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What's the background for this? Are they rebranding? Is it already April 1st? Is Twitter starting a pornography spin-off?
Musk has previously talked about X, his envisioned "everything app" [1]. He also merged Twitter into X Corp, a newly formed company.
So, he's rebranding Twitter [2]:
> And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds
They're rebranding, but ghetto style. Pointing the x.com domain to twitter.com is the easy part. I want to see twitter.com point to x.com instead. Because once you do this, there's no (easy) way back, engines will start indexing Twitter links on x.com, the search rank will start propagating to that domain and it'll be a mess.
And he's completely serious, and yes X is f*king terrible brand and it'll be hilarious for him to find that out in the coming months.
First of all "X" is unsearchable, so people will likely start referring to it as something like "Elon Musk's X" or god knows what. It'll make the whole site look like a joke, in case it isn't already.
Maybe his advertisers will drop in half once more. OK, I'm just daydreaming.
I mean, I assume they'll just refer to it as Twitter. This is in the category of the very, very shittest rebrands, and people usually just ignore those.
Fun fact; in the noughties, the Royal Mail (the UK Post Office), briefly, bafflingly, rebranded as 'Consignia'. Everyone sensibly ignored this, and they shamefacedly changed it back after a while.
The artist formerly known as Twitter.
The noughties?
Search wise it would likely get to the top of Google just based on it being the main domain.
But realistically people will still seach for Twitter or TwitterX or even Xcom
They could easily get to the top of the SERP for "X".
That's his plan for improved brand safety? Move it to a porn-sounding domain name?
Elonfans.
by Xchan
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
In this case we know who the enemy is
Well fortunately, we have the expansion XCOM: Enemy Within that covers that
Congratulations for the redirect.
Such innovation.
Sometimes I think Elon bought Twitter to purposefully destroy it. He's doing almost everything wrong, if that's not his goal.
Perhaps, but it’s easy to attribute malice to what is done by sheer incompetence. To me the situation reads like he bought his favorite toy and is playing with it until it breaks.
I'm baffled that anyone is looking for any other explanation, honestly. He has no idea what he's doing; it's unclear to me why a weird conspiracy-based explanation is required.
Folk are very resistant to the idea the world's richest man might actually be a charlatan. It offends their faith in a just world.
Why are you baffled people are sceptical of elite trickery when it has been going on for thousands of years?
Musk seems unstable, but Tesla, his stocks and various other endevaours has been masterfully constructed to extract public wealth and placing it into private hands.
This is probably just him being bipolar or whatever, but every day companies are being purposefully run to the ground, resold, repackaged, sabotaged etc. for a myriad of financial reasons.
The whole "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity " is such a disgusting american smokescreen, same with the stupid "occamz razor" being constantly used wrongly to shut down old school financial journalism or conspiratorial nature of the upper echelons of society, something that was in the public consciousness 50 years ago, but has now been memoryholed. It's so laughably convenient if it wasn't so sad.
The oligarchs are very, very savvy about finances, but "seem" incompotent about their core business, because their core business is often not what they tell you it is, or they just don't care about efficiency, but about monopolies, subsidies and public funds.
"Oops we lost all of the public's money, sorry we were so incompetent, we're just human after all and didn't intend or plan to at all even though the half the money is now funnelled through hyper advanced financial schemes to Caribbean islands".
I wasn't being serious; I was saying he's doing such a good job destroying the company that you'd have to think it's on purpose because no one could be so dumb. I was being facetious.
I'm more supprised that the people that actually forked up the cash to buy it arent more pissed. You'd have thought their contract has certain stipulations on performance.
it’s easy to attribute malice to what is done by sheer incompetence.
It's easy to attribute incompetence to what is done under the influence of drugs.
Twitter was quite in the red before he said he was going to buy it, he found out it was quite in the red and tried to back out, the SEC forced him to buy it, and everything since is a desperate attempt to float a sinking ship that was doomed from the beginning like cutting expenses (the people maintaining twitter).
Twitter would have been profitable that year if it wasn't for a one-time lawsuit settlement.
It's useful for him to do everything wrong so humanity can either learn it's not wrong, or confirm it's wrong. He demonstrated we can go further with EVs and self-landing rockets. And he failed at a dozen other things. Sometimes someone's purpose in life is to show us the path. Sometimes it's to serve as a warning to others. Sometimes both.
Musk is a major military/intelligence contractor. Twitter was becoming a threat to the US national security state, imo. I agree with your thought re: Musk purposefully destroying Twitter.
And he fixed that threat by allowing Russian bots to have a blue badge next to their fake celebrity name, I mean good job.
I'm not agreeing with the theory presented, but "what's good for the US national security state" and "what's good for the US population" are two separate things.
I’m not really understanding how Twitter was becoming a threat to the US national security state. That “fact” being true is the prerequisite to this particular conspiracy theory, and I don’t think it’s a strong theory. This was a US-based public company where TLAs can knock on their door anytime.
I think the explanation is far simpler: Elon fully controls Twitter and is doing whatever he wants. Whether he lost $50 billion on it is immaterial at this point: he’s so wealthy that it will take him no time at all to recover that kind of money.
With only ~20% of its original headcount, I have to assume Twitter is profitable, even if it lost half its advertising revenue.
Twitter is still commanding a huge user base: the number of people leaving Twitter just because of Elon being a baby is way overstated. There are probably, no exaggeration, hundreds of millions of Twitter users who have basically no clue who the guy is (especially outside the United States where 75% of Twitter users are located).
I don’t even think Elon’s vision for the product as a “super app” is all that dumb, it just depends on whether it’s something that can be successfully executed. For example, Instagram added direct shopping within their app and it’s been successful. That would be a great start for Twitter or X or whatever it is going to be.
I wasn't actually thinking this though, I was being facetious. Just saying that Elon is running the company so comically poor that you'd have to think he's doing it on purpose. Not saying he -is- doing it on purpose, just that he is actually running the company -that- badly.
> Twitter was becoming a threat to the US national security state, imo.
I'm going to need a source for that one. That seems like the exact opposite of what actually happened prior to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.
Twitter was a threat to Donald Trump and those who allied with him, not the US national security state.
Per the "Twitter Files" that Elon Musk released upon gaining control Twitter effectively worked in concert with the Democrats, the FBI, and liberal media outlets.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairnes...
i remeber x.com branding back in the day when i was selling on ebay and found a new payment processor that spammed every auctions footer automatically, and it was so cringey shitty back then they rebranded to paypal.
This erratic but somewhat interesting behavior of Elon Musk reminds me to when Kanye West started to promote his Donda 2 album in a rush, that didn't end well.
They both got a bit cosier with the far-right too. Difference is Kanye has famously been struggling with mental health issues over the years.
Honest question, why do so many on HN have such a raging hatred for Elon Musk?
I get freelance work through Twitter, as do many other people. The other day Musk silently changed users' DM settings from "allow message requests from everyone" to "allow message requests from verified users only". This meant that if any potential clients went to message me while this was in place, they would have received a notification saying "Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue."
He also made it so that if you changed the setting back to "allow message requests from everyone", and left the page, it would reset back to "verified users only". You had to select the third option, "allow message request only from people you follow", refresh the page, and then select "allow message requests from everyone" again, to make it stick.
This might sound like I'm making things up up, or misrepresenting a bug, but I'm not. Everyone in my feed has been talking about this for weeks. Most people are still unaware this has even happened, so if you try to DM almost anyone, you'll get the popup saying you need to sign up for Twitter Blue.
What I'm saying is: he's a scummy businessman.
https://elonmusk.today/
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...
https://www.adalo.com/posts/the-evolution-of-elon-musk-the-g...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-11-14/elon-musk-... (Choice quote: "A pattern: If Musk perceives he’s been crossed, he does more than seethe — he seeks retribution.")
Obviously not exhaustive. Being both successful and a terrible human being can have some overlap.
"can have some overlap."
I would argue in an economic system that rewards the most ruthless competitor "can" is a very nice word here.
> Tesla is building a hardcore litigation department
Oh, wow, forgot about this one. Whatever happened to the Extremely Hardcore Super-Lawyers?
It's payback from years and years of idolizing the man and how big a genius he's been for single handedly designing all these rockets and cars. Now it's become acceptable to criticize him, at a time where he's also publicly demonstrating that he's not quite a tech genius (unless his goal was to destroy twitter) and that he's an asshole (see the way he fired thousands of people).
I don't think anyone believes that he designed the rockets and cars himself, but by creating and managing these companies, he is directly responsible for the technological advancements that have occurred.
A lot of people are assholes that get written about here, but I don't see this level of hatred for many people other than Elon Musk.
The moment I personally really started to dislike him, was when he gleefully destroyed the dreams and hopes of people by pumping and dumping his favorite shitcoin.
I don't want to know how many people in dire conditions lost their life savings while he was mocking them.
I mean, previously it was mostly just because I found him extremely, absurdly, irritating, but he's really gone beyond the pale lately.
start off with the Thailand sub incident and go from there
What specifically has he said or done that has people so riled up?
People think he’s an oaf and they’re tiring of his actions. I see plenty of jokes about him, and comments dismissing him or forecasting a decline in Twitter/X but I don’t see “raging hatred” here
The US online community turns on rich people like nothing I've ever seen