X, the moonshot factory | Hacker News Reader

X, the moonshot factory

x.company

125 pointsrgovostes185 comments

How long do these “moonshots” have until they are considered failures?

It seems like an anti pattern that some huge, futzy organization launches a “moonshot” to explain why they burn money on something without needing a return because it’s a “moonshot.”

JFK gave his “to the moon” speech in 1962, targeting 1970 [0]. And the USG did it. So 8 years was the first one. It cost a ton of money and was successful and had massive returns culturally, scientifically, and financially.

Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?”

It seems like orgs should stop using this terminology unless they are seriously committed.

The USG launched their “cancer moonshot” [2] for very good reasons, and very sympathetic, but their goal was by 2020 and they didn’t make it. I think we should increase cancer research funding, but draping it in hyperbole is negative when we don’t achieve what we said we targeted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act#Medical...

The main JFK speech about the manned moon landing was May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress. The “we choose to go to the moon” speech at Houston’s Rice University in the fall of 1962 was more a case of pumping up public enthusiasm about the very expensive program, given that polls — especially in that mid-term election year — were showing growing doubts among voters that the expenditure was worth it.

Thanks for the clarification. So it’s more like 9 years than 8.

Apollo 11 landed on July 20, 1969, so just over 8 years after the main speech at the joint session.

> Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?”

Waymo, Brain, and Chronicle

Do any of them generate profit?

Brain is indirectly profitable in terms of AI backend for the whole company, which pays dividends in ads, mobile, etc.

Did the moon landing?

I haven't heard of the latter two, and Waymo is currently in development/testing and is not nearly as ubiquitous as it seems to be in the States.

Brain is everything you know of today in GenAI space, and many more internally used products and technologies.

How much of that was actually generated directly from "Google X"? Seems to me that most of it came out of DeepMind, which was just a run-of-the-mill big company buys innovative startup type of acquisition.

Brain and DeepMind were separate orgs until very very recently. Google's GenAI stuff was mostly out of Brain and its RL stuff was mostly out of DeepMind.

>Brain is everything you know of today in GenAI space

I know ChatGPT, Midjourney, StableDiffusion, Adobe Firefly, And GitHub Co-Pilot in this space. Where’s Google?

Let me guess: Brain’s research led to those products? Even if that were the case, Google still failed to market and capitalize. Are they running an open research lab for the greater good? Or are they still interested in launching market-leading products?

Unlike the original moonshot, which was famously first-order revenue-positive ;)

Yes, it was. It was a political program to gain reputation against the Soviets and phenomenally successful in that I think the US was happy with its ROI.

Reputation isn't revenue.

You could say the same thing about Brain or Waymo.

The USG isn't setting out to make money on major ventures. Publicly traded companies are.

Sure, google didn't capitalize on their tech before others did.

But google is a fast follower. Let's wait and see.

Also - did you miss "many other internally used tools/infra" part - if they can feed ads infra and increase revenue by a meager 1%, that's more than enough to make up for all others combined in revenue generated.

Has google landed anything from AI yet?

Bard just launched and it may be a $100B product in a few years, but now it’s still playing catch-up to OpenAI (that started without any moonshot and “only” with $1B in its first major seed round [0]).

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/openai

All SOTA generative models are built on Google Brain’s research.

I can't speak to the other two, but it's laughable to suggest in 2023 Waymo has "landed" - where is the contribution to Google's bottom line? Where can I buy or use Waymo tech outside of some very restricted demo neighborhoods? What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years?

I'd be far more prepared to argue Waymo is presently another poster child for a failing Google x project.

> outside of some very restricted demo neighborhoods

Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro. If Waymo services your home address -- and it services a lot of residential area -- then you can probably get anywhere you'd want to go around Phoenix in a driverless taxi.

> What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years?

I have no insider info, but I'd expect SF and LA County to roll out in the next few years and significant coverage of major metros by the end of next decade.

Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening.

> Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening.

Don't know why you are saying sorry to me either. They are happening of course, but to say its "landed" at Waymo is hilarious to me.

> Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro.

Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country. You've also conveniently skipped addressing the current lack of any profit for Google what-so-ever too - a core component of most people's definition of a new line of business being a success. You can't even point to meaningful user growth given the tiny percentage of the country it operates in.

> Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country.

1. IDK why anyone would spend the money to do driverless everywhere in the USA. You can get to 30% of the population and by far the most profitable taxi markets by going one metro at a time. Even just the major metros in the sunbelt would print insane amounts of money.

2. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the time to go from one metro to N metros in not N*(lifetime of waymo). Ie, the hard part is done. The product has made it to market, at least in the sunbelt, and the poo-poo attitude about being able to go anywhere in the Phoenix metro without a driver is a pretty amazing dismissal.

> You can get to 30% of the population and by far the most profitable taxi markets by going one metro at a time. Even just the major metros in the sunbelt would print insane amounts of money.

When this actually happens, then we can discuss Waymo's "landing". This is all hypothetical today.

It's not about traversing the whole USA - its about serving more than a handful of customers in demo areas, relatively speaking. Waymo has never done this to date.

I'm not disputing Waymo could go somewhere - it might! It hasn't so far.

Describing “landed” as “Waymo is profitable and deployed in most of the US” would be like arguing that the space program was a failure because it didn’t lead to profitable space ports and space routes.

The equivalent of the moon landing for self driving tech is closer to “they have driven a lot of miles without anybody in the driver seat”, which both Cruise and Waymo have done (>1M miles)

What utter nonsense. Google is a publicly traded for-profit company, not a sovereign government or charitable cause.

The entire point of Google's moonshots is new profitable businesses, of which Waymo is not and has never been. Comparing to the United States Government because they both used the term "moonshot" is beyond silly.

For a Google moonshot to land, it has to make money, or it won't continue to exist. It's really not a complex concept.

Even though it came out of X, I don't see how Chronicle could reasonably be considered a moonshot for Google. A cloud-based SecOps suite that emphasizes integration with Google Cloud/GSuite seems like a fairly obvious vertical expansion. That said, I don't know much about SecOps.

I'd argue that the OG Moonshot was less of a metaphorical moonshot than most of the X projects. Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon, and I think we were way further away from a science and tech perspective than we were from the moon in the early 60s.

> Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon

I don’t think that’s fair in the sense that going to the moon was absurdly difficult in 1962. It’s hard to compare things so different, but going to the moon only seems easier now, 60 years later. At the time of the moonshot it was one of the most difficult things humanity ever attempted.

Waymo was acquired externally.

I thought moon shot was in reference to the rescue effort for Apollo 13.

I think in retrospect, we can consider the Manhattan Project another moonshot, at least purely on a technical level, and that only took three years. The thing about moonshots is that you can't just declare a moonshot by fiat and expect anything to happen. The state of science and technology needs to have reached a point where a significant breakthrough is imminent, given sufficient investment. This is where atomic science was in 1942 and rocketry was in 1960.

Which is why the historic examples of moonshots didn't actually arise from government fiat, but from scientists. The Manhattan Project famously started from a letter, signed by multiple prominent physicists including Einstein, warning the US government that the invention of an atomic bomb was imminent enough that they feared Germany would accomplish it first. The moon landing was a little more complicated, but for the entire 20th century, rocket scientists understood it was possible to explore space and did everything they could to try and convince various governments to fund their research[1]; the imminent achievability of a moon landing by 1960 fueled fears in the US government that the Soviets might beat them there.

So who are the cancer researchers promising that any sort of "moonshot" breakthrough is imminent? Let me know if there is one, but the cancer moonshot idea seems to have originated in politics, and once politicians start promising "cancer moonshots"--even if no such thing is likely to be achievable--it's not likely cancer researchers are going to complain or refuse the new source of potential funding.

Unlike the government, Google at least has or had the potential to be the type of organization that actually listened to the relevant technical experts instead of being dictated by the whims of random executives receiving revelations from the Good Idea Fairy. But I agree with you that it doesn't seem like they've delivered.

Finally, I think even calling these projects "moonshots" sets them up for failure in a certain way. If you said "we can and will land on the Moon" in 1962, people will be impressed. If you say "we're going to achieve a 'cancer moonshot'", what does that mean? Does that mean you're going to cure cancer? No, because if you were going to cure cancer, you'd say "we can and will cure cancer". Except (as far as I know) that would be a lie, so instead they say "cancer moonshot", which doesn't mean anything. Any goal that's ambitious enough to be called a "moonshot" is a goal that you can just say out loud and it will impress people a lot more than calling it a "moonshot".

[1] Yes, this is my way of glossing over the V-2; I don't morally endorse Von Braun's work during the war and this is entirely beside the point I'm making here.

X by Google, X by Twitter, X by X. Terrible branding on all sides and I am so not interested in any of this bullshit.

Scrolling down, this looks like Google's X.

It is.

take a dramamine before scrolling down

> scrolling down

There are resources available. https://www.healthline.com/health/suicide-and-suicidal-behav...

mac os x

10 is actually a pretty special number

Am I the only one thinking of that picture of ten roman legionaries, captioned "The X Men"?

ten fingers, ten toes, base ten arabic numbers

For me, the 90's X-Men theme doesn't work in the movie 300.

I suspect the "X" branding for these companies has less to do with Roman numerals and more to do with the prominent use of "X" in mathematics as a unknown variable, and that's due to René Descartes according to:

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/8109/why-are-x-and-y...

There’s also a history of using ‘X’ as the designation for eXperimental planes, e.g the X-15.

I always assumed that was the inspiration for the use in tech branding like Google X - conjuring up images of skunkworks, etc.

hmm:

mac os: numeral

generation: variable

google: eXperimental!

malcom: variable

elon: hey yo, check it out i tried to register x.com and actually got it!

the question is... chitter or xitter?

OS X at least has the excuse of having come out during the time when Generation X were the young adult audience sought after by marketers.

In contrast, today we have Gen X executives who are seemingly trying to recapture the glory days of the late '90s.

The only thing I can ask is: Y ???

It's a combination of things really.

Zzz

This is even better in Spanish.

["Y?" is the equivalent of "And?"]

Much more original and superior

Thank you

YCombinator needs to rebrand as Y to compete in this new world.

I'm told internally at Reddit there's a group called Reddit X working on the next big thing which recently got disbanded.

https://x.redditinc.com

It just reminds me of Telegram. This page I mean, and that too visually it kinda resembles some Telegram product pages. However, unlike Reddit, Telegram app is epic good.

The money/coins/rewards everywhere, the childish avatars, the lies about privacy and "empowering" redditors...

Thanks, I hate everything about it.

>the next big thing which recently got disbanded

A redesign that only applies to 30% of the website? A new video player that's even more broken?

Shit. Don't give them any more ideas. Just wait until they finish the current "revamp of the awards system".

There was also NHSX, which got merged into NHS Digital, which then got merged into NHS England.

Google X doesn't really need brand recognition, because they're supposed to pump out brands, not be the brand. IE Waymo, verily, etc.

"Google" is the brand name for enshittification.

WTH, I totally 100% thought this was Musk's new company. There is already a company called X by Alphabet, what a goof.

Musk's original web payments company was x.com, which he started in the late 90's. Then it did a very early merge with some other startup, and the combined company rebranded to PayPal. At some point, Musk bought back the domain from PayPal.

I do not understand why anyone would think that it's a great idea to do a this major rebranding of an existing company with a well-known brand.

This entire endeavour not sure whether conscious or unconscious is Musk trying to -- gosh, there's a word for this but my English is failing me -- to finally get even with Thiel, to show Thiel he can do everything Thiel did but better. Someone like Musk never fully recovers from getting fired from his dear X.com post-merge. Make no mistake: back then Musk was doing a stupid by trying to force a Windows tech stack on a payment company which was using Unix.

Thiel was one of the largest donors of Trump in 2016, is a true darling of the alt right so of course Musk must rub shoulders with them.

Between the erstwhile x.com and Confinity the company which launched PayPal, the latter succeeded, gobbled up x.com so now of course Musk must show to Thiel that he can make a successful payment company called x.com. He must.

That's the reason for all this bullshit, I am certain.

> gosh, there's a word for this

one-upmanship?

"Google X" actually made (and maybe still makes) a lot of sense.

The history is that around 2010 Google wanted to kick off experimental projects, in part because they were starting to lose top talent to startups. Since they had Google Maps and Google Images and Google Earth and Google Mail etc, they named the new org Google X as a space for the new and undefined projects.

Also of note is that the stock ticker symbol "X" is, for whatever reason, US Steel [0]. If Elon ever takes his X Company public, I bet there will be a lot of erroneous buys of US Steel, similar to what happened when Twitter originally went public [1] (an unrelated penny stock with the ticker symbol TWTRQ surged), or when an unrelated company with the ticker symbol ZOOM surged when people started buying Zoom videoconferencing stock (ticker symbol ZM) at the start of the pandemic [2].

[0] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/X:NYSE

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2013/10/08/after-...

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/video/confusion-over-stock-names-zoom-...

As of 12:54 PM US Eastern time, US Steel stock is up 2.79% for the day. The S&P 500 is up 0.44% for the day. Might be something to that.

IIRC the X came from the 1980s when it branched out into energy, bought Marathon Oil, and reorganized into an umbrella company named "USX" in which the US Steel part became just a subsidiary. They exited that in 2001 but apparently? kept the symbol.

It's actually the other way around - they already had the symbol X and that's why they became USX.

New York Times, July 9, 1986, on the founding of USX: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/09/business/us-steel-new-nam...

"Mr. Roderick explained that for months the company had considered more than 200 new names, ranging from U.S.S.A. and Amcor to Maxus. U.S.X. was selected, he said, because ''it had a continuity from the U.S. part.'' He added that X had been the company's symbol on the New York Stock Exchange since 1924. "

There's no obvious connection between X and US Steel - maybe somebody just thought X sounded cool?

Everyone is hating on "X" right now because of the bloviated way tech companies talk about "changing the world". I'm always pessimistic about things like this too, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for this stuff.

Why?, because it allows some engineers to work on cool stuff. Will it pan out, probably not, but I'm not going to cry if Google blows through a few million bucks. They won't even notice it.

Better that a few engineers get to have some fun working on stuff other than optimal ad placement. Who know's maybe they'll stumble across something actually helpful to humanity (not holding my breath).

These engineers won't be having fun, because these engineers will be working for Elon Musk. Also, it's a rebrand. He fired the vast majority of the engineers he had.

Everyone is hating on "X" because the people who possess the ability to think critically, i.e. engineers, are rightfully perplexed by every single move that this moron makes. It taps into the uncanny valley response for smart people, and it is amplified because Elon Musk has branded himself a genius.

This is a shitty rebrand from Twitter to something that is impossible to search for on Google, and nothing more. It is the X-shaped shadow of a fiery ball of mediocrity that is hurtling towards San Francisco pavement as we speak.

Wrong X

It’s like a hater bot just spewing out mindless hate. Funny how that works.

My cynical view is that Google's X projects had great value to the company but not in the long-shot asymmetric return sense. X convinced engineers working on optimal ad placement that they were part of something grand and beneficial. Google becoming a financial mature company may be inevitable, but risks alienating engineers who want more meaning in their work, whether that meaning is real or superficial.

The last event in their timeline is 2020. Moon presumed shot.

I wonder if we can add it to the Google death pile?

Can't say that here. You'll be downvoted as trite and cynical.

IMO, it's all headed for the graveyard.

> IMO, it's all headed for the graveyard

Every company will die some day.

But some companies have been around for a very very long time.

Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. (株式会社金剛組, Kabushiki Gaisha Kongō Gumi) is a Japanese construction company founded in 578 A.D., making it the world's oldest company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi

And there are some other pretty old companies that are still around as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Now you might say, Ship of Theseus. Is a company that is over one millennia old really still the same company at all.

But philosophy aside.

If you’re gonna prophetize the death of Google (or any other company in particular), I want very specific numbers.

When? Tomorrow? This year? Within 5 years? 313,373 years from now?

[warning: dangerously off topic rabbit hole]

Huh, according to Wikipedia (without citation, unfortunately), that ancient construction company pioneered the use of CAD for temple design. I wanted to see if I could corroborate this claim, so "kongo gumi cad" on Google lead to: https://worksthatwork.com/3/kongo-gumi which makes a very similar claim. From what I can tell, this claim is echoed all over the (English) internet but originates from "worksthatwork.com".

The earliest wayback snapshot of that website from 2014 doesn't mention CAD, but the March 30, 2015 snapshot does. Looking at the wikipedia article edit history, there seems to be an edit war happening regarding the accuracy of sources (someone seems to believe very strongly that Nikkei Asia is not a reliable source): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kong%C5%8D_Gumi&o...

The CAD claim seems to have originated in 2022, but the citation to "worksthatwork.com" was swiftly removed in a subsequent edit due to lack of evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kong%C5%8D_Gumi&o...

Well, this was a strange rabbithole to fall down. I'm interested to know from where this claim originates, or if "worksthatwork.com" just made it up in 2015. The answer probably lies beyond the English language internet.

I wish Wikipedia had a "blame" feature like git. If it exists, I couldn't find it.

> I wish Wikipedia had a "blame" feature like git. If it exists, I couldn't find it.

If there is an edit war going on, and this claim is being removed and added you’d still need to look at quite a lot of revisions manually.

But there are tools to export Wikipedia page edit history to git I think. And you could write a script to grep every revision of the article for the word “CAD” to determine at what point in time it first appeared in the article. And then from there you could look at who added it and so on.

Googly things aren't going anywhere, as long as they are pulling in ad revenue.

From the submission tite I definitely thought "moonshot factory" would be some kind of analysis of how too-lofty startups fail, not an earnest mission statement from whatever this is. Blegh.

Have any of their projects gone anywhere? https://x.company/projects/

Intrinsic managed to purchase Vicarious AI for so little money that my options were completely underwater (by a sizable margin too), so I guess that works.

Yeah, they released 20 million mosquitoes in Fresno

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/14/googles-life-sciences-unit...

Waymo was one of their projects https://waymo.com/

Hard to argue Waymo hasn't gone anywhere, given their public pilots.

The other one I know of is Wing partnering with Doordash in AUS: https://help.doordash.com/consumers/s/article/Drone-Delivery...

I'd say its hard to argue that Waymo HAS gone anywhere. Can I buy a waymo? Can I rent a waymo taxi to take me to the airport?

I, no joke, encounter 4-5 of those white Jaguar driverless Waymo vehicles that are covered in sensors and cameras every day. They're all over my neighborhood. I believe (but havent confirmed) that normal folks can use them in this area too.

In Phoenix you can as long as you live in a 200 square mile area comprising big parts of the Phoenix metro. And not just to the airport -- you can take it dinner, to the golf course, etc. SF and LA "coming soon".

Everyday Robots was recently kneecapped: https://www.wired.com/story/alphabet-layoffs-hit-trash-sorti...

When I worked there we called it "the money furnace"

Didn't Google Brain start as an X project?

EDIT: It did, it's listed on that page. "Attention is all you need" was published by Brain and was a key contributor to the current AI boom.

Hard to argue Waymo hasn't gone anywhere with the number of their Taxis I see driving around Scottsdale. I see multiple everyday and I only really drive along a single road as part of my commute. I don't think they've "made it" yet, but it's impressive tech I can actually use nonetheless.

Just like the moon landing: testing it out in Arizona before doing it for real. https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/coconino/?cid=FSEPRD611864

The information looks interesting but the site is so hard to navigate, there are 3-7 moving elements on the screen at any time, text runs away while reading it, scroll doesn't work as expected, information is presented in too many different ways.

Makes it harder to track the projects and the progress (or lack of it) so maybe that's why they like it

I despise websites that add useless interactivity like this. We already have scrollbars that work perfectly well.

I don't think you're really supposed to navigate it. There isn't any real content on sites like this. They exist to check a "we have a marketing website" box, that prospective parties can basically open, scroll half way down and think "yep looks very impressive".

If you're the public, there is nothing to learn, esp if they have a sub brand that actually does the thing (eg waymo). If your an investor (?) you have actual data to review, or dont care either way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(American_band)

Have worked (or attempted to work) on numerous projects with these guys, and each one has been an embarrassing mix of them throwing money at us and then disappearing and it going nowhere. Half the time the project sponsor just disappears into some other part of google.

Actually someone described this phenomena really well: we are all tied up (psychologically, socially, economically) by these billionaires and the visions they bring up to us, that we let ourselves seduced by the spectacle, while surrendering our common sense and critical thinking, void of power, action, consciousness. The reality is that, even you fuel a revolution somewhere, there are massive opposing idiots out there willing to kill themselves for being quoted by musk etc. So just enjoy the ride and try to navigate this world as billionaires do: profiting from the stupid - but be cool & polite ;) not saying they're not driving innovation, but they're machiavellic the rest of the time (we are all the same, but for others it takes longer to realize). sure, downvote me, at least you have this power :)

> there are massive opposing idiots out there willing to kill themselves for being quoted by musk etc.

Straw man aside, calling your opponents idiots says more about you than about your opponents.

You haven't understood my message because you are superficial. I don't have opponents, i'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, those are my sincere opinions, it was just an observation and i'm not trying to grow a cult. Don't be so reactive on the internet, it's like winning the special olympics (can we still make these kind of jokes today? .... people either forgot the Internet, either they're born in 2000 lol)

Even @sama, as much as I respect him and look up to him (for both ycombinator and openai), disappointed me with his attempt at monopolizing AI. At the end of the day, he's looking for his best interest, who am I to comment? :)

To add fuel to the fire, Elon has been quite vocal about his disdain for Larry lately. According to Elon, he got upset at Larry for not taking the risks of AI seriously. I wouldn't put it past Elon for this to be a bit of him thumbing his nose at Alphabet.

Musk wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. His obsession goes back a long, long way.

True. Maybe it was Larry who was doing the nose thumbing to start with.

Somehow the naming obsession reminds me of the antics of self-promoter (and fraud) Kim Schmitz, who targeted being "Dot Com" or "Mega".

https://www.wired.com/2012/01/kim-dotcom/

There's also this story although I wouldn't take it too seriously

Elon Musk Reportedly Had Affair With Sergey Brin’s Wife—Ending Billionaires’ Friendship - https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2022/07/24/el...

Everybody wants to have the "cool factor" of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

Heck, Musk even copied the logo outright.

Wow - has this guy ever had an original thought.

The Twitter landing page looks like something from the mind of a prepubescent boy pumped on “xtreme” products of the early 00s

You could say "X Æ A-12" as a child's name was pretty original

It was literally a "fan submitted" logo. Not even a Musk thought.

I always felt that calling this a “moonshot factory” was foolishly overblown. Just like you don’t generalise your code until you have at least two instances to work from, show us two successful “moonshots” before you even start thinking about a “factory”.

Moonshots don't imply moon landings. I take the name in a humbler manner — X is a lab that works on risky projects that might not make it anywhere, and Alphabet is okay with that.

That's a fair point!

Although, it still feels to me like the "factory" part implies they've figured out a good way to spot good investments:

At X, we’re trying to build a “moonshot factory”, a place where the processes and culture make it easier to make radical breakthroughs — repeatedly.

...but their track record doesn't really bear this out, I think?

If they had studied successful moonshots from the past and pinpointed some important elements of their approaches, that would make sense, but if so the website doesn't talk about it.

It looks like an incredibly cool and fun place to work, but who knows if they're funding the right ideas and the right people, or if it's all just random?

Yes, X as a brand lacks uniqueness.

Xbox

X factor

X-men

Xvideos

Etc etc

Seems to me musk just loves the domain.

Domain: $10,000,000

Users: $44,000,000,000

The Xbox brand is very unique because they think numbers go from 0 to 360 to 1.

Tough to overflow when bound to a loop, I guess

They do over the domain 360*Z_719

If it's supposed to be degrees, then since 360==0 doesn't that mean the range is [0,360) so 360 degrees is actually an out of range value for an angle?

I've always wondered this but never enough to ask it.

Z_719 is the shorthand for integers in [0, 718], with Z_n typically connotating the algebraic group or ring of integers up to n. In this case 360(Z_719) is an ideal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory)) over that domain.

While the ordered sequence of Z_719 is just {0, 1, 2... 718} then wrapping back around to 0, for the ideal 360(Z_719) you get {0, 360, 360*2 % 719 = 1, ...} which is the basis of my joke :)

It’s kind of how angles work, tho.

correction: it's not 0. It's null. Null to 360 to One. I think Zero comes after One.

Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. I guess that would make more sense if they were rebranding the 360.

To be pedantic, there's no need for "very" in front of "unique", as my spouse is happy to pounce on despite my protests that English is a living language.

> Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns.

From days in the year to years, but since Microsoft isn't very good with calendar, they stuck in pre-Julian epoch and have incorrect values.

Wonder if I should explicitly put an emoji here?

Dropping the "very" would lose some of the sarcasm though.

And after one there is “series”. The “X Box Series X” name is so tacky it’s kind of genius.

0 to 360 to 1 to S to X

X-server

Well, of course he does: his first start-up he managed sold (well, not exactly sold) to Confinity was called X.com [0]. And yes, it had image problems because people thought it was a porn site judging by its name.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

Yep, he was forced out of PayPal for trying to make them rename themselves X.com after the acquisition almost 25 years ago.

So here he is again, pushing the name X. My understanding is he’s done it before. And he wants Twitter to be a huge financial payments player. Claims half the global market will want to use it.

Seems to me he can’t stop fighting past battles to try to prove he was right, when he clearly wasn’t, to assuage his ego. I’m hardly the first person to point this out. I learned it from someone else years ago, it just happens to fit perfectly again.

Well, Max Levchin (the actual creator of PayPal) also had some problem with the guy's, uh, technical (mis)contributions as well, as he recalls in one of his interviews (excerpt from "Founders at Work", Livingston is the interviewer):

     Levchin: [...] For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix. By summer 2000, it seemed like the Windows thing was going to happen because Peter was gone. He took a sabbatical to make sure there were no clashes between the CEOs. So, this other guy was pushing me toward accepting that Windows was going to be the platform. I said, "Well, if this is really going to happen, I'm not going to be able to provide much value, because I don't really know anything about Windows. I went to a school that was all Unix all the time, and I spent all my life coding for Unix." I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, "We built all these cool Unix projects, but it's kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else." So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. "Do you really want to do that?" It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going. Part of having a CEO is that you can respectfully disagree, but you can resign if you don't like it that much. But then eventually I became interested in the economics of PayPal and trying to see what's going on in the back end, because I was getting distracted from code and technology. I realized that we were losing a lot more money in fraud than I thought we were. It was still early 2001. If you looked at the actual loss rates, they were fairly low. You could see that we were losing money, but, given the growth of the system and the growth of the fraud, fraud was not that big of a problem. It was less than 1 percent — it was really low. But then, if you looked at the rate of growth of fraud, you could see that, if you don't stop it, it would become 5 percent, 10 percent of the system, which would have been prohibitive. So I started freaking out over it, and this intern and I wrote all sorts of packages — very statistical stuff — to analyze "How did it happen; how do we lose money?" By the end of the summer, we thought, "The world is going to end any minute now." It was obvious that we were really losing tons of money. By mid-summer, it was already on a $10 million range per month and just very scary.

    Livingston: Did the rest of the company know you were right?

    Levchin: Through the summer, I think various people were slowly coming to understand that this thing was really serious. It was pretty obvious at a certain point. I didn't have to really convince anyone. In the beginning some people said, "Yes, it's a lot of money, but we're really growing, too. As an absolute amount, $5 million is a lot of losses, but, if you are processing $300 million, whatever." There was actually a bit of an altercation at the very top management level, which caused the CEO to leave. Peter came back as the CEO. The first decision that he and I took was that my new job — in addition to technology — was going to be this fraud thing, because I already spent so much time looking at it. This guy Bob, the intern, and I — I convinced him to drop out of Stanford for a year and work with me more on it — for the next year, we just worked nonstop on trying to understand and fix these problems.

    Livingston: So the CEO left and Peter came back?

    Levchin: The three of us are pretty good friends now. At the time, already I had hated the guy's guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, "You gotta go, man." My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major — you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.

Notice how he doesn't even refers to him by the name.

This is a Google company, it has nothing to do with Musk.

I’m no Xbox fan but I always felt the appeal was it was almost a palindrome and it’s a box to play games on.

X has a cool sound and mystery so I think it works when paired with someone that fits. X-men is one for me at least.

Brand-less unpaired “X” is the epitome of bland. I have no doubt Twitter will be around in the next ten years.

But just like AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace no one will really care except a fragment of their original demographic. Which I’m going to assume with Musk at the helm will be aging genx'ers. Which is kinda fitting.

You forgot Xhamster

Was it not called Xbox because of DirectX?

...with an unhinged protofascist billionaire at the helm.

This sort of "throwing optimist VC billions to radical approaches" could be a good approach to a number of hard problems that academy and classical corps couldn't solve, but Musk's recent views and radicalisation drives away any serious partner with an inch of foresight.

When will he change his name into Elon MuX ?

MUX is already trademarked by Mux.com. I doubt the owners would be enthusiastic.

Move fast, take things.

Can confirm, although the resulting awareness might be worth the headache.

So many things ill thought out in this. Curious to see which media outlet is the first to refer to "SoAndSo's x'd out earlier today" or "Recent x's suggest a growing interest in..."

Perhaps two weeks until he explains it all away as an "experiment" rather than genuine ignorance.

Looking past the Elon hilarity, I'm all for moonshots, a bold move investing in the next big thing.

Trying to transform Twitter into WeChat for the west seems unlikely, to say the least, but has nothing to do with this announcement. They just both have X in their names because I guess Elon likes the letter.

Can't wait for The XX to acquire both of these fledgling companies. https://www.instagram.com/thexx/

Is it finally going to get to 12 or are they going straight to weighland?

At this point, it is literally becoming like math, just name every other random variable, x.

"Tidal"? Isn't that already a music streaming service?

Seinfeld was a show about nothing, X is the Seinfeld of branding.

For God's sake people, stop highjacking scroll.

What do you mean by hijacking? The page changing as you scroll down? I'm on desktop and it looks quite pretty I would say. Does it not work for you or do you just don't like that sort of UI?

For God's sake stop highjacking scroll, people.

I guess the WWE Attitude Era still exists.

What happened to unique company names?

Is this the Alphabet X or the Elon X ?

Wow this is a great example of bad marketing/naming/fluff. I thought this was X (Elon Musk) and the site looked generic enough (until Google is mentioned) to make me think this was the case.

Then it hit me: Musk is doing the rebrand so he can package 'moonshots' to pump his Twitter stock and eventually save his investment in the company. He'll bundle 'Elon futurism' into Twitter so he can get a better multiple.

It took me over a minute to realize this is not an Elon Musk production

Is this another shot at Elon Musk? Not sure where all the hate for him came from. Was it the hardline free speech direction he took Twitter, reinstating conservative accounts? That seemed to be the downward turning point in his popularity.

He also laid off a bunch of people pretty haphazardly and introduced paying for brand integrity.

Not sure what rock you've managed to find (please send me the address, BTW, I could use a break myself), but between being forced to buy the company, firing a vast swath of the staff, not paying his workers, and other terrible decisions on what was otherwise a floundering if beloved company, I think Elon has earned this fresh disdain.

Sorry buddy, I value the privacy of my rock.

I think Musks turning point was when he randomly accused the Thai boyscout guide of being a pedophile. Since then his image has been continuously circling the toilet.

Well before that, even before the impractical submersible idea/calling that one person a pedophile when it flopped

Seriously, Google spamming Musk's rebrand? Tacky af.

I'm not sure they're at all related?

Surely Google/Alphabet's X subsidiary has been around for a while now? (wikipedia suggests since 2010, albeit only renamed from Google X to just "X" in 2015)

(And I always felt the name made a certain amount of sense for a subsidiary of a company named "Alphabet").

Why is every rich asshole obsessed with “X”?

Disgraced Uber CEO/founde (“TK” — within his inner circle, douche alert lol) with inserting X into their products

Twitter randomly renamed to “X” by Elon

Tesla car with X

Google has some X product, probably. I think their R&D dept is just named “X”

Apple had a brief “X” and “XS” phase with their iPhones (instead of just using 10 or 10S)

* x in premium products is often associated for ‘exclusive’

* tesla’s cars were S, X , 3, and Y, for that motivation in particular

* x is a bit of a weird letter in the english language, not super common

* x from algebraic notation

Don't forget about your username.

Apple’s X predated that by a decade or two with OS X.

Also, the fine article is about Google X.

F** everything, we're doing five X's!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com