Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

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It isn't an impulse decision.

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.

That's a very large gamble for something that the twitter bird already accomplished. At least Meta kept the name Facebook as a brand and used a different sites entirely when it wanted to experiment with a new formet.

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.

Like or dislike Elon, it seems like a stretch to say he didn't keep up with the times when he's the guy who started companies aiming to make satellite internet that doesn't suck, rockets used to replace NASA's old garbage, and popularize electric cars when every manufacturer had given up on them.

It may be a slightly contestable take, but I do stand by it. He got ahead on space tech because NASA has had it's budgets and missions slashed for decades. Satellite internet was deprioritized in 1st world counties because of physics (and political oligarchies, of course), and Tesla was far from the only competition in the EV space, even a decade ago. He does know how to (or maybe got lucky) find what isn't working and find the talent that can make it work.

(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's the guy who started companies aiming to make satellite internet that doesn't suck

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."

Changing Twitter to X has obviously been part of the plan with Musk from the start, sure.

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.

Interesting that he seems so set on X then. I don't think they'll be able to pull this off - it could work but X is too overloaded for it to be associated mainly with Twitter. I don't think they have the reach to make this work

Musk is trying to create a WeChat clone. He’s just using Twitter as a kind of starting point. A WeChat clone seems ripe for antitrust laws though, but what do I know?

Do we enforce antitrust laws often?

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

He also named his son X, and his daughter Exa. It seems to be a kind of fixation.

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