I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.
Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
> so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
As far as I can tell, it's the domain of the company he co-founded (X.com), that merged with the company that became PayPal (Confinity), that led to him briefly being CEO before Thiel took over and pivoted to focus on the PayPal service.
2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal.
Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
> 2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal. Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are.
I was just wondering how in the world did Elon manage not to sell "x.com" to a porn company for shits and giggles. It being in the custody of PayPal explains that.
idk, dude is pretty anti-trans and his current trans child hates him (at this point, who knows which direction that causality goes). the joke is one that might hit too close to home for that bigot.
Serious question, how are names ever supposed to evolve or change if they are limited by the state? Or are there exceptions for "good" newly created names? Having a weird first name isn't even a hindrance given how frequently people go by nicknames or middle names and ironically they often do that to avoid being called by a more traditional name like Hubert or Mirabel. You can also just change your name if you don't like it.
Probably depends a bit what example you're looking at.
Iceland has a very traditional name system which is enforced. I think the idea is basically that names won't evolve so they can preserve tradition.
Sweden on the other hand has a pretty vague "name can't be likely to cause child psychological harm" law, that doesn't really come into play unless you try to name your child something really outside the mainstream (there was a case a while back where a couple wanted to call their daughter "Metallica". I can't remember how that ended up going).
I don't see how the Swedish-style system would stop names evolving. There are still plenty of trends and new names that come and go just like in the US. I doubt extreme name choices like Elon's "x-ash-12" would inspire a whole bunch of children to be called that.
> Well, I grew up quick, and I grew up mean. And my fists got hard, and my wits got keen...
> He stood there looking at me, and I saw him smile, and he said, "Son, this world is rough, and if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, and I know I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name, and I said goodbye. And I knew you'd have to get tough or die. And it's that name that helped make you strong..."
Also cruelty doesn't translate to fitness anymore. It's just negative emotional investment. But it's signaling "if worst comes to worst my people come first" which is the loudest tribalism signal in a breaking down peace period society reentering the loop.
>You can also just change your name if you don't like it.
After you're 18 and after you've experienced some of the most intense social moments of your life.
It's like literally everything else with kids. Parents have a ton of autonomy but there has to be a line where they aren't allowed to hurt their kid further
Based on what you said, let the kid have a proper name and then they themselves can change to weird as they wish later. Stupid parents have no right to give a stupid joke name to others.
Depends what you mean by limit but I'm choosing to interpret it as "exert undue influence over the choice of the parent". The UK's restrictions on names containing obscenities, numerals, misleading titles, or are impossible to pronounce seems reasonable although you could make arguments against all of those e.g. some words or names in other languages are obscenities in English and vice versa, numerals are traditionally used as a suffix to distinguish generations with the same name so why not be able to be Nathan3421, misleading titles is a bit stuffy and incongruous with existent names like Major, Judge, Prince, etc., impossible to pronounce already describes many names if you are not familiar with the native language. After all of that, I honestly don't think there is a good reason to restrict a name. Maybe the only limit I could think of would be to prove that it is given in good faith and not for some malevolent purpose.
Parents should not have undue influence on other's (the kid) life as they wish by giving a stupid name. Instead parents should change their own name to xxx if they like it so much.
I think most US states only require the name to fit in their database. They may also require Latin based alphabets or be even just English alphabet with no extra marks and may ban some punctuation or numerical characters. But probably no other restrictions
Everything Musk does looks a lot like some of my high-level, successful, Mary-Sue-like RPG characters I had. Including desogn rooted in what influenced my childhood, in Musks SpaceX case it seems to be th 50s SciFi. Well, I never had the money to try that in real life, and anyway I outgrew it before I got my drivers liscense. Looking at it from that perspective, it is borderline pathetic and just sad.
Anybody who's read their Heinlein and is aware of Musk and his father's fandom of Heinlein books can see the obvious inspiration here. It's not just the private technological innovation, it's also the libertarianism, the obsession with interplanetary colonization and a relatedly natalist form of free-love.
edit: and in the case of Errol Musk, a very genetics-driven opinion on the morality of incest, see Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love".
I haven't read any Heinlein but your comment piqued my interest and, after reading the plot summary of the book you linked and summaries of a few others, you seem to be bang on the money.
If you're looking to try a Heinlein book, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is a fun novel about libertarian rebels overthrowing a penal colony on the moon. It tells a great and imaginative story and doesn't shy away from Heinlein's beliefs without letting them completely take over the narrative with ranting. I don't love Heinlein's politics but I can still appreciate his books, but then as a teen-aged white nerd I was kind of the target audience when I first read them.
Cheers for the suggestion, I might give that one a go.
Something that I was wondering while I was reading about Heinlein and his books was why I hadn't read him. My school library was surprisingly well stocked in classic science fiction, which I explored and read a lot of. So I assume it must have also had Heinlein, unless he'd been 'censored' because of some of his more radical content but the library did have the Illuminatus trilogy, so I don't think so. Did I just never find his books, or did I find them and reject them? It's odd, because I pretty much read any science fiction I could find back then.
I'm much less tolerant of science fiction now, to the point of being somewhat intolerant. I often label people as suffering from 'science fiction brain' and I certainly apply that label to Musk for his beliefs in things like that 'Artificial Intelligence' is actually possible (I consider it only an idea to play with in books and not ever feasible in reality). That's why I found your comment interesting; as an insight to the roots of such a 'science fiction brain'.
A gentle reminder: Musk doesn't build any of that, he's just a source of cash, like a bank crossed with a toddler.
Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in.
This lie seems mostly accepted only by non-technical people in technical fields from what I've found out. Leads me to believe Elon actually is one of those great people that will be more appreciated after his passing.
> He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time.
I’m not sure if they mean he can do them in his head or not because the other part of that statement seems to imply so. Regardless, this definitely shows that he isn’t just the “money man”.
Or... people like saying things that make them appear witty.
No need to ascribe political malice where typical internet popularity-seeking will suffice.
"Elon didn't have anything to do with his companies' technical successes" and "Elon had everything to do with his companies' technical successes" are both low-energy, groupthink-supported replies at this point.
Or we could take the middle ground, which is likely the most accurate.
I don’t see anyone claiming Steve Jobs personally designed the iPhone PCB by hand while mining cobalt on the weekends to stay in shape, but on the other, I don’t see anyone claiming that he just provided money and the vision and engineers just manifested themselves.
I’ve said this before. The reasons SpaceX and to a lesser extent Tesla are the successes they are, is because of the “true believer” leadership it draws. Those endeavours have a clear social-good aspect to them at the “good for humanity” scale. Those endeavours have continue to succeed because Musk’s genius was in hiring them, and in focusing on the regulatory context that allows them to be even more successful. His personal engineering acumen is largely overstated compared to his actual skill set. It also helps that those industries are heavily regulated and those constraints temper his ability to fuck things up.
Social media on the other hand doesn’t attract the same kind of believers at that level and there’s no one who cares enough to make it work in spite of him. Being a far less (or barely at all) regulated industry means he’s free to intervene and meddle in the most egregious ways, and the results are obvious for all to see. As a result of Twitter he’ll likely be in lawsuits (from investors, banks etc) for decades. Meantime SpaceX and Tesla will continue to do well. Not because of Musk but in spite of him.
SpaceX's mission is to spread humanity to the planets.
Bezo's mission is to offer orbital fun rides to cashed up tourists.
Fisker failed due to its major investor (DOE) halting future financing, and then being hit with the loss of a large number of vehicles in Hurrican Katrina. Up until then they were following a similar startup arc (with the same sorts of problems) as Tesla had in their first few years. [0]
With PayPal, Musk was insistent that the venture proceed as X.com (despite brand testing showing that people were likely to associate it with porn), but was overruled. He was also opposed to the sale to eBay, which actually catapulted PayPal in terms of growth, and embedded it as a "must have" for e-commerce. [1] [2]
Getting a huge head start by being a privileged narcissistic raised by Apartheid emerald mine owners (aka Slave Owners) is not success on your own merits by any reasonable measure.
"According to a Facebook post from Errol, the Zambian emerald mine he held a stake in "collapsed in 1989.""
Which by definition means he owned an emerald mine during the apartheid Era.
Regardless of his political beliefs or leanings, there is no means or manner in which such a mine could have operated _at_all_ without being advantaged by said apartheid norms and thereby being dependent on whar in effect slave labor.
Just a FYI your argument is that Elon got a Huge Head Start to his serial entrepreneurism just because someone in relation to him had a business 40+ years ago in South Africa. Far after which he lived almost as a destitute during his college years.
Don't accuse me of such BS. Especially when you're the one not doing research (No, disproven myths and a misleading, generalized LMGTFY don't count when we have specific, up-to-date info). Facts seem at best that Elon had a good childhood, not much reason to believe greatly "better" than a common well-aligned western family could give.
After that, he seems to have been in the position of having to make his own way, while only getting help by a partial investment from his family in a further round of his already-succeeding company that he set up living in his office. So in the positions millions have been. There aren't millions of Musks around but there are millions of younger adults that have more than they deserve. But facts don't bend for your weird fantasies to be true.
Funny thing is, some time ago I thought Elon came from a background where he got a lot of money to start his successes, and still cheered him for making so much more from that than really anyone else. Then people started trying to show in him bad light, which backfired hilariously and now his origin story puts almost anyone to shame.
I think you're trying to somehow include fancy concepts and bending your arguments to fit them, which is becoming a bit silly (No, Poe's law doesn't relate to the current conversation).
I am not shifting goalposts. Note that I'm not the original arguer here. I just noted that you basically doomed Elon from birth regardless of what good he's done during his life, which is a crazy weak argument.
I know people who think that casually considering non-comformists delusional is reasonable. They come in many sorts, but most often its Occam's razor so I don't hate and won't get more involved.
I am not disingenuous. I just hope people would cheer on the people of our time who push on innovation instead of attacking them for their money or pecularities. With enough mass just throwing lazy attacks things can only get worse for everybody.
I think you still don't realize I'm not the original arguer. I just came here to point out this:
>Just a FYI your argument is that Elon got a Huge Head Start to his serial entrepreneurism just because someone in relation to him had a business 40+ years ago in South Africa. Far after which he lived almost as a destitute during his college years.
Which you can't retort and makes other arguments meaningless. Which are already so badly-colored (narcissism, trying to dredge up race relations) that are not worth deliberating on for anyone's sake.
He got a head start through acess to better education, access to equipment others wouldn't have had (just like Gates), his fathers social snd business connections, and more, as a direct result of his father's wealth and connections. This lead to immediately improved outcomes compared to his "competitors".
I wasn't talking "global scale" I was speaking about domestically, which is what matters.
"top 5% childhood positioning, services, access to material and equipment, and more.
Strawman, moving goalposts, etc."
Nope what i listed were specifics, those advantages he gained.
You know that but chose to misrepresent with a red herring.
This is the SOP for Elon fanbois, just more trolling type behaviors just like thier wannabe lord and savior.
Really... it's rather sad and disheartening to know you folks actually drank the Kool aid and aren't just playing games, rather actually think like this and genuinely believe you arent fools.
Except he didn't succeed life on his own merits. This is an outright provable falsehood.
He fell upward every time and started with a sizable fortune. He absolutely didn't work so hard that he "built" a multi-billion dollar empire, no one human can work that hard.
> Revealing about his father's business, Musk stated "My father created a small electrical/mechanical engineering company that was successful for 20 to 30 years, but it fell on hard times. He has been essentially bankrupt for about 25 years, requiring financial support from my brother and me.".
Give it a rest.
Besides which, I can absolutely guarantee you that if I gave you a “small loan of one million dollars”, you’d be bankrupt by the end of the decade.
You actually can't absolutely guarantee anything of the sort, but it makes sense that this is something you'd think because you apparently also believe Elon Musk over this and not Elon Musk (or his dad!):
I take it you didn't even check the links because they disprove your comment but instead took something completely irrelevant but dislikeable and are now trying to somehow connect it to the context with chewgum.
My original reply was to a comment saying Musk is just a money bag. The second comment I replied to was saying that Elon "giving himself" the Chief Engineer title doesn't change anything, effectively carrying over the original claim.
"Chief/Lead Engineer" I guess this can mean a lot of different things. Reason I put "giving himself" to quotes, is because I've been in a situation in a few companies where titles weren't really much of a thing but if someone naturally ended up being in a leading role they would start to be called with such a title.
Given that Elon likes to be hands-on, obviously has a lot of agency, is motivated, and works long hours while shuttling around in his jet every few days (you can hear him saying summaries of his % time used by whichever company in many interviews), I really don't see it impossible that he's grown to the shoes being discussed. I haven't heard anyone saying he's the lead engineer at multiple companies at the same time, though he probably has had periods of putting a lot more time to a specific company, like with Tesla during the over-automation production hell.
I think this comes down to subjectivity and personal experience of what the title pertains. My experience as a Lead Engineer in software has come naturally as I have developed base of tech before others joined and cared for it, including reading most of other people's commits while working 1.5-2x the hours of others. This is in smaller companies. Probably in a bigger company, person with the title would use 70% of their time doing code review and attending meetings, working in a more tiered structure and being less hands-on.
Can I ask why you think the Everyday Astronaut's interview (series) _specifically_ makes Musk incompatible with the "Lead Engineer" title?
You're being repeatedly downvoted throughout this thread for both sycophancy and obnoxiously narrow reading of peoples comments.
The actual comment you originally replied to:
"Thousands of employees build it. In the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they frequently build it in spite of Musk, dedicating time and effort to preventing him from screwing things up when he breezes in."
From your own links:
"We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”
And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail (Emphasis mine), but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing."
Stopped clocks are also occasionally right, but frequently wrong.
> You're being repeatedly downvoted throughout this thread for both sycophancy and obnoxiously narrow reading of peoples comments.
This argument is extremely funny in retrospect, with one of your posts being totally dead. I hope you adjusted at least some of your priors after this . . .
>You're being repeatedly downvoted throughout this thread
FYI, there's more upvotes than downvotes in total. The most noted visible one was at ~5 then magically dropped to -1. Even though it obviously has merit and hosts a lot of conversation below it, which makes the downvotes a bit suspect.
>narrow reading of peoples comments.
This seems like that KGB tactic of turning one's argument on its head. What is actually happening is I'm putting way more effort to answering to ill-informed comments because I just don't like watching obvious lies, even if comforting to some, on the web. This is more draining than giving I can say ...
>The actual comment you originally replied t....
-Nnope. You picked the subheading right after the main lie: "Musk doesn't build any of that, he's just a source of cash, like a bank crossed with a toddler."
>From your own links etc etc
It takes trying to read what you've read negatively. For a more illuminating view, there's actually a part that partially answers this in the provided video: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=810 (timestamped link). It's his own stake. You're claiming it's 100% confirmation bias that Elon is given any credit. Let me _try_ to present another take:
People remember conflict way better than success. So if it hurts them 20% of the time but succeeds 80% of the time, people WILL remember when it bit them in the ass. Because in that specific instance, everyone was against Elon, and it failed. But in the long the general practice has worked wonders. And obviously turns fail to success faster than a NASA-like forever project process. If I was working in such an inspiring field, I would give a kidney to have a leader that frequently took even half that kind of personal risk to favor progress instead of peace.
_These are qualities I don't just appreciate in Elon, but everyone in power who practices these._ Sadly people usually just pick the conformist path, to avoid hurt feelings, sometimes even if it's their own money (for god's sake!)
If you want to pick anecdotes, from when that video was filmed Raptor 2 has been greatly simplified while its performance has increased IIRC. Among with the cold/hot gas reuse for BFR, idea that was actually spawned through rubber ducking during the EA interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw
By the way, you just completely dodged the question to your earlier criticism! Did you really have nothing?!
I'm actually still willing to engage in civil conversation. That is what I'm trying to turn this often self-hate fest in to.
If this is the KGB tactic again, I _actually_ recommend just getting a therapist. It's their job to listen to you and not argue much. Not sure how it's with your country/employer, but you might be able to get them to pay it for you.
Yeah and Assange's been implicated of that too and all of them drink water.
Trying to pull that kind of strings together on a conspiracy bulletin board with red eyes and shaggy hair in a dank cellar together doesn't really add value to the conversation.
I mean this really doesn't sound that bad to non-stuck-up people. Elon is currently the greatest single person in tech fighting climate change and working towards providing a solution to a planet-level apocalypse while also being the 8-year boy creating the inspiration of a lifetime for many.
So I have hard time accepting ad hominem arguments as anything but jealous, uninformed, or just plain conformist. Or maybe some people like to just speak untruths with the mindset that the billionaire can take it, but find that anti-intellectual and unnecessarily polarizing.
(This is a comment in general, not an attack on the parent comment but critiquing the generally hateful air I'd expect the HN crowd to be above of)
> Elon is currently the greatest single person in tech fighting climate change
If you're going to defend him for this, you have to admit his distractions have be a hindrance to the cause. Rather than running Tesla and making sure its the market leader across market segments, he's been off on side quests. And now his side quest is making people not want Teslas.
I don't think Elon has ever aimed to specifically be a "climate activist". His positive effects on the environment seem more of a side product from making the "crappy but sustainable, will be cool in 10-20 years at current pace" option "cool+useful and sustainable, now". Which makes sense, he would probably have gotten less done environmentally and generally if he didn't have success of the businesses as clear priority.
I think he stated that his underlying big plan was to act in fields that he thinks will have the most impact in the future, being good business while not just profit-driven, after he got the PayPal money (Can't find a source right now though) in which he has succeeded, profiting from making the world better, instead, for example, lobbying against ICE's and then providing "just-good-enough" Environmental(r) ShittyCars(tm)
He also has shifted his focus accordingly when Tesla, and at part, SpaceX, were at dire straits. For his kind of personality, I'm not sure just working more would even transfer as simply to linear benefit on that thing.
Tesla Solar is a dud, had to be saved by Tesla using SpaceX money. Or rather Elon's cousin had to. PV tech is solidly in Chinese hands by now, and getting cheaper every year, Tesla has nothing to do with it. Same for powerwalls.
What Tesla figures out so, was that charging infrastructure was the early EV winner, nobody else did that. Whether Tesla's netwirk is still the largest in the world, no idea.
Thing is, he managed to seriously kick the arses of the establishment. There's many bad things to say about Musk, but at least he gave a solid whooping towards Boeing/ULA and just about every car manufacturer in the world who all thought they didn't need to improve.
yeah you can't knock him for making stuff, and that its having an impact. tesla QA on the cars is still not great but getting there, and spacex actually launches stuff.
someone else posted a howard hughes comparison and i think that is quite apt, including the dating of movie or music stars, and the inevitable mental health issues
Im sure there are other good comparisons to Elon Must, but I think avreally good one is Howard Hughes... Started an aircraft company because he liked flying, same with movie production, etc...
Howard Hughes also had some mental health issues, similar to Elon Musk.
Considering being in a comfortable position on the spectrum can be an absolute win for many engineers like for yours truly and for Musk, I don't think its fair to compare that to Hughes's decline
This is a great take. Also, is it really so bad? It's fun.
All the adults are clucking their tongues at him but presumably they'd be fine with him being a quiet entry in the Panama Papers and the Epstein flight logs with the other billionaires.
"Blast radius"? Bit dramatic. Where's the trauma normally associated with blast zones? I don't see it.
Who are these "real people" you talk of? I find it interesting in this age of diversity and acceptance of differences, that a "Musk character" can't exist without a constant deluge of backlash, ridicule and grumpiness!
The vast majority of twitter staff should have been laid off years ago, and would have been getting laid off now as the US continues to experience credit tightening. Musk just did it faster.
Twitter would have fallen had it maintained such a financial burden in salaries, which were also seemingly waste in many places given the enormous 80% percentage after which the company didn't fall.
Would you have preferred every employee, including the most loyal and hard-working, to lose their jobs too?
Musk paid billions too much for Twitter. So at least a few of those real people you're worried about, are now very rich.
Companies have layoffs. Are you saying the thousands of layoffs at Meta, or any other tech businesses in recent times, are "good layoffs", but Twitter layoffs were "bad layoffs"? I don't understand your position here. You seem to have an emotional response about the welfare of tech sector people you don't know.
If you have Twitter on your resume, I'd expect it would open a few doors when job hunting. Your concern for their welfare is odd to say the least.
That's a strawman. Nobody's upset about the rockets(1), flamethrowers, electric cars, fake robots in pantyhose. The Twitter thing, though, isn't fun: it's tipping the scales for Erdogan, it's kowtowing to the Chinese government preemptively, elevating literal neo-nazis to prominence, personally promoting anti-semitism. And that's just some of the damage.
And the people in my world who are upset about Twitter do not give anyone a pass on the Epstein flight logs and Panama Papers.
[1] mostly. there is the matter of the habitat destruction because SpaceX failed to listen to experts.
I am certain I can find at least one angry blogger for every single post you’ve listed. I can remember at least a dozen angry articles over the flamethrower alone.
Regarding your complaints about twitter:
> In response to a 2017 request from the Pentagon, Twitter kept online a network of accounts that the U.S. military used to advance its interests in the Middle East
It’s not so much fun when it’s directed against you, is it?
> The Twitter thing, though, isn't fun: it's tipping the scales for Erdogan, it's kowtowing to the Chinese government preemptively, elevating literal neo-nazis to prominence, personally promoting anti-semitism. And that's just some of the damage.
the fact that one single app has that much influence means it ought to be destroyed. I was hoping Musk would walk into Twitter, pull the plug, and go home. Now I hope, maybe, he'll just grind it to dust.
Why would you be incredulous? Musk himself has been accused of sexual assault. He’s literally being subpoenaed in the case against Epstein. He’s been to parties with Epstein and Maxwell and he went to his mansion after he was convicted of raping a minor (a fact mentioned in the very link you posted):
"Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah, as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing," Musk said. "We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined."
Elon Musk is what happens when an 8-year-old boy is the richest man in the world. He builds cars and trains and tunnels and flamethrows and rockets.
Elon Musk is what happens when a 17-year-old stoner is the richest man in the world. He builds cars and trains and tunnels and flamethrows and rockets.
Everyone tries to blame his money or his childishness, when the obvious answer is right there lighting up in public and blowing smoke on podcasts.
Making nostalgia based design decisions is pathetic and sad? Have you seen... any human culture ever?
You don't have to love Musk, plenty of reasons not to but jeez tone it down a bit. It's like if he was seen eating a taco suddenly tacos would be embarrassing and sad according to you.
> in Musks SpaceX case it seems to be th 50s SciFi.
It literally is give a listen to the podcast "The Evening Rocket" it's where I heard of that connection.
spacex is the one I'm actually kinda fine with, it's a fine and actually sorta clever name (as in space[ e]x[ploration]). the other ones just get kinda absurd though.
At least he's doing something "out there", anything, wrong or right, stellar or failure.
Everyone else is on some random "responsible" profit driven train to increase quarterly profits by meager single digit % so they don't rock the boat. The west is on a downward slide of "responsible" and average behavior of do the least amount of anything whilst the world moves forward with actual ambition, childish or otherwise.
Founded in 1999, ousted as CEO within a year, within a year after the merger with Confinity becomes CEO again.
Insists on using Windows instead of Unix based systems, which causes tensions and Thiel (founder of Confinity) nopes the fuck out of there. Technical issues ensue and so, again, within a year of becoming CEO, gets kicked out only for Thiel to replace him as CEO.
All in all, sounds about like what I expected from Musk. I’m sure he’s got a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder about Thiel.
Eh, I imagine people will just keep using the old nomenclature.
Still, while the social network was presuambly the most valuable part of Twitter, gotta figure the brand was a non-trivial part of the 44 billion Musk paid to buy the company. Seems crazy to toss it after a few months.
Also, the new brand is bad. if someone told me to check out "x.com", I would assume they were directing me to a porn site. And the logo looks too much like the button you click to close your browser.
Reminds me of the OS X logo honestly. Maybe apple has a leg to stand on in terms of trademark? Though I find that highly doubtful due to it being a letter of the alphabet.
Think the x.org foundation has the better claim, since they pronounce the name the same way (think OS X is "OS ten", from what I recall), and their logo is closer.
Understandably and I concur. However, I haven't met anyone outside of the apple company that would pronounce it OS 10. That being said, they don't even use the nomenclature anymore.
I came over to Snow Leopard from Windows and always thought OS X til I heard it at a WWDC. Later, I met professors that had used OS 9, System 7, etc. and they always said OS 10 consistently.
But users definitely said “OS Ecks” and “iPhone Ecks”. Using X to represent 10 is a branding disaster. Doesn’t matter if you get it straight in your keynote that only nerds watch.
Musk has claimed for awhile that he wanted to start a new social network, but that starting from Twitter would be faster than starting from nothing.
So I don’t think he is trying to take actions that will improve Twitter, he is trying to morph it into something else entirely while maintaining at least some significant portion of the user base along the way.
I do think it will probably fail, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t have better odds than starting from scratch.
It looks like he wants to turn twitter in to twitter with kijiji. Not really sure what part of this is a social network. He wants a marketplace that he can get some money back.
I think it is very bold of him to claim starting from zero would be slower. He has accrued so much hate that if he were to start one I can't see how it would turn out any different than truthsocial or if Biden started his own social media platform.
Although I do think it's doable if he somehow kept the fact that he is at the helm a trade secret as he gradually grew the userbase until reaching a certain critical mass and finally revealing that he's the owner.
I think the hate is mostly from media turning against him, which IIRC started to happen before the Twitter debacle. What has he done that normal people would care about enough to start hating him?
I would still expect some hate from the sort of people who (rightly) complain about Google Reader being turned down. But normal people don’t care about that sort of thing.
>Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
Elon is driven by emotions not rationality but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes back to the Twitter logo and brand after he realizes that nobody cares about his new logo and brand.
Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
> Like Gil Amelio said[0] about Apple, I would now say about Twitter: Twitter is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water and Elon's job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
The solution to getting Apple pointed in the right direction was (eventually) to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back. So, the solution here would seem to be - buy Bluesky and bring back Dorsey?
Over the last decade the best oracle has consistently been "what would happen in the stupidest of all possible worlds?" and this is most likely the answer in this case.
It seems to demonstrate that there is NO ONE in his inner circle that will challenge him or disagree with him. Does he have an inner circle? Or just sycophants who will tell him whatever he wants to hear?
Reminds me of movies like "Top Secret" and "Airplane", where they spend a big chunk of time setting up elements of the story and characters lines, all to deliver a slapstick joke.
Elon is really, really good at a couple of things:
- Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
- Making people do what he wants
The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lends itself toward making a thing that is better or more appealing for the populace at large.
As an example: The Boring Company. The pure engineering problem of "how do I remove mass from the ground and create a tunnel as cheaply as possible" is a great application of Elon's strengths, and a useful problem to work on, because humanity will always need to build tunnels.
Hyperloop, though, is completely f'ing stupid, because regardless of whether an evacuated tube and car system can transport people efficiently or not, almost nobody wants to travel like this, and the entirety of the system is completely inefficient - trains are better in every case and with every metric.
In both TBC and Hyperloop, Elon wanted a thing, and convinced people to do it. It's just that there was no consideration as to whether the thing Elon wanted was useful or not.
This is Twitter. Elon looked at Twitter as a strictly engineering problem. And yes, Twitter was horribly inefficient, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of employees were let go and the service mostly continues to function, but my suspicion is that it is riding virtually entirely on H1B employees who are bound to the job else they are forced to leave the country. People will grind themselves to the bone for advancing human spaceflight and (to a lesser extent, maybe) improving alternative energy, but I don't know of any rational person who would do the same for Twitter, even if Elon bills it as the defacto public square.
Not to defend Elon, because I can't, but to be fair, any person reading this, if they had experienced the successes that Elon has in SpaceX and Tesla, fighting and succeeding against all of the naysayers, would have a non-trivial ego. When you combine that with the echo chamber of Elon's fans who treat him like the second coming, and who seem to honestly think that Elon (personally) can fix any problem, is it any wonder that he starts believing some of the bullshit? When he built the sub that led to him calling the rescue diver a pedoguy, and did it because people asked him to, and so many people constantly lauded him with egostroking compliments that he believed he could. And even though he didn't do anything that ended up saving those kids, he was found not guilty of defamation, so he still walked away with a win.
Fast forward 7 years and when he's forced to buy Twitter, he still feels like whatever he does is the right thing, and will do it regardless, and he will convince people under his influence to do what he wants so that he walks away with a win.
So that's a lot of text to say, yes, you're right, it is foolish. He doesn't care, he wants to win, and he'll do anything he can to walk away with a win, regardless of how it impacts anyone else, because ultimately it's not about the people who use the service, it's about Elon feeling good about himself.
Are they doing a better job that anyone else? Also, anything they make appears to have to be paired with Telsa's, which for mass transportation, is literally the stupidest idea ever conceived.
The Boring Company an Hyperloop are just Gadgetbahns to try to convince State and local governments to not make public transportation.
Now, if The Boring Company could make tunnels for cheap and then install real trains, then it might be a game changer but until then, it is not.
Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge.
This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lighting the world on fire. I mean if they make it easier + cheaper to build tunnels then I'm all for it. I've just not yet seen anything that suggests TBC is particularly interesting.
As I understand it, they bought a very small TBM and dug some small tunnels cheaply, and then claimed that the cost is somehow comparable to the cost of big tunnels that have to be dug with big TBMs (which is obviously orders of magnitude more expensive).
The idea behind TBC is fine, which is to figure out how to tunnel as quickly as possible, with the assumption that the current methods are less than fully efficient.
The original TBC at the tunnel across the street from SpaceX was a proof of concept that used essentially off-the-shelf tunneling tech so that the team could learn how the current state of the practice was accomplished, and that they could improve on it.
I don't know if you're familiar with tunnel boring (and if you are, sorry I'm explaining something that you probably know better than I do), but essentially the phases of digging, mucking, and reinforcing are not done concurrently, and I think that was the first things they were trying to do, and then move on from there. But yes, smaller tunnels were part of it.
No, the idea behind TBC was to build a tunnel between Elon Musk's house (at the time) and the SpaceX factory for his private use, to shorten his commute from going around a mountain to going through it. That's why the "proof of concept" is where it is.
Also, they did not do any real innovation, as you seem to be claiming. Combining those steps is 50-year-old technology, at least, and has been done at scale (ie not on tiny tunnels) many times.
Is that TBM small enough to fit on a SpaceX Starship and send it to Mars?
I always thought Boring was a project intended for digging a base on Mars, fitting a whole Tesla in the tunnel would be even more than what's needed to connect some underground habitats.
their "innovation" is making tunnels only big enough for a tesla instead of a train. So you save on boring cost by trading off throughput/operations cost...
If you are making a tunnel through a mountain to transport individuals, the cost of the vehicles is immaterial relative to the cost of the tunnel. A tunnel that can carry 700 people an hour is mostly worthless, even if it was cheaper than a tunnel that can carry many trains per hour.
It genuinely seems closer in capacity to some theme park novelty train for kids than any kind of mass transit. It does have RGB gamer lighting though, I suppose
>Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution
I'm not sure that's true considering why he was (or the public story of why he was) pushed out of PayPal.
IIRC: He forced a port/rewrite of their platform to Windows (from Unix) that eventually led to a code freeze of the existing platform to allow the port to "catch up" to the existing platform. At the same time, they were hemorrhaging money due to fraud and they couldn't do anything about it due to the code freeze.
TBF having a quick response time to real-world fraud (as in, not because there is a bug in the code, but because users are lying to each other) is not an issue a developer would normally have to worry about. Seems like he simply got scapegoated on that one.
You're not looking at this with the right perspective. Hyperloop, EV's, solar panels, batteries, huge tunnels, reusable rockets. What's the common thread here?
This is obviously all the technology that Elon thinks is necessary to colonize Mars, and in each case he's doing the best he can to develop it on Earth. However its usefulness on Earth is a secondary concern.
Where does Twitter fit into being useful technology with which to colonize Mars?
Think the fact that the engineering problems Musk demonstrated some aptitude for finding solutions to were also vaguely related to his stated aspiration to colonise other planets actually perfectly fits the armchair speculation that Twitter is just an addictive distraction from hard science which he's pursuing out of sheer hubris, not because of any grand vision but because he said he could do better than the people in charge and people liked his posts
Simply put, Twitter is a tool of immense political influence, and Musk has realized he needs to regime change the US and kill the "Woke mind virus" to ensure his Mars plans happen.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest his Mars plans would be better served by a few well-placed lobbyists for public-private partnerships with NASA than by spending $44bn on making the platform he previously got to vice-signal on for free less popular...
It was a tool of political influence before he killed it and the journalists who would cover and amplify political figures left because it is no longer interesting.
But, then again, "woke mind virus"--the cope, it's real.
Yeah, he's pretty much the most trustworthy person on the planet and has never lied to serve his own ends. I mean, I guess there's still you that's the weak link in that chain of trust, but otherwise certainly if he said it it must be true.
I've taken the Vermonter down through NYC and Philadelphia all the way to Baltimore. It's straight up awesome. Most affordable method of luxury travel. Even coach is more or less OK. The train from Boston to the DC area is even better.
Because it can get you to a location substantially faster than by car, in a way that doesn't require you to waste all your time and attention driving? The US has bent over backwards to accommodate cars and we're still seeing astronomical traffic during peak hours in all major metro areas. When they're built well, a train (or any public transit) ride can you to and from your place of work in an equal or shorter amount of time, while allowing you the freedom to do whatever you want during the ride itself. For the small hassle of adjusting your schedule by 15 minutes you can regain 1+ hours of your life
It absolutely cannot get you to your location substantially faster, unless you live in a city and are going to a destination inside of the city or to another city that is serviced by the train. I wanted to believe, because I don't inherently love driving and love to configure my computer/laptop/environment such that I can work from any device (thin client-esque) and LOVE the idea of someone else worrying about transportation and me hacking away instead. I'll tell you a story about my personal experience delving into making this work.
In order from me to get from north of the golden gate bridge in the SF Bay Area (in Marin) to say, Cupertino, which I did regularly when I worked for Rancher Labs and MariaDB, I'd have had to take 3 separate modes of public transportation which I would need to weave together in a weird way, and was surprisingly expensive. It would also take 4 hours with appropriate adjustments in variation in route timing. Each way. So 8 hours in commute time alone. I didn't even try. The route would have been Home -> Ferry -> Walk from Ferry Building to King St -> Caltrain -> Cupertino'ish, then bus or walk.
OKOK, maybe I should have to live closer to take advantage of the marvels of modern public transportation...
When I worked at Docker, the Golden Gate transit bus stop was right outside of my house (less than a block.) It was $15 each way. The bus ride took an hour+ and dropped me off 2-6 blocks away, depending on the location of the office at the time. So 1.5 hours each way or 3 hours a day + $30 in fares.
Taking the bus was very limiting. Not only did I have to get to the bus at a specific time in the morning, but I had to leave before a certain time at night. What ended up happening was I would take the 5:45am bus, arriving in office around 7:30am and often take the 4pm or 5pm bus back, on average. This was the time I'd get to the office earlier than everyone, work away for a few hours without anyone there, but also leave earlier than most (but arrive home around the same time)
If there was an event in the evening, a spontaneous outing with co-workers, anything, which would happen after work, the busses were no longer running so I had to take the ferry which would take my across the bridge and ask my lovely wife to come pick me up (in a car) from the ferry terminal.
The ferry was shorter in terms of travel time (30 mins across the bay) but you have to get there 15 mins early to park and get in line to board and there's a variation in the schedule. Factor in potential traffic getting to the ferry terminal, and you're leaving to the Ferry 45 minutes prior to departure (for a 30 minutes ride.) So all told it's not much better, all in, but I am already in a car, driving. So no car savings in this scenario.
Even later (past 10pm, oh no!) I'd then I've to call an Uber, and it was incredibly expensive ($120+) in addition to being inconvenient for the Uber driver to have to drive so far away from their normal operating place.
I've tried to like Public transit. It was not time efficient or cost efficient in any way for me personally to do any of this. It was far too constraining, despite the benefits.
I don't think my situation is all too different from most people living outside of a major city or the suburbs of a major city in the united states. Trains and public transportation is definitely not the answer for me. Getting more transportation infrastructure in my area to make it more efficient is not appealing to me in the slightest.
HOWEVER, because of all of this, I am such a huge proponent of remote work. Remote work eliminates all of this shit, and, if you don't want to have a car or commute or have your car on the road, you don't have to.
I've put substantially less miles on all of my vehicles since 2020 as a result of the pandemic and the shift from remote work and I could not be happier. I started my truck and drove it for the first time this year today. That's amazing.
That is a big block of text which reports a rather obvious fact: public transit in the US sucks. I fully agree with this fact. I think that this is a fact because of our car fetishism. I think we need to have less car fetishism and more public transit. I think our current car-centric infra is costing us way too much money, and isn't going to scale in the way we want. I agree with the Strong Towns position that most (or at least many) suburbs are going to become insolvent because of their car-enabled low density. I have no opinions in either direction about remote work generally, but personally I enjoy having an office to work in that isn't my home. I hope the rising cost of gasoline isn't negatively impacting your truck-driving experience too adversely.
I didnt read all of that, but trains are indoubtedly faster than cars. The reason while thats not necessarily true in US is that train network in the US sucks because the whole infrastructure (and ideology) is leaning heavily towards cars and now you have serious people who claim "why whould I adjust my schedule when I am FREE with my car and its faster" as a counter argument to "we should improve public transport network". Living in Europe with functioning train networks, I can confirm train is much more comfortable than car. Adjusting to a fixed schedule is worth the cost of being much faster and having the time to do something else on the train and be it just relaxation to arrive without exhaustion at the destination.
A lot of these discussions devolve because of a lack of shared context. I live out in farm country. No trains are coming out here for a plethora of reasons.
Using public transportation - for me - and a lot of America where population density is LOW in such a case is a waste of time for all of the reasons I listed.
Right but the ability of you and many Americans to live in such low-density areas is fully supported by the massive amount of resources directed towards car-centric infrastructure. The problem you refer to- that public transit cannot service low density- is one which creates itself. Moreover, low-density means low tax revenue and infra is EXPENSIVE; more expensive in many cases than the low-density tax base can support. The net result is that revenue to build infra is generated in high-density areas and then spent on low-density ones, which weakens the public transit offerings in high-density areas and encourages more driving, which encourages more low-density living, and the cycle continues. This is not sustainable, and something will give eventually.
You point out one of the key things about making public transport work well as an alternative: frequency and reliability . And I don't mean reliability in the sense that it doesn't break down, I mean in the sense that you can rely that the service will be offered, no matter when.
Now the funny part is that it's probably a lot easier to make a self driving train, airplane or bus on a controlled, dedicated lane than a self driving car to increase frequency and extend running hours.
Parking, toll roads, tabs, gasoline, insurance, interest payments, maintenance, depreciation will all happily run up to that amount for a new car, and to $6,000 for an old car.
The IRS mileage deductible rate is 65 cents/mile, and it's pretty close to operational cost of a vehicle. Parking and tolls and 10,000 miles a year will easily get you to these numbers.
Some call this freedom, but I call this a financial millstone around your neck.
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(Not to mention the mountains of public[1] and private money that get spent on automobile infrastructure, parking offsets, etc, etc.)
[1] Most of which comes from the general tax fund...
What is your time worth to you? If your time is worthless then of course waste it and use public transportation, but for me every hour I spend on unnecessary transportation is $120 in straight income and immeasurable from losing out on time with my family.
Of course this is very situation dependant but under my exact scenario you can probably imagine why I’d spend tens of thousands per year on a car. Of course I don’t, and the number is actually closer to $4k, but even then the time saving makes up for that in like a month.
I've always thought the "Set an arbitrary dollar amount to my time to do whatever I want" argument is kind of dumb. No value to glean from it. Regardless with good urban design, public transportation is faster than a car anyway.
And I say tens of thousands because car amortization/maintenance, road maintenance, oil subsidies, environmental cost (gigantic) probably clears 4 figures per year easily.
good public transport networks are faster than cars in most cases, plus its much more environmental friendly. The problem is US is catered to the most inefficient modern transport (cars) and falls now for sunk cost fallacy.
“Most cases” is a wildly subjective statement to use here. For my current job, I’d use an hour more for my commute if not for my car. For my previous one, it would be an hour and a half.
> Except what people in America actually want to do, which is not ride a train outside of novelty.
It's not like there's a convenient alternative to be chosen, it's a country where for a lot of people the choice is either to have a car or to starve (by proxy, not being able to get to your job). Doesn't sound much like a choice about what Americans want to do.
I don't necessarily think his plan to turn Twitter into WeChat for the west is /doomed/ to fail, although it seems highly unlikely to gain traction, but it's certainly a bold plan to turn the flailing social network around into something that could be significant and I respect the ambition.
Throwing away powerful branding is just a hilariously bad call.
He’s said X is an app to do everything similar to WeChat in China. I suspect this will blow over and twitter will remain a sub product within a larger app. No way people are going to change the language they use.
Social media doesn't age well. Look at myspace. This will be controversial, but Google didn't get where it wanted/needed to be with Google+ and they ripped the cord out of the wall; it seemed like it was just google being google but it may have been genius.
I was also critical of FB/Meta buying Insta, I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate. FB is now for old people and Insta is probably at its peak. I will not be shocked when Meta launches a new video oriented application similar to TikTok or YouTube but somehow different.
Twitter has been toxic from day one, in fact I think the very idea of reducing discourse to something the size of a tweet is bad for the world. Lately it has been a cesspool, I get targeted political content that I absolutely never sought out, very obviously biased. That aside, do you somehow "rehabilitate" twitter? Or do you scuttle it and have a newness? Rebranding seems like the most realistic Hail Mary option, it can possibly be new without rebuilding everything. I don't think it will work and I don't really want it to, personally, but it's a bold play that is way better than continuing to watch it erode. I've heard 2 or 3 different media sources talking about twitter in the last week, partially about the "X" but also very openly about how it isn't the same thing and they don't like it. It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
I'm not a super active participant in or consumer of "social media" but I can't remember one having a second act, once it was no longer "cool" it seemed like the party was over, did I miss one that reinvented itself? Twitter is not cool anymore.
As a Twitter-skeptic for nearly fifteen years now, the single useful feature of Twitter was as a "global PA system", not a means of discourse. It was a way for people to announce events that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, or engage in public PR battles with monopolies and oligarchies. Which is a threat to the kinds of people Musk wants to be.
Sure, sometimes those public announcements of events were "I hate minorities" or "yo look at my dick", but the platform was a global notice board that served a positive purpose in that narrow definition.
Agreed, if I were to make a "good" Twitter (as in, one that isn't a hellish place) I'd make it so you couldn't comment on any tweets. People could post a tweet, people following that account could view that tweet in their feeds.
Would it have significantly less engagement and be "less successful" than Twitter? Absolutely no question. But it wouldn't be as much of a ridiculous hell of shitflinging and people arguing about stuff with a small character limit and less than ideal amounts of context
Twitter has not been some revolutionary (in the political sense) device since long before Musk bought it, if it ever was. Actually the opposite, it was shown to act as an arm of the states that support the status quo.
> but it sure was helpful for example for getting alerts to breaking news stories and such
Yes, presumably the breaking news that the government-corporate propaganda machine wanted us to see.
Seeing earthquakes and mass shootings and the like a few minutes before legacy media was an interesting novelty but not much actual practical value and not something that will bring down capitalism/billionaires/fascists/etc.
> I figured it was all going to somehow be Facebookgram but they kept it separate
I'm still salty that they pulled out the Foursquare location backend and replaced it with Facebook's... whatever it is they replaced it with. Eleven years later and it's still less often correct than it was when Foursquare was providing the data.
I've been on a Twitter break the past two weeks and it's been pretty glorious all things considered. The only thing I really do miss - and will miss if the platform dies - is that ability to be connected to the thoughts of people I want.
The question of what happens to the blogosphere types if/when Twitter explodes matters a lot to me. Idk if Substack is the right answer.
Genius would have been not creating Google+. Which makes Microsoft a genius for not going down that path. I'm a genius for not launch a site either. You probably are too.
> It might be too late when NYTimes podcasts are openly talking about how the reporters dislike using it anymore.
Nytimes is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They pretend to be better than something like Fox News but they’re the same thing. Their css and layout plus their history would have fools believe they are a good source of unbiased news. But they’re just as fake as the other news and cater to the left instead, which is anti-Musk for reasons.
Also with twitter and AI threatening to displace journalists I can’t imagine they’d like it much.
Not necessarily disagreeing with any predictions about what becomes of twitter/X though..
I didn't see anyone mention the rationale. Here it is:
"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."
Perhaps it's not foolish. People have been leaving Twitter in a huff, slamming the door on their way out. "Twitter" was ruined according to numerous articles and memes. Rebranding might be going with the flow rather than fighting against the grain of "old Twitter".
It's interesting to me that the ones who really have a problem with this change are those who already left Twitter. But, having removed themselves from being the target demographic and already indicated that they won't return; I'm very much in agreement with you here that these changes are now much more with the flow.
Since Twitter is a neologism they are in a strong place: if somebody wants to sell “Twitter” sausages at the supermarket Twitter is in a position to do that…. Whereas “McDonalds” really can’t extend its brand beyond hamburger restaurants.
The next question is: “Is he really serious about the super app?”. The horror is that he probably is, but what business wants to deal with a mercurial leader who might stop payments, pay people extra, or impound money in your account for no good reason. What business is going to want to put an “X” logo up by their cash register when it means they are going to have arguments with customers. (I bet it will be a hit for “go anti-woke and go broke” businesses though.)
Twitter is not a neologism, but a word in the english dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/twitter ("to utter successive chirping noises"). As is tweet: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tweet ("a chirping note").
My knowledge of trademark law is limited, but I guess if someone would like to sell "Twitter"-sausages, they would have to apply for that trademark in the respective category and it could be anyone, as the-company-formerly-known-as-twitter propably doesn't have the trademark for food?
As I understand it, some brands are strong enough and globally-applicable enough that you can't use them regardless of what you're trading in. If you were to sell "Nike sausages," I'm pretty sure you would get sued and lose in court. Other times, the brand is more limited and you can get away with re-using it.
As a slight counterpoint, Bells Labs was selling Nike Missiles before the shoe company ever existed. I imagine that they’d be in a good place legally to continue that brand name.
You mean they voted unanimously to _sell_ it for the (high) price Elon offered (and tried to back out of), right?
The 'vote' was for money, not for any sort of trust in Elon's leadership
I didn't follow this too closely so I really have no idea if internally the Twitter directors thought this was going to be good or if it was a 'dump it on the billionaire' thing
What I mean with my original post above is that Twitter is such a recognizable brand it must be worth multiple millions of dollars - to throw it away for the most bland and un-googleable thing "X" is... hard to understand
Users will have to remember to use 'x.com' plus the search term or they will get too much craft from every page that uses the letter X as a placeholder/variable though, right?
How does "x dot com" work to prop up the brand in daily communication and will people actually do it?
Because if they don't do both, then none of the content on x dot com matters, right?
Twitter needs nothing extra, no 'dot com' in any fashion, the brand lends itself exceedingly well to verbal and digital uses while consistently establishing and reinforcing the brand.
Really, he tanked most of the brand value if not all of it, it just doesn't "work".
The reason I keep saying 'ketamine is a hell of a drug' is, foolish doesn't adequately describe what's happening.
The wealthiest huckster in the whole entire world has done so many horse tranquilizers as psychedelics that something broke and he is flipping out and wielding his power in unaccountable ways, like any billionaire, but in obvious madness.
He broke. But nobody can do a thing to help, because billionaires are so powerful that the man is completely unaccountable to anyone or anything. It's worse than Ye. Elon broke, after too many horse tranquilizer trips. He's not there anymore. You're seeing the drugs acting in his stead.
There are reasons why societies don't set individuals up with this kind of power.
Absolutely. He has publically endorsed doing ketamine as a method of managing depression. Elon is doing ketamine, and I think he's doing lots, from all appearances.
How do you know what he’s doing? Even if he’s said something positive about it and/or used it in the past doesn’t mean anything. I have positive things to say about psilocybin but haven’t done it in 20 years.
I'm not privy to the news on this particular fact, but the fact is that Ketamine IS used medically as an anti-depressant now, just at far below the dosage range to get "high".
So if he's just endorsing its usage in a clinical context, that is way different than railing lines.
According to a WSJ report. Which may be true. But where’s the evidence? Why not stick to provable facts instead of this type of tabloid content? This is Reddit-level discourse.
yes, hes mentioned it before as a depression aid and recreationally at parties. Also previously mentioned Ambien and a little wine being "magic" and magic mushrooms supposedly. Everyone got their demons, take from it what you will.
Twitter? Whats that? You mean 𝕏? I honestly don't get all the hate for it, if you don't like it you dont have to xeet, nobody is forcing you rexeet Elon Musk, dont want to use 𝕏 don't use it!
While I’m not aware of any of the incidents actually having caused damage to the master pieces (all have been on the protective glass), these acts are not without cost to the wrong organizations and people: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/arts/design/climate-prote...
There is no way you are serious, it's just a piece of paper. You can't compare it to one of the most famous websites.
It can pretty easily go both ways. The Mona Lisa have been a cultural icon for a long time, but Twitter has had a massive influence on culture since it's inception.
There are other similarities with Elon’s Twitter too. It’s hard to tell where the Mona Lisa is looking or what’s going on with her. There is a strange fog in the background and some scorched earth.
Seeing as Art is riddled with subjectivity, you absolutely could. And calling twitter “just a website” is disingenuous as it facilitates real-time global communication and a scale not previously reached by humans. I personally never used twitter, but I still respect what they built.
To identify your fallacy, replace "republican" in what you wrote with "women."
I suspect you'll fairly quickly realize the problem with taking a sample size of 1 and extrapolating characteristics about a population of 10s of million of people.
The only things they really have in common are that they both happen to be billionaires who bought their own social media platform that they now use to signal boost discredited right-wing conspiracy theories through memes and insults.
Beyond that, the comparisons are totally superficial.
Sure, you could state my comment is partially ad hominem.
To clarify, saying "there's nothing else there" about Elon Musk, or any great inventor, or even a great villain, I consider too vacuous itself to merit a more pointed response. You don't get to have your thoughts being discussed 24/7 on an intellectual forum without being a bit resourceful.
If he was altruistically trying to save humanity from Twitter why didn't he just turn twitter off when he bought it?
I guess it could be because he didn't single handedly buy Twitter. IIRC he contributed $15B of the $44B acquisition. I guess he can't turn it off without his co-investors holding him accountable?
If that is his intention then he is doing a lousy job. Instead of simply shutting down the servers and never turn them back on, he has given other platforms plenty of time to rise, while loosing users to them little by little, this means communities can coordinate, trial and error, and get the taste of which other platform to migrate to, where they can continue this supposedly dangerous behavior.
If, on the other hand, he had simply shut of the servers many (most?) of these communities would have simply vanished for good, and many of their members might have been “liberated” from social media for good.
If it's deemed foolish, then either Elon is foolish and making a fool of himself, or there's a misinterpretation of the action. The success someone like Musk repeatedly attains in business cannot be achieved without a significant capacity for making wise, informed decisions, or strategic moves. If his track record is any indication, he'll probably have a successful venture, and I, for one, am fascinated to see the emotional attachment and arrogance the peanut gallery continues to spout. It's a curiosity to me why those who have little to no actual stake or insight seem to have the highest confidence and volume. Perhaps it's a selection bias.
PayPal. SpaceX. SolarCity. Tesla. Boring. Elon Musk has a signature characteristic of building 10x-ethos companies from first principles at great personal & financial risk.
It's the Muskian Cycle: Innovate, try to garner investment, be laughed out of the room, make it work anyways, laugh all the way to the top of tens of thousands of millions of dollars of net worth. Then stuff all the capital into the next Big Thing.
Steve Jobs said something like "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." As far as I can tell, each of Musk's successful ventures has inculcated iterative or multiplicative innovation into the fabric of technology, society, and interaction.
PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
SpaceX, with its obvious contributions to the fields of not only rocketry but every second-order industry around it, including testing/software, etc., has been a game-changer. Again, second-order, competition arises, humanity wins.
Ditto Tesla; not only the AI/ML/CV wizardry in the stack but plenty of other non-primary-field innovation and progress comes alongside (manufacturing, battery tech, etc.). I personally am not convinced EVs are some solution to the "climate problem," given the net-impact of mfg and power consumption, but it is a pre-requisite to self-sustainability that we move toward renewables, and with that optimism I move on.
I don't know a whole lot about the Solar operations at Tesla, but SpaceX + Starlink has made one of those incremental improvements in the internet access game. I've got my biggest gripe with this venture - based on Kessler Syndrome, I'm afraid of trashing our space-way by means of junk, though admittedly this fear comes from Stephenson's "Seveneves" and not facts or reality. Orbital tracking remains a significant challenge to the exploding private space industries.
Bringing us to the Boring Co. Literally nobody is complaining about that, but it's such a banal and useful and imperative tech to develop for the overall goal of Martian exploration, and it's not abstract - it exists and is doing what it needs to do.
Certainly 𝕏 (neé Twitter) and Xai are integral to Musk's overarching vision. For years, I've posited that someone should, or perhaps already has, been meticulously analyzing the entirety of Twitter's data. This data, rich in semantic analysis, interaction templating, linguistics, and more, could be instrumental in training and researching emergent systems. The rapid, mostly unfiltered, and bite-sized nature of the medium provides a unique lens into the human thought process, offering a potential approximation of how "thoughts" might interact.
It's possible we (humans) are destined to reclaim our collective consciousness through technology. It is also possible Elon is the anti-Christ, and we should be looking inward, meditating, and removing blockages to our lineage that has shrouded the collective consciousness, muted our heart and soul, and reduced us to a low level of being, what the Buddhists might consider Naraka.
There are a lot of FUD-spreaders about Neuralink, too, but listening to the technical discussions and grokking the science has me convinced they are approaching another sea change. There are hard engineering problems and there are impossible problems. Elon's companies take the hard ones and just work really hard, then get the solution. I see no reason why this approach to software platforms and dynamic interactivity interfaces would be any different.
People don't like change, and they love to complain about something. So I obviously understand why these > angry and disappointed types are out of the woodwork.
But the thing is, we should celebrate and adore the scientific progress, commitment to science & innovation over pure profit, and - in my opinion as a USA chap - dedication to as much free speech as possible.
Cringe, hate, love, whatever - the guy is objectively successful and objectively delivered on some cool shit. I wouldn't argue he is the most precise or accurate predictor, but he's quite the visionary. When the Starship gets to orbit, there'll be some more creative press and commentary, but I will be watching and as excited as when the Roadster Spaceman went to Mars. Or when I saw the first booster landings.
Everyone fails, we are defined by how hard we try.
> PayPal spearheaded and won the race for payment processing. It wasn't perfect, but it was in no small part due to Musk why the company succeeded and earned its eBay buyout.
Musk was removed as CEO within four months of his company merging with Confinity, who had already developed and written an MVP for PayPal.
This is a bit of a stretch. After that point, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal appears to largely have been cashing dividend checks.
PayPal was not founded by Elon. SolarCity was run by his brother / cousin (?) and was about to go bankrupt before being questionably acquired by Tesla. Boring is not a thing. Even Tesla wasn't founded by him. So his track record is really creating SpaceX (and jury is still out on long term success) and executing on Tesla (where technology, concept was founded by someone else).
You could say all that, yes. Or you could just look at the immediate facts of the case and determine that Musk is being foolish and making a fool of himself.
Not that he does in all cases. Not even that the X looks bad. But the Twitter bird was both iconic and cheerful, and there was nothing wrong with it. Kicking it to the curb is the action of a foolish fool.
The Brand Toolkit page needs updating - https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit
Not only does it still have the bird it says "Our logo is our most recognizable asset. That’s why we’re so protective of it. Take a moment to think about how you apply it and take a read of our Brand Guidelines for examples of how we like you to use it."
Do you really have to wonder? I think it's one of his episodes, just like the purchase of Twitter itself, where the too quickly decides on something and pushes it through.
Why? I'd be hanging out with my loved ones in mountain cabins and beach houses. I truly cannot comprehend what makes these people want to spend their time and money on internet nonsense.
If your character is about chilling and hanging out it's unlikely to be one a billionaire.
Most people getting into that group donthat by focussing their time on making money. This usually requires quite some dedication, which is a character trait you can't simply replace for going to the beach.
There are exceptions, but it's rare. And then there are the ones who got spoiled as a kid and were lucky with some decisions, like making some good real estate deals in Manhatten or finding the right partners to build some online payment service, who never learned about responsibility.
Do you see other billionaires wasting time on “internet nonsense”? This guy bought a social media network and was on it 24/7 before that.
Even Zuckerberg who made his fortune with social media seem to post less than him. I have never even heard of Bezos posting while Gates probably only post as PR for his foundation.
Yes, but the prompt was that I'm a billionaire. And I'm the way I am, and described the way I believe I would be as a billionaire. But there was no part of the prompt about the path I took to become a billionaire, just that I am one.
Right? I would be enjoying life to the fullest, privately. This guy has already reached end game, instead of enjoying it, he's squandering his name/reputation for internet points.
That's true: most people want to hoard wealth for personal consumption. That's the normal way for wealthy people to behave. Very few want to change the world. Some of those who want to change the world will change it for the better and some for the worse, but the hoard-and-consume lifestyle is most definitely the common lifestyle.
Personally, I think the "spend time with loved ones and donate money" approach is the far preferable wealthy lifestyle over the "narcissistic egomaniac constantly talking about how theyre 'changing the world for the better' while mostly just being an asshole" approach.
I'd like to think if I was a billionaire I would act the way that I think an ideal billionaire would, being shrewd with my money and making myself richer in an upright and respectable manner while also ensuring that the people who work with me get wealthy as well.
Proving to others that you can act like an 8th grader while pissing away $44 Billion (actually, closer to $33 Billion, maybe $24 Billion if we ignore the outside $9 Billion investors) on an asinine project and still living the life of private jets, and party yachts is the point.
Flaunting your wealth attracts supporters in this day and age. People *like* rich assholes. Its fashionable, or at least it was in the 2010s. The pendulum of society is finally swinging back and demonizing this outrageous display of wealth but we're still in an age where people literally worship wealth. Not the "figuratively literally", I mean literally literally worship as per the prosperity gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology).
Its not just Elon Musk, but also Arkk's Cathie Wood and Bill Hwang.
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The outrageous displays of wealth is proof that you've achieved God's good graces. Its basically Mandate of Heaven (Chinese concept) except the American version of it.
Once you make $999,999,999.99 dollars, congratulations you have won at life!
All future income you make beyond $1B goes to helping society.
You should probably get a say into where the money goes (so it aligns with your values, whatever those may be) but that's it. You are done enriching yourself personally.
I kind of like that (although I'm sure plenty of people hate it).
Norway doesn’t have that, but it does have a wealth tax, which I like. If your net wealth sums to over 2mnok (approx $200k), you pay some percentage of tax on that wealth, every year. There are plenty of exemptions, your primary residence is only worth a quarter of assessed value, and of course this is net wealth, so mortgages and things subtract from this. But it does mean that if you’re just sitting on a horde of gold, you’ll anyways pay taxes, which makes sense to me. Just because you became wealthy enough to stop earning any income doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your share of keeping society running.
I've done some math on this. It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits. You really, really don't need to go all 'Beatles Taxman' on it and confiscate everything over X amount. You can take just 1% of the pool of wealth and come out with enormous funding by the standards of what we use social benefits for.
The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.
A though occurred to me the other day. Taxes have become the offset for the inefficiencies capitalism. Each entity is independent, and therefore has to reproduce common things that could have been shared if society was organized differently.
It’s a Unicode symbol that can’t be copyrighted that was suggested in a comment reply and the CEO had to spin the rebrand after Musk tweeted for 12 hours through the night with no sleep.
He has no plan. How is that not painfully obvious at this point
First of all by saying “the PayPal days” shows you have very little idea what you’re talking about and I’m not going to elaborate.
Second of all, so what? What does that have to do with him just picking a Unicode character at 4am on a Saturday?
Your argument was this logo change was planned.
Okay, so he’s planning on turning it into a finance platform, and you’re saying it was “part of his master plan” to pick a logo at 4am that can’t be trademarked (because it’s just a Unicode character), such that any one can setup a login page for using the logo, to harvest X.com credentials, and they can’t do anything because they don’t own the trademark?
Hey isn't he still majority owner of SpaceX (Jesus, there's the X again, somehow that hadn't dawned on me yet)?
Doesn't a huge proportion of their income come from government contracts?
Aren't there... you know, some laws about that exact thing?
Oh who'm I kidding, only the peons have to sweat about their lives being ruined by getting high on the weekends. Rich people are too good for that, of course.
Besides, he's probably got bullshit prescriptions for most of it.
Absolutely. He's been open, even evangelistic about that, and anyone familiar with drugs can quickly recognize that it's a WHOLE other thing beyond your basic Joe Rogan bakemind routine. Elon has gone full Syd Barrett. It's not going to get better.
I remember back in 2018/ 2019 in SF, when "microdosing" ketamine and/ or LSD started becoming big with tech folks. It was (and still is) always painfully and embarrassingly obvious when someone is "microdosing".
You’re acting as if Musk’s actions don’t affect anyone. Ask the two decapitated individuals who died at the hands of Tesla auto pilot how they feel about Musk’s poor decision making. People had communities they liked on Twitter and Musk destroyed them ruining careers and upending lives in the process.
And he did it all so capriciously. There still doesn’t seem to be any reason for it.
If it was the plan from the beginning then why announce it via rambling tweets late at night, before it's even announced to the employees? LOLOLOL. UNICODE X "ICON" LOLOLOL
The app is also "Twitter", the <title> tag is etc. Everyone is going to keep calling them tweets. It's just the logo and redirecting the x.com domain really. Which makes sense IMO (regardless of whether it was a good idea which I'm skeptical), I don't think they should go hard with the rebranding immediately. You need to slow roll it so people don't get confused. The logo is a good start making people notice and get curious without making a big disruption in Google results and mobile app discovery.
> Anyone looking for a little horror story?
>
> I'm one of the only two in-house designer in the whole Twitter corporate, and I wasn't told anything about this rebranding...
I honestly didn't even know that I could still view individual tweets. I used to go read new tweets from my favorite posters from time to time, but I haven't been back since they forced that behind a login.
you can still view it through https://nitter.net, which I guess makes the open source Javascript-less front-end to Twitter more accessible for SEO? maybe Google should start indexing that lol
The site favicon hasn't been updated either. I imagine that last employee working at Twitter who hasn't been fired has had a difficult weekend updating the logo.
Wait is this just because they aren’t rebranding Twitter? Just the company that operates it? I don’t have Facebook but I was under the impression that it was still Facebook even though the company rebranded to Meta.
Twitter has managed to get so many words to be common. Like it's a "tweet", not "a post on facebook". It's a "retweet" or "quote tweet", not "something I shared on facebook". Why throw all this deep brand recognition away?
It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
I feel like "to google something" has by now become a generic term that means just to search on the web, not necessarily using Google. In particular, in Russian, I've heard people say "загуглить в яндексе", literally "to google in Yandex".
By the same token, the users of XXX dot com will probably still refer to their posts as tweets. Though as OP points out, "tweet" isn't genericized like kleenex or google, so it is less likely to survive the sudden brand shift.
No one quite understands that. But if you want just the search, there's ya.ru.
However, in Russia, Yandex is not just a search engine. It does everything and then some — search, cloud storage, email, maps & navigation, music streaming, a voice assistant with Amazon-Echo-like speakers, news, online advertising, event tickets, a marketplace, taxi, food delivery a-la Uber Eats, car sharing, online grocery store, e-scooter rentals in major cities, and this list goes on and on. And that Dzen ad-filled cringy blogging thing no one seems to like. But Yandex is literally inescapable, it's everywhere and you'd be somewhat excluding yourself from the society if you refuse to use any of their services.
There are probably hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites out there that have the twitter bird logo at the bottom either to direct link people to share the article or maybe a link to the profile of the author or whatever.
Aren’t those little share buttons served via a CDN or third party anyway? All you need to do is swap out the image that the URL points to and any site that uses that URL suddenly starts serving the new image.
Elob has a fixiation on the letter. As I understand it, he wants to create a 'meta' platform for everything. I think in China such platforms exist (?). It's not to far away to say, that you need a 'meta' name for a platform like that. Probably wants to leave the 'private company' image and try to create an 'institution'. I hope it fails.
WeChat is extremely popular in China and on the surface it's a messaging app but below that is a whole swath of stuff, the most interesting IMO is the decentralized marketplace. My GF's mom is Chinese and she buys tons of stuff like vegetables and housewares from random people through the app.
People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.
If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.
WeChat's success lies in chinese culture that people value convenience over privacy bc the gov can already monitor everything its citizen do. It is a "Super App", a mini OS with conglomerate of apps that has everything users need. Without ever leaving the app, it drastically lowers learning curve for people. Instead of learning how to use multiple apps, they need to only learn just one.
I mean, you can also buy stuff on WhatsApp... But honestly, Twitter V2, or, well, X, looks more to me Facebook. Twitter was twitter for its simplicity.
Remember when everyone got pissed off because they doubled the characters? How many is on Twitter now, 5000? Markdown support too. And now they are planning banking, latex, some linkedin copy cat stuff...
In reality twitter is trying to become Facebook. Facebook only didn't had banking because FED/EU didn't liked the Libra idea.
I like Elon, I think he is smart.
I also think he has too much power and influence.
And along with that comes corruption, non sense and slew of other negative attributes.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Twitter, is in fact, X/Twitter, or as I've recently taken to calling it, X plus Twitter. Twitter is not a social media unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning X system made useful by the X corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full as defined by X.
It's pretty simple to avoid that. And no one really talks about Tweeting outside the context of Twitter, which made Twitter's job way easier than say Google's, where something like "I googled you on Bing" has become an acceptable and common turn of phrase.
Thats's only when applied to things outide twitter, which I don't think it's the case. I have never heard anyone talk about retweeting on facebook or whatever. The fact they don't do this would make their brand even more valuable
I grew up in Houston and this was a common question (and answer) to the point where all the midwesterners in college arguing about “soda” vs “pop” just thought us Texans were crazy.
It's not pining, it's passed on! This bird is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late bird! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
Coincidentally, the end of that sketch is how I feel about the platform now:
"I'm not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any further as I think this is getting too silly."
pretty much everyone I know on twitter is like "I don't feel like using it anymore." and only stays around due to the remainder of the network effect and the fundamental issue of transferring followers to another platform being hard.
and that it's a pretty bad branding doesn't help either, I don't want to eX my friends, imagine saying to your spouse you want to eX them etc.
and I mean people often act stupid but it has limits and if you first go around claiming you will buy twitter to protect free speech and then aX anything which tried to protect free speech in twitter from the inside and have way higher censorship numbers people might wonder if buying X products will aX them and their values and their health at some point. That he aXt anyone believing him to be a serious reliable person due to his public appearances probably won't help either.
I hope that this will push government officials and structures to set up mastodon instances. Like one for the government where each agency has an account.
Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data)
I’m surprised that the pro sports leagues haven’t tried this given all of their complaining about abuse on Twitter and IG.
NBA teams are about to start paying middle-of-the-road players $60M per year, hiring a full-time mod team to support an official mastodon instance should be a drop in the bucket for them.
+ is great when you want to censor something that one of the players said but they refuse to delete it. Could also just straight up make everything players say go through a review queue and only approve things manually, skipping anything that could cause drama.
Not saying that this would be better/worse for the public/players, but I certainly could see why the owners/companies would want to silo the players voice into platforms they themselves own.
Pragmatic, but a marketing move like that has far-reaching consequences -- both in their relationships with social media companies and the normies that look up mastodon and associate it with "hackers."
The NBA and NBAPA just signed a CBA through 2030, if this does happen it won't be any time soon (and I doubt it would, banning players from using a social media site is pretty far reaching).
This is perfect for a company like ESPN. They have enough sports writers working for them that they could instantly create the place sports talk happens.
It's legally hairy in the United States for the government to moderate Internet platforms. As I recall, some public officials were taken to court over blocking people on the site formerly known as Twitter. There's a court case pending against the government right now regarding its communications with platforms during the COVID crisis.
Oh but registration would be closed for the public.
In the Europe case it serves as a central official communication hub. Since many public officials around the world are using twitter kinda like this I think it would make sense.
It could be using anything else as a platform but Mastodon is kind of an all in one package that would be easier to work with and interoperate.
I don't think it would only reach .1% of their population.
It's talking about replacing all of the Twitter accounts of government agencies with accounts on a central mastodon instance for the government, that would serve the same "information broadcasting" purpose. I'm not talking about people having to create mastodon account or choose an instance or even use mastodon.
I think far more than .1% of people can read a public mastodon feed for information from their government
The very fact you need to create an account on twitter to view tweets should be a blocker for any gov't communication. That twitter rate-limited views is another strike against them. Government information should be open access. I don't know if activitypub is the answer, but they need to get off twitter.
Yes, self-hosted Mastodon are the best way to share official short messages like that. Proprietary consumer services like Twitter should be avoided because it is hard to even register an account there (my attempt was banned instantly) and this egoist idi*t made tweets unavailable to be read without an account.
I'm not sure what you mean, this address serves as a perfect way to see the latest short form information about EU institutions (even more so now, because of the ongoing twitter situation) regardless of the amount of posters.
Do visit https://xcorp.com for a hearty laugh (or slightly frightened chuckle, on how life mirrors art).
X Corp - Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) - UAP Technology
X Corp is one of the largest multinational conglomerates in the world. It is headquartered in the Western Hemisphere and was founded after the consolidated mega-corporate merger between ApostleCorp, The Allied Spacecraft Corporation (ASC), and Tyrell Corporation. It is currently the global leader in the retrieval and reverse-engineering of non-human intelligence technology (NHI).
Compare to our real-life version of X Corp's CEO, Linda Yaccarino:
Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.
Cool play on E-Corp from Mr.Robot! Wonderfully written show where every day that goes by makes it seem more and more like a documentary. Great watch even if you are only vaguely into tech.
It's a calming thought, that once you have too much power, there is no one left to question you and stuff like that is the result. Fortunately there are no actual lifes of people involved here, opposing to some similar political situation of the past.
The problem isn't that you said Musk has Asperger's.
The problem is that you are saying Asperger's causes impulsive business decisions. Nothing in your quote supports that contention, and it's a terribly ableist thing to say.
In fact your quote suggests the opposite-- people with Asperger's tend to be bound to routine rather than impulsive.
Very true about prox's response. I also now regret saying "terribly ableist" -- in retrospect the right words would have been something like "unintentionally ableist." Reasonableness begets reasonableness...
I don't think your comment was wrong to express. We've spent a lot of time cataloging human behavior over the last 100 years, so it's natural to be curious how the definitions relate to Musk's behavior.
I think the parent comment is just especially touchy to these comments.
I would still call that ableist and an abuse of therapy language. You don't need to tarnish everyone with ADHD to criticize a single person. You shouldn't use therapy language as a cudgel.
Discriminatory intent isn't required, a discriminatory outcome is. Random people with ADHD don't need to catch strays here.
The criticism is that he is impulsive and that he isn't properly managing himself. No diagnosis is required.
I think you might be seeing criticism where there isn't because it's about Elon Musk. I agree with the sentiment that you don't need to "diagnose" everyone and everything, but I think that's also a symptom of our tendency to want to apply labels to everything we see.
I understand you may not be levying a criticism, and I don't mean to put words in your mouth because I know you didn't make the claim which is at issue, but it's difficult for me to read "he makes impulsive business decisions" as not being a criticism. Especially given the context, where a bunch of people are explicitly being critical.
For me criticism has a "judgey" connotation whereas I see this as more of an observation, but I understand associating a negative trait with Asperger's as if it inevitably leads to that trait being off-putting.
It’s clearly ableist to attribute one individuals dumb action to their condition. Imagine if someone said “Musk only did this because he’s white/male”—that would be racist/sexist.
There's a big difference between attributing a set of behaviors to a mental condition that is known to influence patterns of thinking and behavior, and attributing it to skin color.
You can clearly tell that Musk has Asperger's just from hearing him speak or even reading some of his tweets (at least I can, maybe because I have it too), is making that observation also "ableist" or do you only consider it to be ableist because it is attributing his managerial decisions to that?
We may be arguing semantics because nowadays "-ism"s are used as shorthand for generalization instead of prejudice and I prefer to stick to the latter definition to avoid attributing discriminatory intent.
I think the relevant part of Asperger’s would be a difficulty experiencing an automatic social-emotional reaction in response to the opinions of others. A sort of congenital tone-deafness.
I could see this being a factor in someone doing things that appear reckless, not because the person is actually impulsive, but because they are unable to intuitively care about the reactions of other people. And so, in a situation where most people would decide against a course of action primarily because of the expected social reaction, an Asperger’s person may just do it anyway.
Also, I suspect the ableist accusations are coming from people who do not themselves have Asperger’s…
Also, please don't post the same thing in two places in a HN thread, unless you have an exceptionally good reason. You can link to a previous comment. URL is in the "x minutes ago" link. Hah, x!
Bizarre yet totally on-brand for Musk. I’ll bet the people responsible for the rebranding work had next to no notice this was happening. It must be an absolutely miserable existence to need to follow your boss on Twitter to get a jump on his unhinged ideas.
Remember when Facebook was a product of Facebook and not a product of Meta? I don’t know what road this is going in, but maybe the plan is for the product to be called Twitter, and keep the company distinct from it.
The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).
I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.
I agree, its messy. But in a week, it'll all be X, and we won't care.
However, I do strongly feel this is a big mistake and will act as a jarring moment for a lot of people who will not want a 'new' thing. This may be the move that spikes the platform as the relevance of X becomes less and less because now it's history is disjoint from twitter and it's relevance to current events over the last 20 years.
Y'all are trying to make fun of this, but it's really a brilliant tactical move. Think about it; Musk desperately needs to flip Twitter, and this branding change both makes the site much more attractive for a potential buyout from a porn company, and also lowers the valuation of Twitter even further to the point where it's probably within range for a decently sized porn company to buy.
For HN in particular I feel I need to clarify this more often[0] -- but this comment is a joke.
It's riffing on the idea that Elon thinks "X" sounds cool but it actually just sounds like a porn site, that the valuation of Twitter would need to drop substantially for a porn site to be able to buy it (and that this rebrand is likely to further devalue Twitter), and that it would still be a terrible waste of money for Elon even if the fictional "plan" succeeded because he'd be selling at a substantial loss -- but in the context of the joke, it's implied that Elon wouldn't see it that way, he'd see it as a success.
It's meant to satirize Elon's plans for Twitter (and common defenses of Elon's mistakes that show up on HN) by implying that the downsides of "X" are so obvious that Elon would need to be aware of them and would need to be incorporating them into his "plan"; but even so he'd still be the type of person who would make a plan with obvious downsides (ie, selling his company off at a substantially lower price than he bought it for) and just not realize that those downsides exist. The joke frames itself as if it's going to be a defense of the rebrand, but then just goes on to describe an outcome that would be terrible for Elon anyway.
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The actual non-joke reality is likely pretty much exactly what you say -- Elon has owned "x.com" for ages and has always wanted to name something "x.com" and he has a grand vision of an everything "brand" that probably mostly just seems cool to him and that he's convinced would seem cool to everyone else as well. But he's unable to see that to everyone else it just looks like he's rebranding into a porn site.
He's convinced himself that this is a master plan that could lead to his Everything App dominating the Internet. But to everyone else outside of his bubble, the downsides are obvious and the plan just looks silly.
And thanks for the book recommendation, I'll add it to my list :)
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[0]: This is not a criticism of HN, I am myself much more prone to missing jokes than the average person and I regularly rely on context clues to figure out if someone online is joking -- and those context clues are usually missing from HN. So very much no shame to anyone for not catching a joke, I get the confusion and I also regularly miss the exact same jokes.
Gotcha. I guess I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification.
As an aside, I tend to only like the joke that Elon Musk is Phony Stark, the rest of the jokes just don't land with me for some reason. I've never really liked the guy and I'm happy it's a lot less difficult for me to articulate why now.
Mass migration is definitely a concern for potential buyers, but it's fixable. A porn company might be able to slow current Twitter migrations down by implementing smart policies like not rate-limiting their own app.
Also keep in mind the opportunities to regain advertiser trust by pivoting the content focus; many advertisers may prefer having their products shown next to pornography instead of nazis.
Meanwhile, the x.com domain seems to be somewhat shambolic.
As I write this, it hits a Godaddy parking page.
According to this[0] tweet[1], it's been a Godaddy site, a dead link, a redirect, and now a godaddy site again.
The rollout has been embarrassing. Well maybe not, if you work at Twitter these days you probably are past being embarrassed by technical failures.
When they manage to serve a redirect instead of a free GoDaddy domain parking page, the redirect was to ".twitter.com". Complete with broken leading dot.
It's going to the Wikipedia page about x.com for me. EDIT: oh wait my browser did that. X.com now goes to Twitter. So now a sizeable portion of people who try to go to x.com is going to go to the Wikipedia page for x.com I guess.
Also the Twitter sign-in page says "X - Sign into Twitter".
From my computer when going to x.com I get an http:// only site that has a blue background but has no content. If I try to go to https:// I get "Secure Connection Failed". My phone is showing the godaddy parking page, wonder why it's not working on my computer.
You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid.
Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?
Sure. Avoid the platform, continue to mock it and companies that use it to drive down its valuation to the point where he gives up and sells it for a massive loss.
API rate limits for external API clients sure. API rate limits for their own application is insane (caveat, super high rate limits to prevent against truly exceptional use would be fine, but anything that impacts even the 98% user is nuts).
There’s no argument for it. Every goal of these sites is to increase time on site. A rate limit that kicked normal users of the site off in 10 minutes is… well, a truly and unambiguously bad choice.
It was a political game for journalists and now it’s officially instead of unofficially meaningless, but it was never serviceable and certainly not “harmful”. Hyperbole is a plague.
It is absolutely harmful for the user experience because it's tied to a boost in the visibility of your tweets. It's essentially made replies a useless avenue for interesting content.
Instead of the top replies to popular posts being tweets that have been boosted by a signal that arguably indicates quality (views, likes, retweets, replies of their own) tweets are boosted by a signal of the opposite - the poster's willingness to pay for visibility of content that couldn't rise to the top on its own merits or that of its poster.
Replies to popular content are now a wasteland for interesting content or discussion unless you've mass-blocked Twitter Blue subscribers - definitely harmful.
It still has a boatload of users and is still the cultural town square of the tech world. To build X from scratch you'd have to convince people like Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, a bunch of other VCs etc to move.
Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
> Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
I think this is pretty optimistic thinking. "Oh no, I can't pick my way through a bunch of bigoted garbage to which the owner responds 'Concerning' or read Marc Andreesen being deeply weird or see 30,000 reply guys to Paul Graham hawking shitcoins, whatever will I do?" is, I think, probably okay at this point.
Having the thinkfluencey types before the spam and impersonation taps were turned on to full was probably valuable; now Twitter is getting the stink on it and that's hard to wash off.
Personally speaking, Bluesky picked up pretty much everybody I care to talk to and remaining on Twitter in a material capacity is a flag that I probably don't want to hear from you.
Sure but like, Twitter's userbase is now a toxic asset. Starting there seems worse than starting fresh because you can't get rid of the baggage but advertisers also don't want to spend money on them.
My entire tech bubble moved to mastodon and it's been great. No ads, no algorithms. Maybe the VC bubble is just stuck with it because of what it used to be?
Infosec/cybersec. If you just want CVEs, automatic updates, and LinkedIn-style influencers, Twitter is still fine. If you want the stories, the how, the why, and reading humans live updates, you go to mastodon/Activitypub (bonus if you're a student: make your own activityPub reader!)
Definitely a lot of electronics/EE stuff has also moved to mastodon (at least people that i was following). I follow a bigger group there than I have ever on twitter. Mastodon is still a bit quirky sometimes, but my mastodon feed is now definitely more interesting than my twitter feed.
You... probably don't? I continue to believe that there may be some small value in a single-person-instance-as-a-service product for celebs etc (particularly if Threads goes ahead with its embrace of ActivityPub; lots of value for celebrities in having the audience but having some independence from Facebook), but it's very niche.
Not everything has to be about making money, you realise.
It seems like a hassle to re-negotiate federation each time for each celebrity. What about a general PR themed instance (strictly moderated so that everyone will peer with it).
Thats actually a really cool idea. The big PR agencies who rep for actors, authors, musicians etc, could run an instance and that's where the person's identity would be.
There could be a market for one central Mastodon host with better UX that makes it easier to onboard non-tech people, but I'm not sure why making money is a pre-req here. Mastodon was never meant to be a for-profit enterprise as far as I'm aware.
Does anyone make money from your Mastodon use? I understand how moving to your own place could be good, hell, if you're just talking to each other you could even consider retroshare, but I don't understand the business loss when a bunch of IT professionals move their conversations to a private server.
No, I'm a big fan of paying for what I use, and I actually do give money to a small social media site that I use. However, I'm also strongly opposed to giving money to transphobes and Republicans, so Twitter is out.
Not in principle, we're just against paying to use Twitter.
(The dynamic is very different when it's voluntary and feels like supporting a community, though, and in practice it's going to be a few whales making donations)
> On February 13, Musk expressed concern over the fact that his tweet about Super Bowl LVII had garnered fewer impressions than U.S. President Joe Biden's. Summoning another meeting with engineers, Musk ordered an 80-person team to address the perceived issue, under penalty of being fired. As a result, engineers altered Twitter's algorithm to boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1000
> By December 17, Twitter was blocking some links to Mastodon as being "potentially harmful" or "malware".
Could this all be part of Musk's plan, though? As Sun Tzu said, "when you are strong, appear weak". There's no denying that Musk is highly intelligent. If a play of his seems completely bone-headed, there's a good chance it's actually the opposite.
> "there's a good chance it's actually the opposite."
There isn't a "good" chance. It's extraordinarily, extremely rare that someone makes such a genius play that other experts consider it foolish. These events in sport buisness or other areas are often stuff of legend because of how rare they are. Sure, if this play works out and turns to have been undoubtably right, it will be studied for years in buisness schools around the world. But up until that moment, we can be reasonably sure that this isnt one of those exceptionally rare cases
A solid move to instill faith with advertisers that what is left of "the platform formerly known as twitter" will be stable, avoid confusion with their users, and be a brand-positive environment.
What's everyone's timetable for either shutdown or sell-off of twitter, 18 months. Ad revenue will continue to shrink, effective 'cost per' rates will decrease while Ex-Twitter will try to squeeze out stable or higher, likely push brands toward longer term campaign spend, engagements so as to reflect long-term dollars on a balance sheet.
Only reasonable counterpoint would be if this is part of a strategy to convert X to a portal with Ex-Twitter being one app/platform tied to central identity graph with other services/platforms to be connected later.
Despite all the chaos, Musk and his personal image are the only thing holding everything together.
I’m sure he could raise a few billion via text message by the weekend if he wanted to.
Given Musk’s success in other ventures and no prominent Twitter competitor for journalists or government orgs to share quick breaking news updates, the show goes on.
If Musk gets bored and moves on though, then I think your timeline is spot on.
For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back.
He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings and hailing a taxi.
I do agree though, it doesn't feel like renaming it to X is the right approach if this is the longer term vision. Personally I would have thought about Twitter X with these additional services and a much slower migration to X to align with the Everything App vision.
> He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce
This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frustrating to watch people continuously buy into his complete lack of vision or execution.
I really dislike Musk - but it does seem like sometimes - he has a really strong vision.
Tesla and SpaceX and StarLink are really impressive from a "had a vision for something on a broadly positive world-changing scale, successfully executed it" perspective.
With Twitter, I'm not sure he actually has a vision.
The best realistic pro-Musk argument you can make is that he can be a real ass, but he's an ass whose companies tend to do amazing things. With Twitter, the best I can come up with is that he had a personal grudge against the platform, and the means to take pattiness to unheard of scales.
That's technically accurate, isn't it? Twitter is the pea under a stack of shells named X, each founded by Musk. The accuracy of that title only loses specificity when he renames Twitter to X.
Plus I would think by this point in human events we understand that nothing that does everything actually does anything well. This is a terrible idea. At least he's had a financial hit because if it, nothing else has any change of convincing him otherwise. Even he knows it's a bad idea, which is why he never actually wor4ked towards it.
Actually it is closer to Zuckerberg‘s meta rebrand. You don't save a company by slapping in a new brand and wasting billions on VR without doing market research.
Yes, that rebrand is also foolish, but it's not hard to see that Facebook is way better positioned to actually fulfill the "everything" app than others are. Facebook marketplace is huge.
I don't think it's nonsense. Patreon, OnlyFans, etc are basically things that should've been apart of Twitter UX from the jump, all with a simple 'Subscribe ($X /month)' button, the overlap in their user interfaces is no accident. IG is already trying to do this as well already, but its niche limits its scale.
I would hazard a guess that pre-Musk Twitter, for whatever reason, had fears around bringing payments onto the service, particularly in the case of sexual content and resolving that, but this led to a situation where other services spring up to fill that void.
However, Twitter Blue was a case of having your cake-and-eating-it-too where I think Musk wanted a story on cash flow not dependent on ads ASAP. In truth, Twitter Blue should've exclusively been a service tier for creators who want to monetize content on Twitter; a case naturally requiring verificaiton. That would've given an incentive and a rationale to the extant pre-Musk creator class that bemoaned its introduction, but Musk really fucked that up by trying to exploit Right wing allegations of Twitter being biased towards the Left (which it never was, rather, the reverse was true[0]) to make up for freaking out advertisers.
> I don't think it's nonsense. Patreon, OnlyFans, etc are basically things that should've been apart of Twitter UX from the jump, all with a simple 'Subscribe ($X /month)' button, the overlap in their user interfaces is no accident. IG is already trying to do this as well already, but its niche limits its scale.
I'm not sure what you mean by its niche. There are way more Instagram users than Twitter ones, and they are way more exposed to products. It sounds like a much better fit for Instagram than Twitter.
I don't see much overlap with Twitter and Patreon (or only fans). YouTube has more overlap with Patreon and did finally get a channel membership/paid subscription thing although I'm not sure how popular that is.
sam bankman-fried is closer to Musk opponents at every angle you look at. and btw those opponents crowned sam bankman fried while they hate musk in every newspaper you can buy in the US
pretty much every newspaper, tv journalist and a big chunk of the politicians. its easy just look at everyone that gave money to Sam Bankman and try to link see what those people think of Musk. I guarantee you the spread will be something like 90% against Musk
> For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back.
A reminder that Elon had to be sued into buying this company.
TSLA was crazy overvalued, does no one remember that? The reason the ARK funds and Cathie Woods is famous is basically cuz she bet the farm on TSLA.
The stock was absurd -- cars with QA issues and lots of recalls outperforming stocks like Ford or Toyota, companies with decades of making reliable vehicles.
Everyone knew it was overvalued by a long shot, and if Musk sold it would crater. So create a headline grabbing buy that would justify shedding tons of shares, then back out and keep the $$$. When TSLA later has a correction he can just ignore it -- got his money already -- and launch some buybacks on the cheap.
Evidence points to him wanting to use the potential of buying Twitter as a cover for selling a few billion in Tesla stock without impacting it's value.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.
Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.