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mattkevan

Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

Going to be studied by generations as a case study in wiping out decades of brand value overnight.

Also, the logo was selected by a competition, which is absolutely the way to rebrand a multi-billion dollar company.

Fascinating, in a car crash sort of way.

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> Going to be studied by generations as a case study in wiping out decades of brand value overnight.

What is there to study? It's just one childish rich dude with no adults in the room, case closed.

> It's just one childish rich dude with no adults in the room, case closed.

He didn’t do it all with his own money, he took equity investments and debt. A bunch of people had to sign off on this trainwreck, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, a16z, and Sequoia.

Yeah I do really hope they study that side of it in business schools, to teach young business people and financiers about reputational risk and survivorship bias.

The involvement of the banks was always the confusing part of that deal. Really made me lose respect for their judgement.

> The involvement of the banks was always the confusing part of that deal. Really made me lose respect for their judgement.

Agreed, but to be fair the bank transactions were for debt rather than equity, so they will still end up ahead unless he really does drive the company to bankruptcy. That’s a real possibility, but they’re in better shape than the equity investors who have in one public case[1] already written down the investment 47%.

1: https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i... (to save you a click: the investor is ARK)

The investment bankers lost money even before the transaction completed. Interest rates rose while Musk dawdled and delayed buying Twitter, so the debt lost value (this is the same issue that drove some banks into bankruptcy is the debt they owned - bonds - devalued as interest rates rose). Ordinarily what the investment banks do is sell the debt and then enter into other deals, but with the Twitter deal they either have to take a bath and sell the debt at a loss or keep their money tied up as the debt gets paid off.

Yeah but I think the debt risk was also way underestimated by the banks. I mean, bankruptcy risk was already pretty high for Twitter under its previous management. The terms of the debt seemed to me to reflect the acquisition reducing that risk, which was insane, and not just in hindsight. I don't think there's an explanation for it that doesn't involve the consumption of a large amount of kool-aid.

I think that most of the equity investors in the takeover were motivated by politics rather than profit. It was more or less a PAC donation.

Don't the banks have Tesla stock as collateral?

I’ve taken a business course in college that covered things like this. There’s plenty to learn by dissecting the many, many levels of failure involved.

I would be most interested to read about that, can you provide a reference or links?

In college, I studied the failed merger between GM and Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Essentially a study on egos and cultural incompatibilities.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/26/magazine/gm-vs-ross-perot...

Sadly, no. It was over a decade ago. I don’t remember the cases nor do I have the books or paperwork.

Fortunately, case studies are really easy to find online. Try searching for “case studies in brand management”.

It does really boil down to having a leader with nobody left around them that feels comfortable challenging their view of reality.

Classic situation: too many yes men, needs some real friends who know him and can ridicule his bullshit until he thinks better of it. We all need real friends!

"Here's a really stupid thing someone did in the past, look what happens when you do this, don't do this" is a fairly normal business school thing (I think the classic branding one is New Coke). _Why_ they did it is somewhat beside the point.

> It's just one childish rich dude

I mean, that alone could make for vast magnitudes of study. It's the kind of thing that should lead us to question to nature of public/private companies, for a start.

There could be a whole course on the fall of Twitter. Musk has also wiped out 50%+ of the company value, which for a company of that size is wild. There's also the psychological side to study. Like/dislike Musk, he's done great with Tesla. Whatever skill(s) he has there has not transferred to Twitter.

I don't think it's the same person and leadership model working well for one company and not for another, I think the person changed. I think he was poisoned by internet obsession. He's just the most visible case, but it has happened and is happening to millions of people, sadly concentrated among adolescents.

Agree--the adoring fans, the huge amounts of money, the years of "this guy is the real-life Tony Stark!" talk went to his head, and he sort of became a parody of his worst impulses.

He already had the money. And plenty of people get lost down this "terminally online" rabbit hole that don't have all the fans and adulation, though I agree that's a component of it. But I think to some extent there are just some personalities that is predisposed to succumb to this, though I think we're all vulnerable to some degree.

That is, I don't think what's going on with him is actually unique at all. All that's unique about it is the level of impact and visibility his deterioration has been able to have because of who he is.

It’s very simple. As Tesla grew, the company figured out how to manage Musk’s worst impulses. It has an immune response to Musk’s malignant narcissism.

Twitter does not have an immune response. It’s like a colonizer introducing a new disease to an ecosystem. Twitter didn’t know how to handle Musk, and so it just amplified his worst tendencies.

He was always a malignant narcissist. But he probably did get worse. It’s like an alcoholic suddenly owning a bar.

There's nothing to study. It's like studying the bottles of piss of Howard Hughes. Elon Musk is simply not well. And his enablers will stop enabling him when the financial outcomes of this entire mess become unquestionable.

> > he's done great with Tesla

What real innovations has Tesla brought to the market? And I mean real innovations which benefit the consumer, not stuff like electrification that is something that needs to be done for the sake of ìstopping climate change'.

Driving a Tesla is essentially the same experience as driving a 1996 Mercedes, actually the Mercedes interior are higher quality.

It's too early to tell with Twitter.

The (fall|rebirth) of Twitter - either will be studied.

Where competition == latex:

  $$\Huge
  \mathbb{X}
  $$

Try it here: https://www.mathjax.org/#demo

Or U+1D54F:

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F

Reminds me of Yahoo! circa 2013, with the CEO deciding that of all the problems, the logo was the one to fix. Competition held, CEO's design won.

>Competition held, CEO's design won.

why even put up the facade at that point?

So the CEO can win and show everyone his super cool design skills

I think he is trying out the corporate version of Tr*mpism.

So-called "Informed" people will yell and frown, but are those the important ones And how serious is the yelling?

And is the attention he accumulates really what counts?

> And is the attention he accumulates really what counts?

He recently admitted that ad revenue is down 50%, so I guess not?

Brand value?

The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.

> The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.

I believe there is more than one association with Twitter's branding and that depends entirely on how much of a Twitter user you are:

- Associated with a toxic cesspool of doxxing, pile-ons, harassment, bad faith arguments, etc.: you are an active user of Twitter, tweeting, replying, participating in the endless threads devolving into the usual social media toxicity.

- Associated with public announcements, breaking news, and insider info: you are a consumer of information shared through Twitter, that others sifted through and surfaced it through other means (Hacker News, Reddit, news websites embedding a tweet, etc.)

I say that because I was never an active user of Twitter, pre-Musk acquisition I had my account (and a pretty handle) since 2009 but I never actively used Twitter for discussions, posts interactions, and so on. I would go to Twitter from other media, check maybe a thread or two and get the fuck out of there. And that was exactly because interacting on the platform was not only toxic but pretty chaotic to keep track of, the whole "shouting into the void" style of communication never resonated with me.

I still got some value out of Twitter by seeing verified accounts of prominent people (not celebs) breaking news or sharing inside scoops sometimes by retweeting someone that wasn't verified but was an insider on the subject. All of that has crumbled for me, I can't use Twitter for anything anymore.

So there was brand value, even in the midst of being a cesspool of toxicity, for people like me, that casually ended on Twitter to find information that wasn't available (yet) on other media. That is completely gone, the big question is: what's actually left of value in the platform? I don't see anything that can be recouped.

> The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.

This only worsened recently. So the X.com brand is going to be associated with this.

But only because it reflects human nature.

It's still the place to go for on-the-ground breaking news witness/reports, etc.

The new logo looks like it's for a "gentleman's" nightclub.

Conveniently none of that association will go anywhere, just no one will know what it's referring to.

I live in a country whose national broadcaster endorsed the platform — that's a broadcaster that is respected around the world, btw. Twitter's brand value used to be enormous.

So, like any and all of the top websites?

Yeah, it’s up there with HBO->Max in stupidity.

I’m fascinated by the idea that anyone would use Twitter/X as a super app - I don’t see how Musk thinks anyone would use a mediocre social app over the ubiquitous Apple/Google Pay.

I think he's come to peace with the fact that he paid $44 billion for an unprofitable messaging platform and he's not going to be turning it around. He's now giving up on the concept of short-form pub/sub text messaging and instead hoping he can just capture those millions of logins for a completely unrelated platform (i.e. some hazy crypto payment stuff). This is a web property that for whatever reason, he was never able to build himself.

There’s a good chance that Twitter is being destroyed intentionally; it has been a very useful tool for people organizing against the political- and billionaire-class. Egypt really hated its influence; Saudi’s aren’t too thrilled, etc. Powerful monied interests financed the buy-out.

But who decides when/if it is a failure?

If Musk is truly able to build a Western version of WeChat, i.e. his dream "everything app," it will be a roaring success.

And it won't matter what coastal journalists and trendy pop-culture explainers printed at the time.

x.com is not a bad domain tbh

I think a major problem with it is that it sounds like a porn site. The value of short domains is probably overrated too, a single word is nice but a single letter? so what?

Brand value doesn't exist. Services and products do.

Ridiculous.

Which do you prefer, a Ferrari or a Geely? It's purely on the merit of the product, right?

Why do people wear t-shirts with 'GUCCI' or 'Balenciaga' on them instead of just 'GREAT' or 'Ballerina' or whatever?

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