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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling the biggest blunder Musk made isn't verbal gaffes, but renaming Twitter to X. He basically gave business away to Meta on silver platter.

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Which is even funnier when you know he tried to rename PayPal to X before and got fired over this abysmal idea.

For anyone who wants to know more: https://mashable.com/article/musk-x-twitter-paypal

He also tried to replace everything unix-like with MS Windows. Somehow that must have seemed really important when trying to make a startup survive the dot com boom-and-bust cycle.

Which is odd, really; you’d think that X11 would have appealed to his terrible names fetish.

Oh. Though, actually this was probably the ActiveX era (DirectX is largely the only remaining evidence of it today, but MS went though an irritating “everything should end in X” phase in the late 90s).

Xbox - prototype name for ActiveX game box.

Xbox Series X.

Like, how many X can you cram into a name?

WindowsX ;)

Absolutely this. One of the dumbest things he’s ever done.

What is Meta? Are you talking about Facebook? They must have changed their name...

Twitter had such a strong and recognizable brand too. Working in payments under the X name or something like that might have made sense, but what a god awful idea to kill core app branding.

Agreed, but that said, he can call it what he wants -- the rest of us still call it Twitter.

Yes, that was the last straw

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