censoring in free countries like Facebook, Instagram, old Twitter, etc have been doing.
Yes and no. There are libel and slander laws, and there is definitely content that has to be moderated, such as illegal content. Which, if we're being strict on the idea of free speech absolutism, then complying with the laws is still censorship. Which is sort of the issue with the entire idea of "free speech absolutism" in general.
> Please show me some examples of new Twitter increasing political censorship of people he disagrees with.
The fact that the word CIS gender is considered hate speech on the platform[0]. That's a decidedly moral perspective and one that comes with an entire political movement.
> The flight trackers thing (from what I understand) ended up being a security risk
You understood wrong. There is no risk, period. The flight trackers aggregated public data which literally anyone can go look at. And they didn't validate whether the plane being tracked had anyone on it, and they didn't follow the people on-board around telling you their destinations once they landed. There was no real risk, full stop. Musk and other people with private jets have many ways to remove themselves from those trackers and simply chose not to do it.
> Turkey thing is not a choice of his.
Weird, now it's not a choice when he decides to censor stuff, but it is a choice when he decides to not moderate people using other slurs AT individuals. Is Musk located in Türkiye? No. Is the Corp offices for the company located there? No. Do they have employees there? No. Türkiye has no power over Musk, yet he still bent the knee because he wanted his platform to stay up in a country so that he could continue to benefit from the user base. Just like Zuck does with FB and Dorsey did with Twitter before that. Musk could have said eff you to Türkiye because he truly believes in free speech, but he didn't because he doesn't.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841?s=20
>The fact that the word CIS gender is considered hate speech on the platform[0]. That's a decidedly moral perspective and one that comes with an entire political movement.
CIS IS a slur, used to marginalize non-transgender people. I totally disagree with banning the term, but labeling it under "hate speech" alongside anti-transgender wording is perfectly logical IMO.
>yet he still bent the knee because he wanted his platform to stay up in a country so that he could continue to benefit from the user base.
Again, he has no choice here. Either shut twitter down or follow the countries laws. The choices tech giants make in authoritarian countries is pretty meaningless. It's the choices they make in free countries that count and shows their true colors.
Do you then also consider "hetero" to be a slur?
> That's a pretty ridiculous notion to pit illegal content such as death threats and real libel with free speech.
I am not the one that chooses to call myself a "free speech absolutist" and I am not the one that is claiming that Twitter is a place for free speech. If we're only looking at what is considered free speech in the US then Twitter had completely free speech before Elon took over. My usage of illegal content was in response to the claim that there were no laws around censorship in the US. Clearly there is, and you agree; Illegal content does need to be censored. I am fine with that, but is a "free speech absolutist"? If so, they aren't an absolutist.
I wasn't making a claim on whether or not that was reasonable content to take action on.
> CIS IS a slur.
No, it's not. It might be able to be used as a slur but that is true for most adjectives. You feeling like it is a slur says a lot more about you than it does about people who use that word. And this is just another example of where someones personal perspective is influencing the moderation on Twitter/X. You agree with Elon that its a slur, which is fine I guess. Elon says thats going to get banned, and that's not a free speech issue for some reason. But when people bring up the usage of the N-word or anti-Semitic language, Elon is oddly quiet. Again, I guess that is fine, it's his platform, but clearly slurs aren't wholesale banned, so then how is that free speech? Oh, right, it's not. It's the exact same as Facebook or Reddit or any other website. As if Elon isn't doing anything unique but selling you on the idea that he is.