I'm not on the Musk hate train, but this feels like a stupid impulse decision to me
He's nuts. Maybe that's part of his success throwing himself into areas no one else dares, like EVs and self-landing rockets, but he's just a chaotic agent, he doesn't have instinct for what will work, he just has instinct for being random and confusing everyone with it.
Equis and Dos Equis, maybe?
Look at what the parent comment up there said: "it's hard to google it". Did you catch that? He didn't say "to web search it", he said a brand. He, and all of us, are like a free walking talking Google ads every time we say "to google it".
The same has been happening when anyone, or a media says "in a tweet" or "he tweeted" or "retweeting" and so on.
Everything can have "a post", and everyone can "post a message". But you can only "tweet" on "Twitter". And now there's no even sane way to use this new "brand" as a verb, or as a noun of a post. There's no sane way to use it at all. It's a horrific brand.
People will not even use it because it's unclear what you're talking about. Look at every single instance when Elon Musk says the name of his own son, he doesn't say "X", he says "Lil X". He has to prepend this "Lil" in front because otherwise it's absolutely unclear what the hell he's talking about.
It's also full of registered trademarks that use "X" in their name, because "X" is a letter. So now The Twitter Files... become The X Files. And "Twitter Videos" become "X Videos". I can keep going forever. It's a damn mess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
Now... on the other hand... "X" is aaall over the place in brands, in words, in phrases...
Elon had X.com for ages. He had before they merged with Confinity to form PayPal, Inc. He wanted PayPal to be renamed to X.com back then, but PayPal had way better brand recognition, so (even though he was CEO) internal backlash talked him out of the idea.
The former Dutch brand Xs4all (ISP) had a marketing campaign where they asked input from their customers. It evolved around the X. It taught me X stands for a lot of things. It's a letter, for one. It's a cross. A railroad crossing. It's a knot. It also stands for trans (in the broad sense of the word, including but not limited to transsexual). There's also an association with masculinity.
That X stands for so much isn't coincidence. Musk wants you to think of his brand (X.com; not X) when you see the letter X, or even subliminal in the examples I gave above. My take is it could work out on the long term, but on the short term it further alienates Twitter's status quo. It could accelerate the domino effect.
But him having that idea for so long explains a lot. He is very clearly stuck in the 90's/00's "extreme/radical" days if he is that beholden to having the name "X" somewhere in his portfolio. way before you consider factors like search ability and SEO and general professional communication on the internet. But I'm not surprised he didn't keep up with the times.
(I will give him props for rolling out the super charger stations, though. And no screwing up with some proprietary schlock like other dealers would have tried to do.)
I very much feel like this is a Jobs v. Wozniak moment, too. It's clear there was was some unsung hero who could realize Musk's crazy dreams and even reel him in when he got too crazy. But for Musk, he simply had the funds and willingness to take the risk. I'm guessing that "Woz" left or is simply heads down at SpaceX/Tesla given recent decisions, though.
He started SpaceX because he wanted human missions to mars, he's as "progressive" as every American was in the 70s.
> popularize electric cars when every manufacturer had given up on them
Eh... "The company was incorporated as Tesla Motors, Inc. on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning."
He may be looking at Google, Amazon, and Apple as examples that big tech can destroy all the trust they want and monopoly away with little regard for legal implications
But rushing it out in the past couple of days was absolutely an impulse Musk-only or Musk+1 decision, like many recent Twitter changes. Especially given what we've heard from staff at Twitter so far.
And, of course, given the fact that so little on the site was actually updated and Musk has already talked about not even thinking about things like retweets yet.
Perhaps Musk just goes "Screw it, I'm building the app I always wanted" even if he has to build it on the ashes of Twitter, ejected Tesla auto-pilot code, a couple of rocket boosters and a domain he had in the draw.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_website...
I think it's just a game for him.