That was a fun read. I fired up a Valheim server for my kids (and me, let's be honest) and it censored part of the word "Basement" in my server name. :)
Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it. Second, these hamfisted attempts to try to get the new (terrible) name to stick. It's just not going to work. The huge number of existing users will always think of it as Twitter. It will at best become The Service Formerly Known As Twitter. It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.
Apparently Elon has been trying to push the "X" brand on things throughout his career, but always had someone stop him until he had complete control of things.
He literally got removed from Paypal, "his first company" for trying to push the x.com thing there. That's why he owns the domain. It was stupid then and he held a grudge ever since which is why he's pushing it everywhere else since.
He owned x.com before he went to PayPal (they acquired his company which was called: x.com). When ousted, the domain continued to be owned by PayPal until later they ended up selling it and eventually he bought it back.
He also got removed for creating systemic, existential risk for the company by handing out $10k line limit credit cards to anyone who wanted one, resulting in a 50% chargeback rate. There are so many reasons for them to have gotten rid of him that the answer is highly underdetermined.
I haven't seen any strong evidence that that was the real reason he was ousted. It seems more to me like something that was too good not to go viral, rather than actual fact.
That’s not true. It was mostly over their servers. Elon Musk’s startup was running Windows while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s was running Linux. Musk wanted to migrate everything to Windows due to the more mature (at the time) APIs and Levchin was adamant on staying with Linux. He was also busy trying to fight fraud, which was becoming an existential threat to the company, and had no time for migrating to a different platform.
Ultimately, Levchin gathered several other key people in the company, and went to the investors threatening to quit (and destroy the company) unless they brought back Thiel as CEO. The board sided with Levchin, Theil returned and Musk was out of day-to-day operations.
I mean, while nothing about the web was particularly mature at the time, the idea that Windows was more mature than Linux for it is… peculiar, from the point of view of someone who was messing around with web programming at the time. Note how much difficulty Microsoft had migrating Hotmail to Windows.
The guy's a kook. He's like Michael Jackson: a very rich guy, with complete control over who he meets. Unsurprisingly, the people he does meet all tell him what they think he wants to hear. I mean, who's going to tell him something he doesn't want to hear, and then see their name smeared all over Twitter by the richest man in the world?
I expected Twitter to crash and burn as soon as he took over; I was wrong. I guess it's like Truth Social - if you're fabulously wealthy, you can run a social media site that's a complete train-wreck, without it ruining you.
Well Michael Jackson is also one of the most talented musicians and entertainers of the last 100yrs. His wealth is the least impressive or defining thing about him.
I do get the point you're trying to make though. Just thought that emphasis was a little off.
Just like with Elon, you have to consider that extreme outcomes are the result of extreme people or people that were forged in extreme circumstances (which is certainly true of Michael Jackson).
I feel both Musk and Jackson could have greatly benefited from a few more people telling them "you idiot, that's fucking mental". In general being in a position where this doesn't happen is not good for your sense of reality (very rich, very famous, a lot of political power, or something else).
In that sense Michael Jackson having sleepovers in his bed with 12-year olds[1] and Musk's x.com rename are very similar.
[1]: taking the most generous interpretation; no comment on whether he was a nonce or not.
Also Michael Jackson’s having an amateur anesthesiologist putting him under every night with a wide variety of easily lethal sedatives, and Musk’s use of ketamine and mushrooms and stimulants and whatever else he’s on this week.
> I feel both Musk and Jackson could have greatly benefited from a few more people telling them "you idiot, that's fucking mental".
I agree with you but imagine if Elon had listened when people said the same thing about starting an electric car company, a reusable rocket company or a brain-interface company.
Or if Michael Jackson had listened to all the people that told him the sounds on his album were too crazy and fused too many genres together.
Ultimately it's a fine line between genius and crazy. You have to acknowledge that often where genius resides, so does crazy.
I mean look at Steve Jobs, clearly incredible talent - but also harbored some unconventional beliefs about medicine which many say ultimately led to his premature death.
Most smart/innovative people don't pull off this kind of weird behaviour. Lots of not-so-smart people do the exact same shitty behaviour. It's just a bullshit excuse for bullshit behaviour.
And those weren't widely held views either so it's not even accurate.
I'm not excusing the shitty behavior or saying the behavior isn't shitty.
The world would be such a simple place if it really was as simple as "shitty behavior = shitty person". It'd certainly make my life easier if this were the case.
But the world is so much more complicated and difficult to comprehend than that. Often the most interesting stuff happens in the gray areas where you have to wrestle with multitudes. We all contain multitudes ourselves.
I didn't mention Jackson's talent (nor Musk's). I mentioned the singer in passing, in the context of a "rich kook", and I implied that he was a kook because he was rich. The Orange Man is another example.
It does seem to me that extreme wealth is a severe risk factor for untreatable kookiness. And arguably, being a talented entertainer is a risk factor for extreme wealth.
I don't deny Jackson's talent, and I assume Musk is very good at several things I've never tried. I would cheerfully forgo even modest wealth, if the deal was I didn't have to be like them.
Are you suggesting that Musk is not having huge lasting impact? Perhaps his name won't be as sticky as Michael Jackson, but some of his companies are definitely changing society, partly thanks to him.
I'm not a Jackson fanatic, but everything Musk is doing could have (and very likely would have) been done by someone else in a relatively close timeframe. I won't claim Jackson couldn't have had a similar counterpart on an alternate timeline or there won't be more like him, but there are remarkably few artists and performers who are so prolific and talented to such a degree that they noticeably shift the direction of popular culture for decades. If Musk went away today, frankly I don't think many people would think of him within 5 years or so.
> everything Musk is doing could have (and very likely would have) been done by someone else in a relatively close timeframe
Why do you think that? As far as I can tell, both electric cars and reusable rockets technically could have been done decades earlier. But for all this time nobody was crazy enough to go all-in on it, until Musk did.
I’ll concede that I can’t prove anything in one direction or the other. Years ago I did admire Musk for these things though, and yet the more I learn the less confidence I have that he truly was instrumental in these developments in a way that meaningfully changed the course of history (sorry determinists).
His individual actions certainly bumped things forward. I suppose what I doubt is that no one else would have done that, or that steady gradual adoption wouldn’t have been as far off as we imagine.
I should add a disclaimer here that I don’t feel very strongly about this stuff, and I’m pretty comfortable with being wrong. I also don’t have any major hang ups about Musk; he has undeniably done some great work.
Musk likes to take credit for things he at most participated in.
Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?
SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
What other impact are you thinking of? The hyper loop? The solar rooftop's? His vaporware robots? The boring company? Everything turned out to be pure hype with hilariously overstated success. Or maybe the autopilot which is still only usable by people that enjoy gambling with pedestrian lives?
>Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies
I'm as cynical about Tesla as anyone, as my comment history will show. I think they played fast and loose with financial data when celebrity and anything tech put you above the rules. If he had the enemies he has now, I don't think they would have made it.
But...Elon Musk is a force. I was skeptical of him in, maybe, 2016, but the guy has managed to continue to do stuff no one else seems capable of, even in the face of haters. There's no way pre-Elon Tesla does what he did, I don't believe it for a second.
Even Twitter; yes he fired too many people and it's a bit of a fiasco (and hard to kill, apparently). But the fact that he's using it to explicitly push an agenda is wild. There's no one else like him.
What tomoyoirl said is correct. Musk's talent is mainly in raising hype which results in incredible funding. he's definitely the most successful person at that since Steve Jobs.
Everyone that ever worked in large enterprise knew that Twitter would be fine after the mass terminations. The only thing you lose at that point is the ability to maneuver, the platform will be mostly automated and barring incompetence or malice, things will just keep chugging along with a skeleton crew.
> Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?
Given how shit even current EVs are compared to the early Model S, you are totally wrong. It was always at most a side project for ALL the existing OEMs as we now know. They have have had chance after chance after chance to prove the thesis that "if they cared, they could produce a Tesla killer overnight". None of the OEMs have produced anything that is competitive with Tesla in all metrics (price, range, features etc.) all of them compromise in one or more areas.
The only real serious competitors are the Chinese. There is a reason when teardown analysis reports are offered on all the EVs, the Chinese care about one company and one company only: Tesla. Everyone else is just a follower and the Chinese are not even bothering to waste their time looking at them. You even see it in their actions. Tesla is the only "legacy western" company without a JV partner in China. China can happily dump all the other losers any time they want. They can't afford to lose Tesla so they have accommodated them.
>SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
Are you for real? In 2021 they launched ~380 Metric tons of mass to orbit while the rest of the world combined launched about 400 metric tons. In 2022? They were double what the rest of the world did and finally in 2023, they were 80% of all the mass to orbit launched. When I mean rest of world that includes: Rest of the US industry + Europe + India + China + Japan + Russia + everyone else. If you look at the other launch providers in the US they get far more subsidies and have delivered not even a fraction of what SpaceX has provided.
Can you think of many industries where a single company is doing 80% of worldwide effort? And they are on track to increase that by 50% this year (a metric they will likely achieve given their track record).
In the last couple years they have sent 42 humans to orbit and back. They year they are on track to do their first spacewalk.
Starlink now has 2.3 Million customers in over 70 countries.
I am seeing this outright dismissal of Musk more and more since the whole Twitter saga. Its reeks of ignorance just like all the people that repeatedly make fun of Apple users as idiots who just get duped by fancy marketing. Even in 2024 people here make that silly argument. Musk bashing is the new version of that. It just makes you look ignorant because you are so blinded by what you don't like that you have dismissed all these amazing achievements that no one else is doing.
I think you're interpreting something into my comments I didn't say.
My point is that every product was hilariously under delivered, not that the product itself is unusable.
Let's address the products you're citing:
The Tesla model s was marketed heavily on price and the full self driving.
There were essentially no electric cars in the 100k price range the Tesla cost, so comparing the cars at the time the car was announced with when the car actually was delivered, 5 yrs later is extremely questionable.
But without Musk's hype, we probably wouldn't have the rivian etc, as they were all riding his hype wave. But we'd still have electric cars. Just less then we've got right now.
Now SpaceX's.
It got billions of taxpayers money, there can be no second company because nobody else can get such funding.
In the nineties pretty much everything was delivered by NASA. It just threw in the towel for price reasons, so Musk came along and promised a lunar base & manned missions to mars, netting him all contacts.
So yes, now we have SpaceX. The only player that can deliver things to orbit, because Russia is too poor, European nations somehow don't want to spend money on it and China is mostly interested for military applications, so they're not publishing what they're actually delivering to orbit. They're definitely shipping things however, you occasionally get leaked videos from failed launches that spread toxic fumes close to population centers and similar fuckups.
What you're using as an argument is really an inevitability.
Starlink is another highly exaggerated product, which is still decent value if you need/want an Internet connection in an area that doesnt have usable cable connections. It's not the cheapest, nor the most expensive. It's in the middle. It's a solid choice (and so are the Tesla), it just didn't have quite as much impact as people attribute to it.
I'm not even bashing Musk. What I said from the start is that his contributions are exaggerated.
>SpaceX employees take the Musk fundraising and spend it well. They have systems in place to minimize his technical interference.
Sounds like nonsense used to wave away his success with SpaceX.
If you look at his interviews, it seems like he is most involved in SpaceX of all his ventures. He can explain deep technical details of the product whereas this is less true for Tesla and has been proven many times that he cannot do the same for Twitter.
Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe. He does an incredible job of this, attracting capital investment on absurdly favorable terms.
(Delivery on his wild promises, well, sometimes the true believers he hires make that happen, sometimes not.)
> Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe.
I wonder how long this lasts, though? The more we see of him, the less smart/magical he seems other than to devotees. I feel like his getting in the limelight has pulled the curtain back quite a bit.
Exactly. Musk makes a passable "hype man" that would do great on a sales pitch. But it's the same story as every sales team where he promises so much that isn't feasible to deliver on the timelines he promises.
He took a roughly breakeven business and turned it into a money incenerator. If Musk actually had to answer to a board or investors things would shut down or change drastically. That'll still happen at some point but he has enough money to subsidise his crazy vanity project for a long time.
Because Tesla has been significantly underperforming the rest of the S&P 500, Elon is not the world's richest person anymore. He's in like 4th place or something.
Seems Musk always had a desire to use "X" from his pre-Paypal days. He made a boastful post about buying Twitter, didn't actually want to follow through but was forced to do it by the courts.
My take is that Musk then sorta went "f-it, I had to buy Twitter. I might as well try and make it into X."
>Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished
I always thought the rebrand was a complete shame, if only for the reason that "tweet", meaning "to make a posting on the Twitter online message service : to post a tweet" is in the dictionary!
> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me.
Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
> Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
I dunno, is it that baffling? It seems like he really loved using the product but didn't like the leadership, and he just wanted to own it so he could mess around and have fun following his own whims.
Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable. Like any hobby, for X/Twitter to be a "success" it just has to amuse him, and based on his usage of the platform it seems to be doing that.
The amounts of money he's losing are staggering to us but also meaningless to him. Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.
If the money he is losing is meaningless to him, why has he launched lawsuits to back out of the purchase and sue media watchdog orgs? Why did he replace himself as CEO with an advertising exec? Seems like the money is pretty meaningful to him.
It's really just an extreme version of a boat. They seem like fun, but they're money pits, and a lot of work goes into keeping them running. Alternatively, it's the Cartmanland scenario.
I imagine you're right that the lost cash does have meaning to him, but it doesn't appear to be the primary motivator for his decisions (and is definitely not driving his near-term decision making).
> Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.
This is the frustrating part. If I went around my office tomorrow endorsing nazi propaganda, I would be out of a job by the end of the day and probably struggling to pay my mortgage in a few months.
But this fuckstick can do whatever he wants and never face any real repercussions. He could bankrupt Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla and just decide to retire early on a private island.
It's so incredibly hard to actually fuck things up when you're rich that it's downright impressive when someone like SBF comes along and manages to actually do it.
I'm frustrated that being born into money can make you functionally immune to most of those consequences.
There are two sides to freedom of speech. You have the freedom to say dumb shit, and I have the freedom to not associate with you because I don't like the dumb shit you say. If one of my employees started expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at the office, I would fire them, because I have a right to do so and because I believe the rest of my employees have a right to a safe working environment where they don't have to put up with people who think they are inferior just because of their race or cultural background.
> expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at the office ...
nazi speech would incur this consequence because it is classified as hate speech.
However, termination of employee cannot apply to just _any_ speech that the boss doesnt like. Of course, the boss would have other ways to "manage out" that troublesome employee, but directly firing for the speech cannot be one of them.
Nazi is strong word that you're throwing around. But let's say you're pro-republican manager and you're firing pro-democratic workers (assuming you're US citizen). Or the other way around. Does it still work for you? Where's the line?
I draw the line at disrupting the workplace. If you're constantly badgering people about your political beliefs enough to make them uncomfortable, left or right, that's a problem. You can't (and shouldn't) fire someone solely based on their politics, but you absolutely can fire someone for creating a hostile work environment. In most cases, I would talk with the problematic employee with HR and try to get them to fly straight. I'm vehemently pro-choice, but I would still have just as much of a problem with an employee harassing a devout Christian about abortion laws.
What I have zero tolerance for is hate speech. These infractions don't get second chances.
He really likes X. He even named one of his kids that (well X Æ A-12, with the spaces). The A-12 is indeed a reference to the plane that came out of the oxcart project. Æ Musk pronounces "Ash" which is apparently an accepted name for the character, which was (among other things) used as a latinization of the futhorc rune[1] that means "ash tree"
They government let him name his kids that? I remember a story a long time ago about a couple that tried to name their kid
"Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which is about as meaningful as "X AE A-12", but was blocked by naming laws
> That was in Sweden, which has naming laws. The US does not have similar laws.
The US doesn't have the same sort of naming laws that are common in European countries, but there are state-specific limits around what you can have in a legal name.
Specifically, in California, you cannot have diacritic marks in a name, which is part of why people were shocked that Musk was able to name his child X Æ A-12, when someone named Ramón Núñez will have their legal name as "Ramon Nunez" in California.
Ironically, Æ is the most useful part of this child's name. Ash short for Ashley or Ashleigh is common for girls and boys in Britain. Wikipedia suggests the name is mostly for girls in the USA.
I live in the US and "mostly for girls" is an understatement. I'm not denying that there might be a few boys named Ashley, but it's now considered about as feminine as "Susan" or "Emily"
Nearly a year into the rebrand x.com still redirects to twitter.com, rather than vice versa, which you'd think would be the first thing they'd want to fix.
That's one of those situations that feels like: "Executive just hasn't noticed / lost attention span, and engineer is leaving a workaround for a bad call in place."
Because domain names are tied to security model, they're often the last thing you can fix.
So let's say, hypothetically, they build in a redirect from twitter to x-dot-com. Off the top of my head...
- All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.
- A huge amount of third-party integrations are busted because they aren't using client libraries that understand redirects
- A full code audit is necessary. Someone has hard-coded twitter.com into a critical system somewhere. Other people have referenced a variable, but it's the wrong variable. Still others are looking up the value in a database somewhere that doesn't have a search frontend anyone knows about. And some other database has a huge cache of absolute URLs it vends and everyone who built it got fired by Musk. This is probably the most predictable-cost step, but it's still a cost to be paid.
- A significant number of users are confused. The median of web user is profoundly ignorant of how the web works, and no matter how much you warn them and how much you prepare them, day-of-switch they will panic. Staff up your support team. Customers-lost-forever-two-point-oh.
- Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere. That probably triggers a security audit of every version of the Twitter client (and those companies aren't particularly inspired to foot the bill on Musk's behalf, billionaire that he is...). Hell, Google indexes twitter.com via a dedicated side-pipe. Will that side-pipe handle a redirect?
(source: I've been in the side-seat for a merger-become-rebrand, and the number of things people expect to "just work" and don't is impressive).
> All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.
That includes everyone who had 2FA active before Musk made that a "premium" feature and subsequentially lost their 2FA device. What a clusterfuck, that one.
> Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere.
And that's assuming the integrations even support changing the primary domain name in their OAuth backend, which a lot of them will not. Or you have appliances that got made years ago when Twitter integration was the fad of the day - I 'member there's a fridge out there that showed tweets on its screen -, game consoles or other devices that don't get firmware updates any more.
> Or you have appliances that got made years ago when Twitter integration was the fad of the day - I 'member there's a fridge out there that showed tweets on its screen
Most of those are probably already broken. Twitter dropped support for most third-party API clients a few years ago.
I imagine that changing it would break a lot of things, otherwise they would've done it already. Copying a link to a tweet already makes it an x.com link too.
It's stupid and irrational because this wasn't a decision that was made based on reason - it was an emotional one. Elon is a bag-holder. He bought x.com in the dotcom boom and doesn't want to admit that the domain he paid a good chunk of money for is worthless - hence the (failed) attempt to make a brand out of it.
So far I really haven't seen anyone seriously call it just X. Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar. Some still call it Twitter, not even an acknowledgement that it's been renamed. At least Meta had the sense to just change their app splashscreens and such (e.g. Facebook by Meta). And it seems that Alphabet doesn't make any effort to make their presence known.
The thing that really bothers with me with this is why couldn't it just be "Twitter by X"? You want to make an "everything app", that's great Elon, let's call that X. Now what do we call all the mini apps inside the everything app? Oh, they're called "X", too? So you're using "X of X" to call a cab, and "X of X" to send a message, and these are different apps inside the mega app? How does this naming make sense?
Even X itself resorted to putting "Formerly Twitter" in its App Store and Play Store taglines after their daily installs fell off a cliff. Previously the tagline was just "Blaze your glory!" but nobody knows what that means.
> Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar.
I mean, if nothing else, "X did [something stupid]" just looks like someone forgot to fill in a template; no-one is going to publish an article with 'X', unqualified, in it.
Was thinking almost exactly this while reading a recent BBC article — their style guide appears to be that the company's name is "X, formerly Twitter,"
> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it.
First, fire 80% of developers. Then, make the remaining developers create an "everything app" (in addition to the workload they already have with the Service Formerly Known As Twitter app). Something, something. Profit ???
Aside from being a long-standing obsession of Musk's, the thing about the 'everything app' is that it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+, Musk's reputation, and several years of his rapidly-shortening QALYs. If you force as many people as possible to subscribe, you can then flip them to the 'everything app' and bootstrap a big enough bloc of customers to matter that you control their demand. (cf. Stratechery).
It's not going to work, but it is the only story you can tell yourself and employees about how the Twitter saga ends in any way other than Musk losing interest and getting distracted by AI again and Twitter spiraling into the drain and possibly being dumped into bankruptcy by its debt load.
>it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+
While Twitter wasn't making money hand over fist, it was bringing in $4,500million in ad revenue prior to the rebrand and had years where it was marginally profitable.
Musk's saddling Twitter with interest on the debt he paid to buy the company is one of the reasons it's immolating money.
Yeah, that's the problem. Buying it was so bad an idea and so overpriced that he had to load the blue bird down with debt. He can't just quit Twitter and toodle off and say 'well, I stopped wokeism, and that justifies destroying my reputation and 3 years even as my other ventures like Tesla run into major strategic problems while I was distracted'. So right now, Twitter is "default dead", as pg might put it. There is a viable business there... but not one that can service the Musk debt load indefinitely while enduring all the usual shocks & risks. So he's either got to put in a lot more money, tell a story which will get someone else to put in a lot more money, or lose it.
Exactly! Ownership is not in it for revenue. They'll say they don't care about revenue to everyone who asks. To be baffled, one has to ignore all of that.
There is strong nostalgia for aw-shucks persona of an inventor-turned-business-owner.
> It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.
True but there is no way it would be implemented in such a half-assed way at any other big company (including pre-Musk Twitter).
Stuff like this makes it obvious that the people who are still there no longer give a fuck, they just do what they are told with the minimum effort required to collect the paycheck.
Beyond the incredibly botched implementation, the actual _idea_ is very funny; the 1984 approach to rebranding. Twitter, the Unwebsite. Like, how the hell could he think this would actually work.
I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production, without passing many layers of gatekeepers, any one of which should have swiftly flagged this down. It's not that the string replacement was implemented wrongly (that too)—it's that they're touching, in any manner at all, one of the most obviously-sensitive UX things in their product. Without a commensurate amount of security review.
Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?
> Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?
Which part of "anyone who is not a Musk yes-man has already been fired or quit" are you having trouble with?
It's worth remembering, there are two kinds of yes-men:
1) the sycophant who loves authoritarian institutions; the "true believers"
and
2) the young, brilliant visa holder who was the talk of his parents' social circle in Hyderabad three years ago when he graduated and was able to get on board at a household-name NorCal tech company, but who is now being abused by the employer who sponsors the thing that lets him stay in the US.
You'll always have type one; some humans simply love following a dolt. The second type is a result of our laws, and laws can be changed to keep people like Elon from taking advantage of workers.
The visa holder thing might have been true for maybe 3 months before and after the takeover. The job market was absolutely on fire at the time (early 2022). Anyone who wanted to leave should have been able to, especially considering they were good enough to be hired at Twitter.
> The visa holder thing might have been true for maybe 3 months before and after the takeover. The job market was absolutely on fire at the time (early 2022).
The Twitter takeover (and subsequent layoffs, ultimatum, etc) happened in late 2022.[0]
I would argue laying off an insane chuck of the company was not predicable. Some? Yes happens all the time. What Elon did? No. But visa holders would probably be the first to go. But if you did manage to survive, no way you’re quitting in that job market and getting a new gig in a saturated market.
Visa holders wouldn't be the first to go. Not by a long shot.
1) They come from places that have much lower pay for software engineers. Seriously, people forget just how much more American tech companies pay their devs than just about anywhere else. That means that you can wave a smaller pay package in front of them and they'll be more likely to take it. Replacements from local labor markets are more likely to know what they're actually worth.
2) If they aren't making you 100% happy and they're at-will employees, you can hang their entire lives over their heads. Do you want to have to pack up everything in a few weeks and move back to your home country in shame after your families sacrificed so much to get you here? No? Sounds like you'd better sleep in that conference-room-turned-bedroom, then, and be ready to work 90 hour weeks until this company's in the black.
Go re-read all the comments here during the take over and layoff where people claimed it could not possibly take more then a handful of people to run such a simple site.
I use twitter daily and the site is a shell of its former self. It's slow, prone to bugs, filled with bots, the amount of real users has cratered, user reports go nowhere, there's no support team, the ads are now bot accounts posting crap like "Today is a good day, be sure to make it advantageous", there are no new features besides previously in-flight projects pre-Musk, they've actually removed a lot of features (like Circles, block lists, etc), and much more. He took an otherwise functioning social media service and forced it into maintenance mode. He also fired all of the people that keep the user base alive so now it's flooded with bots (which he presumably likes so he can boast about engagement being up). So yes it's still around but it's dying and the skeleton crew he has left can't do anything.
The bot plague is atrocious. Like, there are tons of "keyword watcher" bots... write "onlyfans" and you'll get ~5-10 spambots in under half a minute, and for stuff involving popular politicians or political events (anything Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Covid) you'll get Russian fake newspaper clones. On top of that come the "human bots" - write the name of infamous German youtuber "Drachenlord" and you'll get that vile hater bunch and it's just the same.
Honest answer: it's where my friend group's group chat lives. I miss a lot of conversation if I'm not in it. To be fair, I've blocked 235k+ Blue accounts so my experience is actually a lot better than most users.
> he fired a huge number of the staff and the site is still running, so how was that assumption not proven correct ?
Why would you expect the website to stop running though? Keeping a site running with a smaller crew is easy amd baked in - all organizations with >10 engineers do this frequently, over the holidays or Lunar New year. What's harder is building new features at the same pace and quality as a larger engineering team.
Don't take this as a defense of what is a harebrained idea; but this kind of replacement should be easy to do correctly. You know; in such a way where only real twitter.com links are changed to x.com.
Honestly it is only somewhat surprising to me that no one noticed the error ahead of time. On the one hand, this is the type of mistake I do see in reviews from time to time... usually in the form of a regex that is not anchored to the start of the string, or perhaps it uses a non escaped period which of course means "any character" in regex. On the other hand, it is revealing about the kinds of controls in place that it got through.
Example: one of the worst and most costly bugs I ever saw during my time in finance involved a code review [1] with the exchange:
"Looks good generally but this will serialize incorrectly if a date is ever negative."
<... pause while everyone digests that...>
"Why would a date ever be negative?"
Noone could think of a reason a date would ever be negative. The resulting code push cost millions in a single day.
[1] I was on the call because I was the SRE[2] responsible for doing the release
[2] We didn't call ourselves SREs because it was like 2001 and that terminology hadn't caught on yet. We called ourselves "Installmeisters" believe it or not.
Iirc it turned out some 20+ year old code was relying on an undocumented/unknown behaviour of dates when they are negative to calculate cashflows on very old perpetual fixed income instruments[1]. If you have a codebase that's large enough and worked on by enough people, for every possible hack/undocumented feature you'll have at least one person who will rely on it in some way.
It cost millions, because the serialization corrupted the USD treasury curve when we wrote it to the database, which meant that even though the code was reverted quickly, for a while no derivatives (like literally no derivatives) in the whole of the trading part of a big IB could price (because essentially all derivatives were priced in dollars using some sort of discounted cash flow mechanism which relies on the USD treasury curve). No price means no risk, because how you calculate risk of a derivative is by finding the underlyers, shocking those underlyers a little bit and calculating the new price (essentially an empirical method of finding the derivative of price with respect to each of those things).
That's a good hypothesis with the non-escaped period! That someone wrote /twitter.com/ for the string substitution, which almost works, and then added a second one like /\w+.twitter.com/ for subdomains, which also seems to work, and would pass simple tests to check if it works or not. Matches everything it's supposed to; rejects most of the things it shouldn't.
You are right the period would line up with the issue we saw.
But also, I can’t help but to think even /\w+\.twitter\.com/ will match unexpected domains like foo.twitter.com.evil.ai. I already gave you the hint it needs to be anchored!
Well, that is the specific outcome Elon wanted when he laid off three-quarters of the company. He very clearly stated that he didn't see the value of the "trust and safety" teams that would have been the ones to flag something like this down.
It seems this may have only affected the X on iOS App. [1] That greatly expands the range of possible causes. It also makes this quite odd in another way as well, because it suggests this was not a server side change.
They wouldn't "have been the ones to flag something like this down". It should've been caught long prior; the code shouldn't have been written, it shouldn't have survived code review, and it should've failed automated tests.
It's a trust and safety incident now, but it never should have been.
> I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production
This is what happens when you "cut the fat" and are left with an adversely-selected[1], skeleton crew of "hard core engineers." The site was never going to fail all at once, instead, it's a death by a thousand cuts and suboptimal engineering.
1. No disrespect to current Twitter engineers who can't leave easily, or believe in the mew mission. However those who survived layoffs but could leave have left.
Well, that’s because any org that has five layers of audits for this just has five layers of audits for everything and so rarely gets anything done. This is a clbuttic bug. It’s silly and damaging but easy to fix and move on with.
Not particularly different from Bluesky allowing one guy to own all of S3.
Well it starts with the bad idea probably coming from the top, Musk saying I'm tired of seeing twitter.com links change them all to look like x.com links, that plus his gutting of the company when he took over means there's less people around to be the person to say no you can't do this this way go back and start over (or not at all).
It's probably worse with Musk. His executive style seems to be, from his biography, ignore a thing for a while until he gets in a maniac phase and then over the shoulder manage a thing until it's done, regardless of time or context.
I can just take the scene of Musk being on a roof yelling at the crew to change how they install solar tiles late in the night and translate it to him berating a programmer in the office to make it look like x.com and not caring about the details.
This article was 5 hours old at the time I'm viewing it and the bug is supposedly already fixed per the article itself. So yea, seems like this was probably fixed within 5 minutes of anyone noticing.
Since most of my tweets where related to work, I moved from Twitter / X to LinkedIn. Twitter under Elon is a huge mess. The irony is that he kept complaining about spam and bots before. Since he took over, my new followers and many of the likes I received were from new only fans like users. Maybe it's by design and he wants to make it an only fans clone. But I'm out. I don't even bother reading my feed yet alone posting.
LinkedIn has its problems too. I would say it's the least bad among the two.
My biggest issue with LinkedIn is their horrible mobile web interface. I didn't trust their app. I know it's been years, but they burned anything resembling trust.
It's been a bizarre ride watching Twitter slowly unravel under the new leadership.
It'll have a long way to fall... the total userbase is still around the same order of magnitude as the population of the United States. But when I read stories of decisions like this, I can't help but think that it indicates the adults are no longer in the room, and a 300-million-plus userbase becomes a massive target surface if it's being run by a team that doesn't really grok the Internet...
It's certainly less weird in official contexts now though. The brand was OK but not really "scalable" without sounding like something right off Idiocracy in some contexts.
I closed my Twitter account when this guy took over, for all the obvious reasons. Somewhat to my surprise, it actually turned out to be a massive boost to my mental health. For a week after I closed the account, I'd find myself thinking, "I'm bored, I should check Twitter... oh wait, I can't" and then I'd just go on with my day. It was fantastic and I don't miss it at all. So in a weird way, my life got better when he took over.
Definitely recommend closing your account if you're on the fence. Don't move to bluesky or whatever, just take this opportunity to cut all this crap out of your life. You don't need it.
It's okay to be bored. Boredom serves a purpose. When boredom is taken away from you, you end up not making an effort for anything worthwhile.
People worry about what (web caused) divisive propaganda, erosion of social skills, and attention grabbing is doing to us — and I agree those are all real and serious threats — but the lack of boredom is worries me the most.
did the same for facebook circa 2020, and even in lockdown it was a godsend. Obliterated my reading list and actually managed to make headway on the massive list of mothballed projects.
Someone seriously did a s/twitter/x/g seemingly (or the raw string replace equivalent). Maybe there are more requirements here, but it seems like just parsing a URL and checking for `twitter.com` and some other literal domains instead of sub strings would have been completely fine.
The regexp example on https://sourcegraph.com/cody has been broken for months (scroll down a bit, second block). Also not a regexp problem and easier solved without regexps.
Please, no one tell them. It's funnier the longer it goes on. It's been like this since at least October (I told a friend on Telegram this), but it had already been like this for some months by then.
Explain this regex: [a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+\.([a-zA-Z]{r,63})
And part of the explanation was to fix the bug. Well, almost, it removed the () in the process, but it did know what was wrong.
When your AI's error can be explained by someone else's AI…
* Why this model? Because the https://chat.openai.com is currently throwing me the error: "You've reached the current usage cap for GPT-4. You can continue with the default model now, or try again later. Learn more" even though I've selected 3.5 in the popup, and my earlier attempt to use ChatGPT to give myself a PAYG chat interface to all the models was done when gpt-4-0125-preview was the best one available.
if `twitter.com` is mapped to `x.com`, then a link `carfatwitter.com` will go to the non-malicious `carfax.com`, so registering `carfatwitter.com` seems to be just a stunt. When would `carfax.com` redirect to `carfatwitter.com`? Urls with `twitter.com` in the name are affected, not urls with `x.com` in the name.
edit: from the responses looks like I was wrong; the urls still point to `carfatwitter.com`. Leaving my comment up in case others were confused like me.
I infer that the display was getting rewritten, but the underlying target of the link would not. So if you posted "carfatwitter.com", the UI would display "carfax.com" but the underlying link would still go to "carfatwitter.com".
Note I have no direct experience with this, it's just the only way this makes sense as a phishing vector. The alternative is that it is being presented as a phishing vector, but was never actually useful as such, and people are just jumping up to yell about a security issue without it actually being one. That happens too.
The links themselves are unchanged, just how they display. So if you type carfatwitter.com in a tweet, then it will display as carfax.com, but if you click on the link, it will still redirect you to carfatwitter.com.
> X eventually realized the issue and rolled out a patch later that same day for some of the domains affected by this change. "Netflitwitter.com" no longer shows up as "Netflix.com" for example.
> However, Mashable can confirm that the X for iOS app is currently still changing many other references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com." We noticed that in one instance we found, the change was happening when "Twitter.com" was being used in a subdomain for another URL.
The article is pretty fresh ("This entry was posted on Wednesday 10th of April 2024 10:28 AM", and the author is from the US. Even if he's on East Coast, it would only be half an hour ago) though.
Unless Twitter just fixed it within 1 hour, I think the author should mention it has been fixed (edit: or that it was limited to certain platform [iOS?], since it's not reproducible on web at least.)
Glad the site is rotting tbh, it wasn't great before and now it's so full of bots and propaganda it feels surreal. Posting and/or reading from Ukraine is even more surreal.
Well that title didn't take long to go entirely invalid as this isn't a thing anymore.
Reasonable to doubt if this ever was thing as this seemed to only exist on iOS and due to the direction this went it didn't really do anything. Probably different if it had gone x -> twitter
> On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com, which is currently rendered as fedex.com in tweets.
I'm in awe. Does Twitter have any software developers left, or is it just Elon's nephew working his way through W3Schools?
I wonder if there's a browser extension that checks if the link text is a valid URL, but is a different URL (or just on a different domain?) than the actual link target, and adds some kind of warning for the user if so?
I'm not sure what keywords I'd use to find an extension like that.
This would break every website that wants to track what links you click on by sneakily rewriting the link under your nose. Which, to be fair, is a use case that I'm all for breaking, but it would make Google mad, so it won't happen.
It is a borderline racist trope that keeps being repeated (mostly by ex-Twitter developers with a chip on their shoulder) without any hard proof. It is equally likely they are upset over a lack of solidarity in quitting and are perpetuating a lie based on someone's citizenship status.
Apparently they have just one developer left who knows just enough to break things. Maybe they use Grok.
Anyway some engineer wrote this change and deployed it. The product process failed though, as did the testing process. Rollback was a mess too, given this change was visible for hours (days?)
Musk fancies himself a coder, so he probably wrote it himself and pushed it to master without review; or he did have it reviewed and fired anyone who pointed out the mistake.
Salty ex-Twitter developers too busy huffing their own farts to remember when the pre-Elon CISO (mudge) was fired after he uncovered how messed up things were behind the scenes, then filed a whistleblower complaint and testified before Congress.
Twitter was not a marvel of engineering pre-Elon, despite the fantasy arrogant former developers keep perpetuating. Their infrastructure was barely held together with duct tape.
It's a simple string substitution at the display level - fedetwitter.com becomes fedex.com, but at the link level fedetwitter.com remains. It's just replacing the content of the a tag, but not underlying href location.
I haven't decided if twitter is actually more buggy or if bugs are more publicized because of the extra scrutiny since Musk took over.
There used to be a bug that wreaked havoc for a short time where you could force anybody to follow you. At the time I don't recall people blaming Twitter's leadership or culture--it was just a bug because software sometimes has bugs.
Twitter was notorious for crashing. The fail whale was a internet meme... Then they fixed it and for about 7 years I basically never saw a problem with twitter, even in the worst internet conditions.
Today the bugs are back. Things are constantly a problem. This isn't a "well all software has bugs" -- yeah true, but somehow for 7 years twitter was bug-free. Or rather the bugs were quickly caught and fixed. And now... nothing.
Musk got rid of all guardrails, and now we face the consequences.
Since Musk took over, I’ve frequently clicked on links to tweets only to be presented with the “Something went wrong. Try again.” Error message instead of the tweet I should be seeing. I then have to refresh multiple times to get it to show up. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all, I decide I don’t care enough, and I move on with my day. I’ve also observed broken embeds around the web. This is core service reliability. I grew up with Twitter. I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Twitter is definitely more buggy.
> I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring.
Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs.
Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.
Great. This is all completely besides the point anyway. My point is that there are more of them and I think anyone who doesn’t see that is nuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a Grafana dashboard to show you.
I never pretended to have anything else, and “motivated” is a weird word to use here. I have no skin in this game, and from what I can tell neither do you. If Twitter survives, great. I guess some of what you noted could be an interesting lesson, but I don’t think it’s going so hot so far and I’m not willing to call it yet.
You have a belief that the service is more buggy, and were arguing as such from anecdote. That's what I mean by "motivated".
I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.
It's totally possible that there was a ton of bloat. It happens when organizations scale and they're looking for market share instead of profitability. But, as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more, which works for a minute, then management thinks "we're right, it was all fat", until those key people burn out and stop producing. Then you end up hiring 10-15% of the staff back. Or, the org slowly dies.
> as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more
Yeah, this wasn't a simple staff reduction. Twitter fired something like 80% (?) of their employees. By conventional wisdom, they should have gone down hard and never recovered. There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did.
The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.
> There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did.
> The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.
I've been arguing since the purge that Twitter was in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the cliff and is still treading air" phase, but that argument is getting harder and harder to justify as Twitter somehow stays alive. How could firing all those people really do nothing to the operational success of the company? What were they all doing? Companies don't hire people where they have nothing for them to do. I look at my (BigTech) company and everyone is running around like crazy with 3-5X more tasks in their backlog than they can possibly do. We always need more people. How do you get rid of 80% and just carry on??? Are they all just writing TPS reports for each other to read?
I also thought there was a decent chance the entire product would just die irrecoverably, and that hasn't happened (although of course there might have been near misses we don't know about). I must admit I'm surprised how well it still seems to run, on the whole.
I think it's still an open question whether the business is damaged irrecoverably. I guess now they don't have the same reporting requirements, as a private company, but everything I've read suggests they're losing as much money as ever.
Although... you can certainly imagine a world where they both avoided infrastructure-death and managed to sustain the business (not pissing off advertisers, not pissing off power users, no pointless rebrands, etc).
Yeah, that's why I was careful about my wording. Without excluding the possibility that many people were truly doing nothing, I see this pattern all the time as companies get bigger:
* project is done to 85% effectiveness by <= 1 FTE
* company is flush with cash, and can hire someone to backfill that last 15%
* new person is not fully occupied backfilling that 15%, and therefore *finds new things to do*...which creates more projects that are done to 85% effectiveness
* goto step 1
Also, of course, as companies mature, they inevitably start moving down the cost-effectiveness graph, and taking on projects with lower and lower expected value. There are all sorts of reasons for this, ranging from valid ("this effort might pay off 10x"), to pathological ("if my team doesn't grow, I don't get a promotion").
Anyway, shovel enough money into the boiler during the "hypergrowth" phase, and you can easily end up with lots of people who are all very busy, but just not productive.
- Twitter staff were needed
- Twitter will fail if the firings continued
- He just fired all these useful people
But at the end of the day, Twitter/X is still the same exact thing and runs exactly the same way. It does prove that firing all the slack can change very little but it's a good narrative to cry about Elon Musk and his "sinking soonTM ship".
I recently tried to reinstall the Twitter for Mac app. It was never a good app. Although a flagship for Apple’s Catalyst, since its catalysation it never got the UI love other 3rd party clients for the Mac had. But it was at least somewhat usable. But somehow it got never updated for the X'ning, neither name nor icon, never got support for longer tweets and other stuff.
And now I click Install in the App Store and "something goes wrong". Simply can’t install it.
There must be UIKit people remaining at X, after all they’re updating the iOS app which must share the same code as the Mac app. But for some reason they don’t update, but leave a broken, uninstallable app on the App Store.
From day one, the Mac app was a hobby project from passionate developers within the company, at times maintained by a single engineer. With the layoffs, they likely lost everyone passionate about maintaining it.
As devils advocate, maybe this is evidence such QA doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks? It looks like no actual damage was done and the problem was fixed quickly once users noticed it.
Sure, using your users as QA is a fine business plan and instills confidence. We should extend this to other expensive industries (healthcare, law, civil engineering, etc.).
Testing is necessary even for social media, not doing so is a big security threat for its users. Even apparently dumb bugs like this one can be exploited to steal important information.
Social media may not seem as important or vital as banking or healthcare, but most of our modern society depends on it. Socials are the best tools for social engineering after all.
No, more like something new on X breaks every year. The site is simple enough that that the engineering is mostly focused on optimizations and there's little more I or any other active user would even expect from the platform, outside of growing to new areas like YouTube-comparable video.
I find it quite bizarre how some people still try to push some narrative about the site being broken. It's not more broken it was before the takeover outside the odd Spaces dropout (which is a new feature so doesn't really count), but is now better serving its actual mission as an actually unbiased speech platform, radical as that is in the current day. Now X just needs to stay unchanged for ten years to overcome any competition.
