Monday, July 24th 2023
Elon Musk Announces that Twitter Will Change Name to X
After having paid US$44 billion for Twitter, it appears Elon Musk isn't happy with Twitter being Twitter and is now getting ready to change the name of the social media platform to X. For those that aren't familiar with Elon Musk's company history, X was his online bank that preceded PayPal, or rather X.com, a domain name that is still owned by Elon Musk and currently redirects to Twitter. It appears that Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have big plans for X, at least according to several posts by the Twitter CEO.
Yaccaranio in a post on Twitter states that "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity - centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking - creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine." Make of this what you want, but it appears that Twitter is about to go through some major changes, some that had already been mentioned by Musk as early as last year. Time will tell if this will be a direction that Twitter's users want things to go, or if the platform will end up dying a death of a thousand cuts.
Sources:
@elonmusk on Twitter, @lindayacc on Twitter
Yaccaranio in a post on Twitter states that "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity - centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking - creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine." Make of this what you want, but it appears that Twitter is about to go through some major changes, some that had already been mentioned by Musk as early as last year. Time will tell if this will be a direction that Twitter's users want things to go, or if the platform will end up dying a death of a thousand cuts.
178 Comments on Elon Musk Announces that Twitter Will Change Name to X
That's $200 million that Twitter was initially losing, $1300 Million from the new $13,000 Million loans they signed for the buyout (estimated 10% CCC grade loans locked to April 2022 rates. It's probably worse interest rate payments in reality mind you...) and $2500 million lost revenue from advertisers fleeing the platform.
Maybe Elon managed to save $1000 Million/year by firing 8000 workers. But the dire straits of this company is obvious to any observer. A rebrand to Elon Musk's domain name he's owned since the 90s changes nothing.
-----------
Elon Musk needs to "do something" to show that he's in control. So he's flailing around like an idiot hoping that he can distract and prove that he's still in charge of the situation. But everyone already knows that the new management/leadership of this company is bad.
The question is how much of this Twitter/X idiocy infects Musk's brand and starts to affect Tesla or SpaceX ?
The Twitter Blue subscription is too expensive for me, I don't think it's worth it for me, I don't have a huge outreach, my personal Twitter account is used almost exclusively for purposes of NieR fandom and artworks (with a significant amount of NSFW content), plus a touch of nerdy artsy and techie things, most people I have come to know through there seem to despise what Elon did to the platform but, I have found it to be engaging and entertaining on the terms that he has set forth. I like a place that encourages conversation, regardless of political, cultural or religious view, Twitter nowadays come as a form of civilized imageboard to me.Infects? It's been there all along. It has always been his ultimate goal, X is his brand. Tesla is somewhat of the exception on branding, but if given the option he would fold it into X Corp as well. I just know it.
That said, fandom and gimmick accounts need not apply for that sort of lifestyle integration, so I expect a few things to change.
blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-birdwatch-a-community-based-approach-to-misinformation
Oh wow, 2021, over a year prior. Didn't realize how much earlier it was until I looked it up. I was personally aware of it in August though.
Elon's changes have been the API changes, the firing of community moderators, the loss of advertising partners, the change to "X" branding, the "can't view tweets if you're not logged in" change, etc. etc. And of course, DeSantis's "Twitter Spaces" live talks that can't even hold 100k people without dropping out. Also finding new ways to stop paying Google Cloud bills (which is probably why the read-limits were implemented, because they're running out of money so much that they literally can't afford their cloud services anymore).
technology/comments/1582bdt/_/jt8h4b1
Very interesting article about X.com on Wikipedia:
"X.com was an online bank co-founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. In 2000, X.com merged with competitor Confinity Inc., a software company also based in Palo Alto. Elon Musk was interested in Confinity because of its easy payment system. The merged company changed its name to PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for US$1.5 billion in 2002. In 2015, PayPal was spun off and became an independent company.
On July 5, 2017, Musk repurchased the domain name X.com from PayPal. He explained later that he bought the website because "it has great sentimental value".
On July 14, 2017, X.com was launched again, consisting of a blank white page with one "x" in the top left corner, and a custom error page displaying a "y". The site displays this way due to having nothing in its source code except the single letter "x". In December 2017, X.com redirected visitors to The Boring Company's website, which Musk also owns. This was done in order to advertise a hat sale.
On October 4, 2022, Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app". This has been linked to x.com. In conversation with Ron Baron a month later, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world."
On July 22, 2023, Elon Musk revealed the rebranding of the widely recognized social networking service Twitter as X and the introduction of a social media platform called X.com, and made X.com redirect to twitter.com. Elon Musk's Twitter account, as well as the official @Twitter account's profile picture among other official Twitter-owned accounts were updated to the new X logo. Specific details about the rebranding remain undisclosed."
The nothing company.. or perhaps the misery loves company
"What's the line of lights in teh sky!?!"
You mean Tesla, where Elon Musk sued the company to make himself the founder? Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were the ones who designed the original company and original plans, and ever since they quit the company hasn't really moved forward.
Etc. etc. Elon Musk is pretty good at suing and bullying people into becoming an owner and "founder", but its not that hard to see through him when you recognize the pattern. When you realize that he just has a bit of legal trickery, manipulation of courts with his lawyers, and a solid PR team to gloss over any other details, everything else falls into place.
Ex: This guy has such a good PR team, he can claim that a space company that explodes its rockets in testing is a success. And his fanbois will eat it up. That's not innovation. That's failing, with style. Sucks for the people of Boca Chica who were promised a certain level of noise (ex: 100db or less IIRC) in their wildlife preserve / fish spawning zone that has become SpaceX's testing center though. But blowing up rockets and exploding concrete all across the wildlife preserve isn't exactly a "success", nor is it keeping with the promises the company made to the town.
The sooner people realize Mr. Musk's just public-relations trickery, the better off we all are. It sucks that someone can bully and sue like this to become the "Founder" of Tesla, and other such tricks he's done to our court system and society.
Meta and TikTok are moving into Twitter's text niche.
The big-tech companies smell blood in the water and are already making moves.
The concrete flying was just dumb but that sometimes happens, the challenger space shuttle was lost because of some o-rings that they knew would probably fail but the information wasn't communicated well enough through the chain of people involved. And besides, we see him doing his pr thing but actual engineers went ahead with the idea of not having exhaust venting on the launch pad, it's not like is doing all if any engineering day to day decisions (he's "known" to be very involved but I gather most of that is pr bullshit)
Which is fine, I don't think we should go back to 0% interest rates for another decade. Too many bullshit artists (Theranos, Cryptocoins, Wework, etc. etc.) have sprung up because we purposefully ran our economy too hot with too many bullshit ideas.
But the bullshit artist who just doubles-downs with hopes to raise more money next year is over. Its not like 2012 where you can waste $4 Billion on an insane project and use that reputation to raise $6 Billion next year. Everyone's cutting back, finally, because we've run into the limits of our 0% interest rate scheme. We're finally forced to raise interest rates to 5%+, and the bullshit artists all around are panicing because of it.
EDIT: Remember jet.com? The company that "Beat" Amazon.com's growth by simply offering 10% deals on all items? They bought from Amazon, shipped it to their warehouse. Took the item out, put it into a Jet.com box and shipped it to you. Congrats, if you were stupid enough to make companies like this in 2014, you got bought out and turned into a billionaire. Life ain't gonna be like this in our lifetime ever again.
-----------
Twitter itself was part of this panic. Its why they accepted the $44 Billion buyout (which was below the stock price / market cap IIRC, or at least not as much of a premium as people expected) in March 2022. They saw the writing on the wall and the issues with the rising interest rate environment / inflation and wanted to get out before this problem occurred. Better to sell the company and make it someone else's problem.
Similarly, SpaceX is going to have issues moving forward. And Tesla. You can't just perpetually raise equity and/or bonds anymore. 5%+ interest rates have made everything harder.
Case in point: the exploded concrete all over Boca Chica. Or do you really think that engineers didn't know that the world's heaviest rocket ever launched needed a flame diverter / flame trench?
Heavy rockets need more lift. I know this is "technically" rocket science but... this is like elementary school level crap here. Heavy things need more care and thought put into the explosion. I don't know how lift works (and fluid dynamics is very complex), but if much much smaller rockets needed those flame diverters, I think the larger / bigger rockets also would need them.
He's only worth $200,000,000,000. What a moron he must be. :kookoo:
I've called him a Conman, Bullshit artist, and more. Elon is a fake engineer for sure, akin to the Edison patent problems from a century ago. He's smart, but in a way you're not describing. Elon Musk is the kind of large-scale salesman who can sell people a dream of going to Mars and terraforming / replacing that atmosphere as a viable solution to Earth's Global Warming. (Ignoring the fact that replacing Earth's atmosphere of CO2 would be far easier than trying to transport tons-of-Oxygen to Mars, and then trying to warm up Mars instead).
That's the kind of skills Elon Musk has, the ability to sell bullshit to a widespread audience. The tech to terraform Mars and make a reasonable colony over there simply doesn't exist, and if it did exist, we should use it to replace Earth's atmosphere instead and solve 2-degrees Celsius of global warming (rather than the 80+ C degrees we need to solve to make Mars livable: Average Mars temperature is -60C).
----------
As I've stated: Elon Musk's key innovation is rewriting our society into believing that Elon Musk is a founder of Tesla. Or that exploding rockets are successful tests. Or that Full Self Driving is around the corner. Etc. etc. etc. Its simply bullshit-artistry. He's really good at it, haven't you noticed?
Look, Elon Musk is the kind of guy who sells Tesla shares for years straight while promising that their share prices will keep going up. If he really thought that TSLA share prices were going up, why would he ever sell?
He is not the richest man alive for doing silly things ;)