Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft
themessenger.com
themessenger.com
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
There are two main types: a "standard character mark" (which is text) and the rest, which are visual logo designs.
This one is the latter. That is, they're not trademarking the text "X", just that particular visual representation — the colors involved, etc.
You can tell in the TEAS system by looking in the "Mark Information" section, and the "Standard Character Claim: No" line.
But could you even get a trademark for X, a single character?
Yes. In fact there are at least a few registrations in the TESS database of X for various goods and services. They don’t conflict with each other unless the goods and services are the same.
> Providing on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games; providing on-line electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games
> Entertainment services, namely, providing interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the Internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefor via the Internet
So for _those narrow usecases_, Microsoft can (in theory) enforce a trademark over the character "X". Any attempt to use that trademark here would be tossed immediately IMO.
Where the specific design of the logo is critical is for shirts etc. If you’re selling clothing with other people’s logos that’s a problem, but a distinctive X design is going to be fine.
The X trademark in question appears to be a Service Mark[0], meaning it is a name to represent a service (in this case some kind of social media chat service). My understanding is that the trademark applies to competing services regardless of the artwork or logo, so the social media chat service formerly known as Twitter may have trouble avoiding a collision with it if they want to rename themselves X.
[0] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=76041368&caseSearchType=U...
Similarly the Honda and Hyundai logos use very different frames rather than the common circle which makes them far easier to distinguish than different fonts inside a circle. Namely a box with rounded corners vs an oval. Honda’s H also floats in the frame where Hyundai connects to the oval etc. The point of a logo is to be distinctive and they are.
This is extra-confusing on the USPTO site[1] because it says "Standard Character Claim: No" (which usually means not text), but it also says "Mark Drawing Type: 1 - TYPESET WORD(S) /LETTER(S) /NUMBER(S)".
And that last part is merely the old way of saying it is Standard Character Claim (that's the newer terminology). See their documentation[2] (page 7); the terminology changed in 2003.
Some more info here: https://trademarkgarden.com/2018/03/09/amazon-and-you/
So my understanding (not a lawyer) is that Microsoft's "X" is indeed generic text, though still limited to the specific goods/services listed in the application.
[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=2693757&caseSearchType=US...
[2] https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/products/applicati...
You never know but I think this would be too far of a stretch to pose a real risk.
You don't generally need to sue every infringer in order to keep your trademark. My understanding is it can vary by court and it gets a bit legally complex, and the final decision will depend on various factors (eg: [2]).
[1] for reference: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
[2] https://www.dbllawyers.com/can-i-lose-my-trademark-rights/
However, the 'X' they chose is "just" a single UTF8 character, which would then make it classed as a _standard character mark_.
Hmmm.
The Meta trademark is for this design: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/img/87980831/large?1690302463976
It's true that they use the text "X" in the (textual) description of the trademark, but that is not what's being trademarked. See the "Mark Information" drop-down on the page[1], for more detail.
[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
I see lawsuits ahead.
Apple owns X with OS X and the iPhone X.
Microsoft own Xbox's logo, with the console, store, game pass
Musk is showing the world that he got lucky with his previous ventures. His management of Twitter has been a display of poor management at every level.
If you were less than a year into your position as CEO of a company with revenue divided by half, ex-employees suing you, banned journalists from your platform in the middle of some half-thought-out free speech debate... would you not be fired?
Everything about this makes me think he's just too rich to be fired... anyone else would have been. He just owns too much to not be given any more chances.
Luck (in a random chance context rather than a supernatural context) is real.
Don't really like this framing of the problem - he owns a majority of voting shares, and he paid (or, rather, overpaid) mightily for that right. You can't really be "fired" from being an owner, and I'll note Musk is no longer CEO (and, sure, you can argue the new CEO was hired to be the fall girl/glass cliff example, but that was still her eyes-wide-open choice).
People wrung their hands about Zuckerberg as well (he also has a majority of voting shares of Facebook), but in retrospect that hand-wringing looked premature, at least from a shareholder perspective - Meta is nearly back at its peak and has tripled its stock price from late 2022.
Edit: Pre-acquisition Twitter bonds are trading at ~70 cents on the dollar. Seems like the acquisition financing isn't being traded yet -- banks trying to avoid facing write downs?
They are racking up massive debt to leaseholders, cloud providers...
This is basically what people mean by "too rich to fire". I don't think anyone is suggesting that if he wasn't a stakeholder, he'd keep his job solely because he had a lot of money. I think it fair to say that, if Twitter was a publicly traded company with a board of directors, Elon likely would have been fired by now. Or, at the very least, significantly reigned in.
Sure he might just drive it all into the ground, but the interim piloting has created so much good (whether some acknowledge it or not).
I find it difficult to believe both SpaceX and Tesla was 100% pure luck and chance. Not even the devil is that lucky.
It's rather political, and debated within the clearance community. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
In-Q-Tel is basically DARPA but for the CIA, btw. It's private mostly to help obfuscate initiatives and cashflows, as that's been the SOP for a lot of US black ops kinda stuff for a while; see also: Blackwater aka Academi aka whatever-they're-called-now, plus other chunks of the contractor sphere. Wagner, the Russian mercs, were an attempt to duplicate that effort.
The extreme nature of the focused attacks on him today are fascinating to watch in terms of how angry, irrational mobs form on targets and attack until there's nothing left (and then they keep attacking, because some people are late to the party).
They attack his parenting.
They attack his business successes.
They attack his mental capabilities and rationality.
They attack his character.
They attack his family and background.
They lie about all of the above to whatever extent is necessary.
This goes on here, on Reddit, Twitter, wherever a discussion about Musk arises. The only difference between HN and Reddit on this topic is that HN is slightly more highbrow, although the same general attacks get repeated here as they do on Reddit.
Someone on Reddit yesterday was proclaiming that he "attached" himself to the SpaceX success and deserved zero credit for it. That rather nicely encompasses what's going on.
It's one of the biggest shit shows in the history of the Internet. It's embarrassing - as a human - to watch so many people desperately rolling around in the muck to participate.
We're talking about the same internet in which Facebook's algorithms contributed to violence against the Rohingya. What people think about Elon Musk is simply of no significance by comparison.
My casual observation says that HN has become more "Reddit-Like" in terms of low quality and off-topic posting since the whole Reddit API/MOD debacle.
And yes, I see the irony. I get it.
This place was IMHO pretty toxic during the pandemic. It felt like half of the threads were some covid-related "controversies" and the other half was about whether or not WFH is a fundamental human right.
People have been saying this pretty much as long as HN has been around
Go back 2 or 3 years ago and the level of idolization and fanboyism was just incredibly high.
Tons of 'Elon is a genius' or 'Elon could fix [insert global issue]' like comments.
It was just really annoying for a lot of people. And now, with Musk's recent 'reversals', some of these people are becoming very vocal, swinging things at the other extreme.
What a letdown.
Of course you can go the "morality is meaningless, the guy has highly successful businesses so he deserves respect" route.
Or you could figure out that a self-made genius that pushes nonsense like the hyperloop, rocket mass transportation, tunnels for taxis and terraforming mars to save humanity while denying climate change, is probably neither a genius nor self-made.
If you’re honest with yourself I think you’ll fine these are all caricatures you’ve created because he’s no longer politically aligned enough with you.
TDS has been replaced with EDS.
I do think his recent decisions have been quite poorly thought through, independent of the results. I suspect X/Twitter are going to get hammered by regulatory bodies worldwide because they are not meeting requirements set by eg FTC consent orders.
Stealing credit for achievements that aren't truly yours is a very serious accusation.
> The extreme nature of the focused attacks on him today are fascinating to watch in terms of how angry, irrational mobs form on targets and attack
You seem concerned about discussion quality, but you can't debunk the accusations, all you have to contribute is "everyone I disagree with is irrational!"
Curious.
It just looks like an error or failure and completely out of place with the rest of the site.
1 dud
A few successes
It's really hard to tell to what extent it's luck versus skill. It'd be much easier to tell if we'd live for 10K years and he'd have started like 50 companies. If even 10 of those would've become wildly successful, whereas the mean baseline of other people who started 50 companies would be maybe 1 or 2 companies, then I'd argue that he didn't only get lucky. I'd argue there's also a skill component to it.
It's hard to say how many duds he had in the aughts, since they're probably well-buried at this point.
I don’t like Musk but I think the leftist vilification and dismissal bears all the sounds of people who have no idea how hard it is to build and maintain a successful company.
These are in fact different tangential topics similar to how whether or not AOC likes Musk is tangential to whether or not Solar City was a dud of a company.
You need not like Bill Cosby to objectively state he had a long successful career.
This is hackernews not cable TV. You do not need to regurgitate "talking points".
That's not how that discussion would actually go. Need has nothing to do with it, and the same holds true with Musk. The detached attacks don't need to be brought up in regards to a discussion about Musk & SpaceX, and yet they are guaranteed to come up regardless.
There is no discussion today of any meaningful length that is going to happen on a major public forum (eg Reddit) regarding Trump's border wall where the events of January 6 do not come up as a prominent matter of discussion.
The reason this happens is because the target (Trump, Musk, whatever) triggers people to such an extreme emotional degree they can't control themselves properly, they can no longer think & express rationally. They have basically been trained into a hyper emotional response by the mob they participate with. It's some manner of one-upmanship, virtue signaling as competition: who can most greatly beat this target to death, using any means necessary.
Let's reflect on how we got here.
1) xutopia is making the claim [1] (on a thread about how Twitter's rebrand could be a nightmare) that Musk's actions would've costed any other CEO their job.
2) mettamage countered with Musk has only had 1 dud company so far [2]
3) And that leads us to this oversized thread where yes Musk has had many dud companies and "only 1" isn't correct.
Whether or not Musk is correct on the Thai diver being a pedophile would not belong in this oversized thread though and as you may not have yet noticed; wasn't brought up. It is in fact possible to have a discussion on a forum (perhaps not major) without bringing up tangential points. Some people can control themselves and so far in this oversized thread they have; it's been very on point besides this meta discussion.
If money alone was enough we’d see more Teslas from places like Saudia Arabia. But we don’t.
Now, that may be a skill in and of itself, but that's not a skill for innovation, it's a skill for timing markets.
If you are interested in what successful ratfucking psyops looks like, check out Caltrans’s recent obsession with hydrogen trains.
Patton? Luck merchant (Task Force Baum)
Eisenhower? Luck buffoon (kesserine pass)
Einstein? All luck (Cosmological constant, black holes perhaps)
With moronic clowns such as these it is truly a wonder that the Allies got anywhere.
Also, I think we should make it so if you own a company and it stops making money, it should be taken away from you.
Musk is showing himself to be, well, kind of stupid. We've seen him make moves that are obviously bad and didn't pay off. If you look a little bit deeper, you can see that he has a pattern of making bad decisions. He may also make some good ones, but isn't it more likely that "his" other companies (which he did not create) are succeeding despite him, not because of him? After all, many other smart and ambitious people work with him.
Er... fine. But ... much stupider people have had similar success. I don't think attracting ambition is a worthwhile trait on its own and it's not something I'm going to praise him for.
Actually, if I step back, I don't even think that's true. Again, he didn't create any of these companies, nor did he run them alone when he was CEO. Many very intelligent engineers joined companies he was running because they believed in the product. They may or may not have even heard of him when they joined a given company.
Have they? The number of people who have built a Tesla-size company is very small. The ones who have built a SpaceX-size and a Tesla-size one is minuscule.
Or maybe he's finally stretched himself too thin, isn't getting enough sleep, etc.
"the howard hughes effect"
Personally if he wanted to make an "everything app" I would have gone with making X an "exclusive" edition of twitter, i.e replacing twitter blue.
Twitter is a free app for the unwashed masses and X is the Exclusive App.... if you login to twitter with a X login you get the rebrand
Then add new features to X
WeChat is what it is in China because it replicates (in a sense) how things are in Chinese society.
Also, X is fucking stupid.
I am okay, to be totally vendor locked in the apple-ecosystem, because Androids market share is so much higher. If the iPhone fails to be a good product I will just switch. I am okay, to be totally vendor locked in gcp, because aws is a thing...
Musk's approach is the polar opposite from Apple. A capricious and petulant owner who goes out of his way to appease racists and dictators is not someone most people are comfortable with handing a lot of control and information about their lives to.
I wouldn't do business with Musk personally, but I don't think most people view him the way you do.
In any case, we're talking about normies are comfortable with. They don't really consider any of this stuff.
What makes you think this? Lots of tech people have this perspective, and lots of gay people understand this perspective at a very deep level (especially if older)
Just curious why you think what you think.
When he's sucking up to China, all the morals and values he ingrained by growing up a gay man in the American deep South quickly and rather conveniently go right out the window.
I also think you massively over estimate the average persons fear of monopolies over convenience.
How is it different than Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc?
Helpful, yes. But mandatory? No.
In China, it's borderline impossible to do anything if you don't have WeChat. It centralizes everything related to personal and professional life in China.
Your rideshare app is not sharing data with your fitness app, or with your laundry service app. In China, there's 1 app. It centralizes everything.
WeChat has turned into its own operating system offering and app store offering mini-programs that other companies can create.
These mini-programs do work through WeChat and Tencent probably has all the data that goes into or through these mini-programs but couldn't the same be said about our current situation?
In a way isn't that just like Android or iOS itself?
We debate Android vs. iOS (vs. awesome Linux shenanigans), or Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux. Those are choices. Most of the market is essentially duopolies, but that's a different issue than a pure monopoly.
I really really really wish this were true but It is not. People take the path of least resistance and companies have been working on superconducting these paths for years.
I put out a version of this that is WeChat is the way it is because of the way China regulates its markets. Chinese regulators prioritize e.g. surveillance so that it makes sense for them to have fewer competitors that do more things. (Note that they do not regulate their hardware markets this way, so there are many more companies operating in that space.)
Regulators and market incentives are different outside of China, so there is no pressure to end up with an everything app.
Like Alphabet, or Meta, or Microsoft, or countless others...
It really seems he just wants to start fresh and kill the Twitter brand immediately regardless of the short term cost. It's a strange play indeed, and it's hard to guess why he wants to disassociate with the brand so strongly.
Tim Apples even saw this coming and had an emoji in place, Man Crossed Arms.
Or maybe he just doesn't care when people tell him "no".
It's that Twitter is using a generic Monotype font letter for their brand.
Which would mean that their brand will not be able to be trademarked and thus anyone could use it to associate their dodgy product with the main site. So I wouldn't worry about Meta, Microsoft etc but about the insane number of X ripoffs we are going to see in the future e.g. X crypto coin, X bots.
The original purpose of trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. That's it. It's not to protect the profits of a company. It's not to reward creativity and hard design work.
The original purpose of patents is to encourage disclosing new innovative ideas in order that others can build on top of the invention after having read the patent text (and in exchange for revealing how the innovation works, the inventor gets exclusive rights for a set time, but this is an instrument in achieving the former main purpose). Similarly, copyright incentivizes creative output. (But it only protects the actual expression, not the underlying general ideas etc.)
Musk can't trademark the letter X and he can't trademark an existing font letter.
Microsoft applied for, and obtained, a trademark for "x". Companies do this all the time. Companies also trademark numbers all the time. Dale Earnhardt trademarked the number "1": https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_...
Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures.
It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.
[1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mea...
[2] Although it is a pretty generic "1".
I'm not sure similar cases exist but it's similar as using an old public domain logo as your own. Would that be enforceable?
(And now I know: designed by Ron Wayne, so not public domain at all; and I'd forgotten about the ribbons with the text)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Apple_Inc.#/media...
3M, Scotch, Crate & Barrel, Lufthansa and Jeep all have legitimate trademarked word marks that consist of nothing more than their name written in Helvetica.
The typographical and design treatment of the word can have separate trademark protection.
That can be true whether or not a design mark is registered.
If you started a car company called ‘Beep’ and write its name in olive green Helvetica Black, Jeep might struggle to make a case about your name’s similarity to their word mark (beep is a different word and rhyming is not a crime), but they for sure could take you to court for stealing their trade dress.
‘Word mark’ is also just a term of art in graphic design referring to a logo consisting of just text - another word for logotype. Should I have said logotype instead?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3M_wordmark.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scotch-logo.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crate_and_barrel_log...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lufthansa_Logo_2018....
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeep_logo.svg
For more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordmark
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Threshold_of_orig...
Why can’t Elon?
I’m not aware of any existing font letter exception.
These days, the one I find shocking is Monday.com and Slack. Both have names in lowercase black Circular, their logos use pill-shaped elements in similar shades of primary colors, and they're both in the business productivity space. The branding is so close you'd swear they're sibling products like IntelliJ and CLion.
Before that he arguably was a lot more well respected as an entrepreneur - keeping a lower profile and building a couple of extremely successful businesses in parallel.
My big question that I’m still searching for an answer to: Did he drastically change as a person in the last couple of years? Or was he just “lucky” to build SpaceX and Tesla into tremendous successes? Or is he still a genius and all of us simply can’t see how he’s making Twitter into the next big success in his CV?
If he did change as a person - why? What happened? Bad breakup? Drug abuse? Depression? Too much self confidence? Too much stress for too long? Something else?
I do believe that people who marginally understood his work but have vested interests in the existing structure, including “news” orgs, reporters, political hacks, and direct competitors, have tried to create controversy and confusion around Musk.
Of course this would be expected to happen, and those gossipers and murmurers who can be influential will be among the uninformed.
You can count me in that bucket. I didn't like some of what I heard from Tesla, mostly about the working hours. But I genuinely believe he was driven by a desire to do Hard Stuff that traditional organizations refused to do, and inspired a lot of smart people to come along and try to make stuff happen.
Now I'm convinced he's just a drug addict, or the drugs have done enough damage to his brain over time that it's noticeable now.
- insulting a kid saving cave-diver a pedo;
- getting into a buying agreement with Twitter's shareholders, as a "joke";
- repeatedly asserting that FSD is a solved problem, and will be production ready in 6 months, for 6 years;
- repeatedly claiming to be free speech, but continuously enforcing politically backed censorship over Twitter;
- refusing to pay Twitter' suppliers.
But the approach of “I will speak for all of us and take the liberty of summarizing and manufacturing a consensus” is too far. I object. I bet the needle has barely moved, and if it has that’s largely because the media is flooding the zone on normies who never really cared anyway.
Musk Fanboys: "One must recognize that virtually every human action [...]"
So it's been clear for at least a half dozen years or so that a successful Musk company needs a team to manage Musk and keep him from unnecessary interference in the company, but it may have required paying more attention to what he did. What changed when he bought Twitter is that he is now articulating a vision that is far less comfortable for many people ("stop banning fascists" is rather less inspiring than "I want to live on Mars"), and also, many of the failures of his micromanagement are far more visible to the general public on a large social media platform than a low-volume rocket or (at the time) auto manufacturer.
This is not the first time he's done this... stuck his fingers in, shouted at people, pushed his weight around, and Dunning-Kruger'd something to the point of failure. In that case, the board turfed him, and Peter Thiel fixed the problem.
He's grinding on an old (20+ years) obsession, down to the name of the 'product'.
As I said about this yesterday, Musk's success was a product of the economic situation from 2008->2022, when interest rates were insanely low, QE/stimulus was going crazy, Silicon Valley profits sky high and endlessly growing, and investors were willing to throw money at stuff like this.
With rates higher, investors will have other places to put their money, debt is more expensive, and people like Musk will find themselves standing naked on the beach as the tide goes out.
It's similar to the quote "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'".
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=mXQuto1fMp4
I mean "Twitter Videos" are now "X Videos". "The Twitter Files", this series of "investigative" threads... are now "The X Files" (lol).
"Direct Messages" will now be referred to as DirectX I guess, or I don't know.
X is a letter.
It's Roman number ten.
It's in millions of brands around the world.
It also stands for "X Rated", as in containing excessive violence and nudity. It stands for pornography in some context.
It's unsearchable, and barely speakable, as in it's unclear already when you say "X" if you mean Twitter or Elon's son or whatever.
What is he doing? We can ask but I doubt he knows himself.
Which also happens to already be a porn site…
As far as I can tell the actual extremist right-wingers are on Gab rather than Twitter.
And I'm speaking from a US politics perspective, where Hillary Clinton is considered center-left. If we were to take a more international view, then Joe Biden is somewhere on the center-right, and Trump and Tucker are so far on the right that you can barely see the spaces between them and the nazis. For context, far-right Marine Le Pen of France is to the left of Tucker on most issues, except that she's a bit more openly racist.
Not saying all right winger are Nazis, but the "jews will not replace us" crowd definitely is. And the rest is at least authoritarian bordering facist. Same goes for some European parties: the AfD in Germamy, whateber LePen calls her outfit now in France, the current government party in Italy, the current politics of Nethanyahu (arguably not a Nazinof course, but a straight up authoritarian with religious tendencies and disdain for democratic seperation of powers), Hungary, the FPÖ in Austria... The list way too long.
Don’t underestimate the nationalist bloodlust.
Haven't some of them been clamouring for an attack on Mexico recently?
Anyway, there are worse figures than Tucker Carlson on Twitter. Some are outright nazis. Others can name them if they wish, but I won't amplify them here.
There's no payout. There's no conspiracy. Just a man and his arrogance and mental issues.
Even if it's just PR (and it is just PR, evidently), it's an additional burden to have your PR and your actions be consistently at 180 degrees.
Also, $20 billion aren't the "price tag". That money didn't go to Elon. They went to Twitter's shareholders. Elon only ended up with losses and loans, so far, to the tune of another 20-30 billion at the very least.
So where's the "payout"? If you "hired" Elon to do this for you, as a Saudi, and you spend $20 billion as a co-investor, and need to cover Elon's $20-30 billion loss, "the price tag" is now up to $50 billion, but we're still only at break even in the short term, and only when we don't consider opportunity cost of Tesla stock dropping last year and future losses to Elon's company brands and so on, because he's coming off as a lunatic and wasting his time on Twitter, instead of being at Tesla and SpaceX.
So what's the price tag now? $80 billion? $100 billion? $150 billion?
Reminder, the entire Saudi family, all of them, together, have about $1.4 trillion, and that's not cash in the bank, but assets, oil, real estate, all of it.
Which means any such "price tag" would imply them giving up all their liquid assets and maybe liquidating more assets, in order to afford this "price tag" so quickly.
It's just nonsense.
By now I am very much aware that there are lots of people who believe conspiracy theories, yet I am still surprised when those people are from the tech scene. A developer who believes in the dumbest conspiracies is such an odd thing to me. It is so odd to me that someone who supposedly things about problems in a systematic way and has to break them down into their parts, can fall for something as dumb as the richest man in the world taking some sort of payoff to kill twitter.
I should know better by now, but it still takes me by surprise sometimes
Shrug.
The original guy didn't even say he 100% believed it as fact. It's just a thought experiment
It's also not at all a burden for your PR to be diametrically opposed to your actions, especially if your actions are seen as bad. Absolutist regimes love portraying themselves as the victims because it gives them a moral justification (no matter how flimsy). And "free speech absolutists" are a great example given how many people publicly adopt that stance but then use it to justify shutting down their opposition for being "against free speech".
The reason people are creating nonsensical conspiracy theories about the Twitter buyout is that they want to believe there's a rhyme and reason to the madness, the same way they created nonsensical conspiracy theories following 9/11 because it meant that the US was in control after all and not actually (figuratively) brought to its knees by a handful of foreigners with box cutters.
The truth is that Elon Musk shitposted his way into being forced to follow through on an acquisition he never really wanted, used his business connections to coordinate a hamfisted leveraged buyout and got too high on his own supply after being the dog that caught the car. Now he's stuck in a midlife crisis trying to relive the failure that was his involvement in X.com but without Peter Thiel being able to stop him.
Exactly. People want to believe that the richest man in the world somehow deserves to be so, mainly through their effort. They want to think "if only I put a bit more work in, I could have it all!" The thought of somebody becoming the world's richest man AND being as unstable and erratic as Musk appears to be is disconcerting for those who want to live in a world with some kind of order in it.
Yup. The real reason behind all of this is not the market or the Saudis nor anything else. It’s because Musk wanted to be on the board, and he was rejected. He suffered a huge narcissistic injury, and then said “Fine, if I can’t be on the board, I’ll be the board and just buy the whole thing outright”
That’s why he waived due diligence and offered so much money. He was high off his narcissistic rage and flexing. He was on the warpath and forcing a hostile takeover. But then he cooled down, of course, and realized what he did was a fucking mess for himself. So he threw a tantrum in court.
This is all explained very easily by his personality disorder.
Meanwhile, you've offered Elon the opportunity to justify liquidating billions of TSLA stock at its height without triggering a massive crash right before the entire market sank. And his reputation outside running a social network doesn't seem to have suffered much at all. Do you need to offer him a premium or does he offer one to you?
(And on financing, the Saudis' credit is fine)
Now, it's nonsense because controlling Twitter and using it to silent dissent algorithmically is better than blowing it up. But the math could easily work.
> he's a "free speech absolutist" and is "defending the future of democracy of the world".
Twitter is extremely popular in Saudi, more so than the US/Europe, so some level of influence is extremely valuable.
How would destroying it prevent that again, people would just go elsewhere. You’d prevent it by Twitter thriving then clever use of algorithm suppression and shadow bans.
Conspiracy doesn’t add up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558581
At this point, this seems intentional on his part.
It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.
And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.
The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued.
Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications.
I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.
It was so easy everyone else also did it
Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge.
If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech.
His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.
But if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone else bothered?
All space programs run on government contracts, what's new? He's providing the only reusable rocket, and 10 years later no one else has done that, why?
Because to most other automakers, EVs are a side business that competes with their core business, not their core business, and the rest of it because its not true, e.g., Tesla doesn't offer the best self-driving, they just spend more effort trying to sell the idea of self-driving to individual buyers.
You can't buy another car that can do even 10% of what FSD beta does
Right, because Tesla is the only company that sees individual car owners as the target market for self-driving, everyone else in the business sees institutionally-owned robotaxi fleets as the target market. Actually, so does Tesla, fairly overtly—though they are behind at actually having auch a thing—they just see individual vehicle owners as a way to defray costs, especially development costs.
They aren't ahead at self-driving, they are just more creative at how they are financing it.
That's an odd statement, as "the first self-driving system to be approved for European public roads" and "the first automaker to receive government approval in the US for a Level 3 driving feature" is from Mercedes-Benz.
Tested and approved >> beta hype.
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/mercedes-opens-sales-...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-p...
It's just worse cruise control, can't even go at highway speeds, there's about 1% chance you could use it.
Meanwhile FSD Beta is driving around cities the same as Waymo/Cruise are, except every city in North America.
We know a few things about AI, it needs lots of data, and lots of CPU. Tesla has 2 million cars with 8 cameras gathering data, and a top 10 in the world supercomputer.
Beta.
We know a few things about Musk: it needs hype, smoke-and-mirrors overpromising. Get back to us when it's out of beta.`
Tested and approved >> beta hype.
"During the second quarter of 2022, SpaceX delivered 158.7 metric tons to low Earth orbit which is four times more than second palace China’s space corporation CASC at 38.8 tons.
Roscosmos at 17.2 tons was third, United Launch Alliance 4th at 13.0 tons, and Arianespace at 9.8 tons was fifth."
Telsa has the best selling car in the world, while Ford loses 200% on each EV they sell (according to Ford)
With Tesla, I think that this very much remains to be seen, and signs are not good (1)
M-B is at least making verifiable progress
1)
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tesla-elon-musk-self-driv...
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...
Doesn't seem that bad really, 2 FSD reports, first one FSD braked suddenly, maybe, no results from investigation it seems so far. And people driving incorrectly behind them were too close and couldn't brake on time. If only all the cars had FSD and not humans.
And the other FSD report was about driving into a junction where the car they thought was going to hit them had already stopped to let them go, and beeping to warn it was getting close to a cyclist. That's why it's still beta and warns you every time to be aware and it will do stupid things. So far in 300 million miles driven, it's apparently hit 0 people. So that's way better than humans, who kill someone every 100 million miles.
You're welcome to dwell in the weeds of specific cases. There are others (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-... )
I note that you switch from "not proven yet" to "zero" which is not honest. Like a Tesla, you need to pick a lane.
Fundamentally, "just a beta" is not as far along as an approved shipping product. The shipping product is harder to fake, and we cannot rule out deception here.
Meanwhile I've found 0 evidence of any member of the public who owns a Mercedes using Drive Pilot 2 years after it was announced.
I'm sure if FSD ever kills anyone it will be headline news. It is weird there's no NHTSA webpage about the results of their investigations though.
I honestly don't know why that's supposed to be relevant. I see plenty of videos of it on YouTube after a 5-second search. No, it's not the HN crowd who have it and post here, but so what, that proves nothing at all. It's actually a bit of a weird outlier to have your ego tied up with promoting someone else's product for free online. "I've never seen it, therefor it doesn't happen" is not really true.
> FSD works on highways.
Legally though, "Statements about the "FSD works" should not be taken to imply that this is out of beta and therefor works unambiguously, or is technically actually "full self driving".
You keep trying to blur the line between "experimental feature" and the finished thing, marketing and certified, and then extrapolating to false claims about "hit 0 people" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-a...
being "just a beta" gives them wiggle room to make claims that they don't have to back up properly. It is a key point that you do not engage with. I know that you want to believe, but I refer you to my comments above on the topic. Legal lines do make a difference, and not being able to meet them, while claiming otherwise, is a red flag.
That article says it's about Autopilot, not FSD. My claim that FSD has hit 0 people still hasn't been refuted by anyone. Meanwhile humans have killed 3000 people while driving today.
All these graphs from NHTSA data ignore the warning on NHTSA's page that the data is not useful for statistical analysis. When they actually publish the cause of the crashes, and what software was being used at the time, we will have actual knowledge. If it turns out that FSD was killing 1000s of people they'd probably have said something by now
I agree with all the rest of your points, but I think the problem with this is that Elon really is smart. It is just that you can see that he was mostly a really good salesperson of his personal brand. He also had his finger on the pulse of what was "cool" (internet, space, electric cars) for awhile (a lot of that is probably luck, but there has to be a certain amount of talent there I think--but that talent for fashion always wears off).
He's also smart enough to be able to regurgitate what SpaceX engineers tell him and to manage to sound like he's got a PhD. He must actually study that pretty well and be at least decent enough at physics/engineering that he's clearly above-average intelligent. But it is other people making the breakthroughs in the mathematics of how to hoverslam rockets, he's a bit more like a CEO version of a science communicator.
The thing is that people are largely just ignorant about where all the technology comes from (Lars Blackmore worked at NASA JPL when he published the first articles on successive convexification of the landing problem -- so the US Government really invented hoverslamming rockets), and they are horrible at judging what kind of intelligence a public personality actually has. They also think that smart people are smart at literally everything.
And as much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump was also smart, but his talents are almost purely sociopathic. And one of those talents is being able to actually lean-in to a shitstorm of stupid that he creates around him, and make his sycophants write it all off as 4D chess. That is actually a talent. A genuinely stupid person wouldn't be able to pull that off.
That doesn't feel quite as fair as having earned success, so 4D chess it is.
Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money.
> It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.
The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter:
- Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only.
- Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public.
- Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates.
- Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view.
The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.
It’s not.
So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing.
We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-ara...
[2] https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dol...
[3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-...
This commenter's analysis seems more credible to me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36858613
It's also possible that they got approached by Musk and saw a good timing to exploit a rich Western idiot to further their interests. I mean, Musk being deranged enough to call a rescue diver a pedo, smoking weed in Joe Rogan's podcast or give names to his children that are completely bonkers even for celebrities?
The signs that he's not completely well mentally were there for years. Loaning him 20 billion or whatever dollars was an extremely high risk move alone for that factor, so either the Saudis have gone off the rails as well or they see some hidden aspect that makes the deal worth their while even if the risk event materializes.
That was revenue (?) when oil prices were much higher.
> particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the
But yeah, I guess arguing about monetary amounts is a but pointless since I think the whole premise is just absurd..
Organizing the WC or buying European fotball clubs is a much better investment (if there only reason they invested in Twitter is what you’re suggesting, which of course makes no sense).
The price he paid is for the human traffic. Redirected to his world of interests
Quite. It's pretty big corp 101 to sort this shit out as a rebrand.
So now we have this insane situation where he's going to throw away a strong brand that has an outsized influence in global media by converting it to become the do-everything app, and rename it to his favourite, cool letter. I don't think there's a secret plan beyond that.
I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).
This is textbook Management by Logo. When you're out of ideas you change the name/logo and now suddenly you're dynamic forward-looking innovative etc.
Except not really. Management by Logo is like respraying a car engine because you don't know how to fix it. There's a fair-to-good chance you'll make things more broken rather than less.
Musk bought Twitter (RIP...) because he wanted to use it as a propaganda outlet for his own crazy Randian/Trumpish ideals. It was never meant to continue as a free and open discussion site for humans.
Musk appears to have plans to spray AI and other magic dead chickens all over everything to create a new automated kind of propaganda outlet.
I suspect that won't work. Outside of his circle of immediate fans, people don't like being talked down to - especially not by bots.
My theory is that he is desperate. He was forced to buy it. The interest from his loans to buy Twitter are estimated at a billion a year - and now interest rates are high so he can’t swap them for cheaper loans. That’s not an insignificant amount of money even for someone like him.
Thus his cutting cost to the bone, even refusing to play bills/rent for as long as possible, and all the harebrained ideas about what to do with Twitter - clearly staying the course is not acceptable since Twitter turned a profit I think only twice in its entire existence; both times where during the pandemic.
But the changes in the market were not entirely against him. It's not that interest rates are high so that he cannot refinance. He had semi-floating rate (floats up to a maximum), so refinancing would never be necessary. It is currently pegged to the highest level. But it is still locked in at a much lower rate than the market rate.
And a billion is less of an estimate than a rounding. The amount of the loan, the interest rate, etc. are all public knowledge because he had to file the terms and contracts with the SEC.
Meanwhile, I'm not convinced it's "not an insignificant amount of money" is the appropriate phrasing. It's a lot of money to him, but certainly something he can afford. Jeff Bezos famously put that much each quarter (so 4x the rate) into Blue Origin.
Still the billion a year is paid out to the banks and not used to run Twitter.
I wonder how much Twitter is making/losing now. Sure they cut a lot of staff but income must be in the toilet with ad revenues down due to advertisers getting cold feet and now rate limits further reducing the number of eyeballs.
Yeah, and now people are deriding him for that, which makes no sense. As far as I know, he made an offer, had to publicly announce it beforehand (due to law), then the stock market tanked, making the Twitter purchase nearly unaffordable for him. Then Twitter was loaded with massive debt. Very bad luck. But people hate him so they are satisfied with any misfortune he may have.
People have been mocking him for the price, the no-due-diligence clause, and other aspects of the contract since they became public. While later movement of the stock market may have made it even worse for him, it was a ridiculous deal, on its face, at the time negotiated (and even worse for Musk as a buyer given his public comments about Twitter.)
He purchased a huge amount of twitter stock, and simultaneously made the public offer at like 4x twitters current stock value. Twitter pumped on the news, which was exactly Musks plan.
The stock market crash did not all of a sudden make twitter worth next to nothing on the offer. Musk was attempting to pump and dump the stock, and it backfired on him.
Even at the “rainbows and unicorns” drug induced tech stock valuations we’ve been seeing lately, twitter wasn’t worth 1/3 what musk offered to buy it at.
The stock market tanking has literally nothing to do with why this was a bad deal.
When you’re a public company and some coked off his ass idiot billionaire offers you 3x your companies current already highly inflated value, you are essentially forced by the shareholders to sell.
That's a lie. See
He's really gone out of his way since to polarise the public, for limited benefit.
No, my point was that all the derision was undeserved and you didn't provide evidence to the contrary. Journalists just hate him.
Long before X was the holding company he used to buy Twitter, which he is now trying to turn into a do everything (including finance) app, X(.com) was the online financt company Musk openly wanted to turn ibto a do everything app, and was dump as CEO from multiple times, the last time just before it was renamed after a product it had acquired with another company, and which (unlike the products Musk tried to launch internally) was its only meaningful success, PayPal.
> I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).
Because he overburdened it with debt, meaning the turnaround has to be quick to work at all, and his do-everything plan is premised on a change in revenue model from traditional big ads to free/low-paying users to a more regular-user fee-for-service model.
Muxk likex X and xe doexn't gixe a fux.
But seriously, Musk likes X. When you have the kind of Fuck You Money(tm) that he does, you don't need a reason to like something or use something you like.
Seems that he wanted to put the domain to use
https://web.archive.org/web/20000619201415/http://www.x.com/...
Musk did not own x.com between 2001 and 2017.
If Musk’s X moves away from the name “Twitter” and the bird logo as completely as they seem likely to, those will become essentially undefended trademarks that someone else could start using.
Want to found Twitter all over again?
There are ways (legal tricks) to rebrand while defending the old brand. But these require detailed legal advice, disciplined ops, and a will to do so. I’d say that it looks like Musk is lacking all three of those at X right now.
Perhaps Musk will do something similar. He's definitely not going to give up Twitter, and even if he does, he'll keep the domain.
To simply stop using the Twitter brand, logo, and verb-ology would be a huge slap to that number, not that it really means anything financially.
Unless the company forgets to renew the domain because everyone who would be responsible for that has quite or been fired. Not that I think this is at all likely, but God would it be hilarious.
If not using it is a big deal (it's not, but let's assume it is), it doesn't require "detailed legal advice, disciplined ops" to put add logo on a webpage.
It actually does, because the use has to satisfy the specific terms of the trademark, which might not be accomplished by just a logo on a random web page. And it has to stay there even in the face of internal pressure to “turn the page” on the old brand, or the general drift of focus/priorities over time.
This is one those things that is simple in concept, but can be deeply complicated by internal factors. I’ve got years of experience doing this.
Trademarks are like a ratchet; if you let them slip too far, it can be extremely difficult to turn them back. And things tend to slip if left unattended.
Edit to add: note that I also said “a will to do so.” It’s not even clear whether Musk will want to defend the Twitter trademark. Certainly doesn’t look like it so far.
"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."
They didn't re-brand 'Coke' when they took out the 'Cocaine'.
It takes a lot of effort to have a global brand. They already have it in 'Twitter'. X is not unique enough to ever stand out.
This is such a bad decision, it is just frosting for all the people sitting back eating popcorn watching this dumpster fire.
There is a single company that is authorized to import coca leafs to US. They create a cocaine free extract which they sell to Coca-Cola as an ingredient for their syrup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company#Coca_extraction
From: https://www.eater.com/23620802/cocaine-in-coca-cola-coke-rec...
> it’s more likely that it “continues to be used merely to enable the Company to retain the word ‘Coca’ in the name
What does this have to do with the made up name of a short message of 140 characters? Nothing. It’s not like sending a video or 141 character messages are auto associated with the term “X”.
But in the Coca-Cola case, the words in the brand do have meaning.
The extracted cocaine is used by the pharmaceutical industry, as a bonus for top level executives.
Yes, the last part is a joke, but it is really used in medicine as a local anesthetic.
The brand kinda succeeded, as everyone calls is Coke, even though ti is actually Coca-Cola Classic and Coke is dead because the Coke formula was terrible tasting
Note: I've never had New Coke (was before my time). I'd love for them to bring it back in a limited form just to try it.
Mountain Dew is acceptable response when you order a Coke and they respond with "We have Pepsi"..
inversely if you order Mountain Dew and they say "We have Mello Yellow" you respond with "Coke please" because Mello Yellow is gross
:)
In fact, New Coke is based on the Diet Coke recipe, the latter is still a success to this day. The sugar-free version of Coca-Cola classic is Coke Zero, and it sells less than Diet Coke. If it really was about the taste, Diet Coke wouldn't have sold as well and would have been quickly overtaken by Coke Zero.
The most likely explanation for the failure of New Coke is that it replaced the classic, and an influential minority felt alienated by the change.
The clear reveled preference of the consumer they did not like New Coke, they expressed this by not buy it.
Limited market research will often give the company the answer they are already looking for, there are plenty of examples of this
Further is completely self defeating to New Coke was better than Classic because Coke Zero failed. First off, Coke Zero tastes NOTHING like Classic, To me aspartame is actively bitter to me not sweet. So Diet Coke or Coke Zero or any other drink with aspartame in it is a no go.
But aside from my personal tastes, Diet Coke has the first move advantage for the zero cal beverage, so all of your arguments as to why classic won over coke would apply equally well to why diet won over zero.
Further still, I think there is a massive consumer disparity between the consumers of zero cal soda, and people that want regular soda. Comparing their consumer preferences is going to be very hard
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/health/diet-soda-vs-zero-suga...
which one wins is irrelevant to the primary point about rebranding things
Why didn’t he take $44 billion and do a startup instead?
He mistaked his like of Twitter for everyones likes of Twitter, and he has no impulse control leading him to sign an iron clad contract.
Stupid is as stupid does
Why not just use that $44B to build X.com from scratch?
Who will trust Elon to build a reliable platform, i.e. use X.com for their finances or any other crucial services X is planning to offer.
He thinks you can run this platform with a skeleton crew. I wouldn't trust that platform at all.
I would have also waited to roll out the name until I actually had something to show for it. But what do I know.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991114130555/http://x.com/mana...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230401142845/http://x.com/
Now then, of course Musk can challenge it, and given his domain ownership, possibly successfully even.
But given the scads of lawyers who Musk owes money to, yet is not paying, who will take the fight on?
It's about 'Extant Use', not existence.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-model-e-elon-musk-tesla...
Between that and the requirement that they be defended, honestly, I think trademarks are one of the forms of IP that I like the most.
While you and I might think it's obviously legal to start Apple Airlines or Apple Faucets or Apple Fans, apparently this is not obvious to Apple's trademark lawyers.
I'm not sure intellectual property law operates according to any rational rules that can be understood by us mere mortals.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-vs-apples-trademark-ba... [2] https://archive.is/MKQpW
but park tool's trademark is only in the context of bicycle repair tools, and kubota's is only for tractors. the law just isn't that dumb, it's interpreted by courts and real people, who are capable of saying "no, that's dumb" if something is dumb. kubota can keep their trademark, and everybody else can keep making orange things as long as those things aren't tractors or tractor-like things that are going to get confused with kubota products.
similarly, any somewhat reasonable person will be able to see that twitter's rebrand to "X" isn't really going to confuse anybody into thinking they're using a microsoft product, so depite it being a very bad name it's probably not actually going to run afoul of anybody's trademarks.
I feel that reasonable people and the people who suffer from Musk Derangement Syndrome (seemingly a lot of the people here...) are two very different groups.
What else? Is taste trademarkable? Or some kind of smells? Or maybe a tone/frequency?
But I suspect what will happen is people will continue to call it Twitter and the X name will not stick.
Me too, the problem is that you cannot convert X to a verb. "They x'ed this and that" sounds much dumber than "They tweeted this and that".
Google translate: “Sentence with X was probably nothing.“
The new Twitter logo immediately brought to mind the X-Window system one.
Firing everyone to improve operating margins, I understand that.
Iterating on features rapidly, even if they're not quite ready for prime time? That makes a lot of sense if you're trying to beat out the competition.
Rebranding your website and conference rooms? This sounds like a stupid waste of time and effort. If you wanted to create X the next twitter, just do a start up. Everyone would have signed up just because Elon Musk was using it. You didn't need to buy twitter for that.
Just stupid.
You do need to buy Twitter to avoid running afoul of the SEC.
You do need to buy (something) to dump lots of Tesla stock without cratering it.
Huh?
Now, I would say that was maybe a month of a long process when that was true.
turned out not to be the case!
I'm not a Twitter user, how has the user experience changed since Elon's taking over?
Since 'verification' is now just a paid service, it's also much harder to separate bad actors from good actors. There are other minor changes that have degraded the service, but it's difficult to tell if they're permanent or just another live experiment.
Doesn't the fact that a payment method has been setup _help_ and not _hinder_ the process of separating bad actors from good? I'm not a huge Twitter user by any means but I would think that verification step would cut down on automated spam.
Maybe he should trademark this unicode character instead of letter "X".
How does his boot taste?
What boot, malaka? Maybe you should grow up a bit and realize your persecution complex is self-induced.
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854166
https://onlineornot.com/guidelines-to-help-avoid-losing-your...
X.ai was subsequently acquired in 2021 by Bizzabo: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/06/03/224127...
Bizzabo then shut down the X.ai tool: https://www.bizzabo.com/blog/xai-sunset
And then they sold the X.ai domain to you know who: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/14/23684005/elon-musk-new-ai...
"How to destroy a international brand and company properly and fast"
I can't believe it was intentional, but i can't imagine any reasons for this, i could only add my speculation.
In the case of this particular trademark claim, it's likely to be fairly weak for MS. There are countless legitimate uses of the letter X. They've not been going after a lot of companies over this. And there's also the notion that MS launched the x-box after the x.com domain was registered by Elon Musk. So, any dispute over this could end up being quite hairy for MS. I doubt MS lawyers are going to even bother with a cease and desist letter.
Not a laywer of course; this is just my understanding of trademark law. It gets even more complicated when you consider that laws vary internationally.
- X axes a renowned, recognizable tech brand
- X was done hastily, without proper planning
- X won't be a dictionary word, hardly a verb, not anything cultural
- X means nothing really, like a branding "*", the algebra/programming x, even more generic than "meta" or "alphabet"
- X is another gazillion brands, logos and trademarks
- X is impossible to search
- X is so X-Rated
- X certifies that Elon is nuts and has no idea what to do with this acquisition
- Users are vowing to resist, refraining from using X whenever possible
But it DOES make sense in Elon's World:
- Twitter as we know it is gone anyway, so we might as well call it... X
- X is his SpaceX thing, his pre-PayPal made-me-rich thing, his fetish letter, his Rosebud
- X is like sex, like Tesla models S,3,X,Y - a cool "bro" brand, fits Elon Musk maturity level very well because sex sells (at least for cars and rockets it does)
- No need to search for X. Search is dead. X is the new search, especially once it becomes a (sentient?) AI [1] https://x.ai
- X creates user resistance, friction and backlash, which means it's polarizing and Elon only thrives in polarized ecosystems
- Polarization arouses the media so much it will have free press for a while
- It sounds like something out of a Marvel movie. Like a villain's world-threatening crime syndicate.
- "It's just X, just fucking X, it's really badass dude"
My take on this:
- Twitter had to rebrand anyway if it were to evolve into a disrupting Musk company - it made no sense to just be the old, stagnated Twitter minus headcount, moderation and ad revenue. Another logo or word by itself would not cut it or be up to the task. It had to be something in-your-face like... X.
- X stock will probably soar when it hits Wall Street (again). The marketing actually feels solid or at least more in line with his other companies, and definitely stronger than Alphabet and Meta's wishy-washy rebranding. Now X Corp needs to deliver new moneys, beyond the dwindling ad revenue to prove itself as a Google and Meta's worse nightmare.
Alice: it's called Y
Bob: But why?
Alice: Yeah, Y
Bob: no, I mean, why?
Alice: Yeah, you heard right, Y.
...
The salt amongst engineers / developers that are not working for his companies should be a thing of study, methinks it's mostly driven by jealousy.
Looking forward to what comes from all this 𝕏 stuff.