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> "The rebrand represented really a liberation from Twitter," she said.
Yeah, a liberation from a household name into something that sounds like a porn app. Genius move.
I'm amazed that she still has the ability to get out of bed in the morning, never mind address the questions of why her boss does crazy things that will definitely end up as a whole module in decades of MBA courses under "what not do to."
> I'm amazed that she still has the ability to get out of bed in the morning
Once she climbs over the giant pile of money she's almost certainly getting paid, it's mostly an easy downhill slide.
I mean, hopefully for her sake she’s climbing over a pile of actual dollar bills and not a bunch of IOUs or options.
Lol I'm sure that person is getting paid more than enough to not be thinking about that stuff
> “Elon has been talking about X, the everything app, for a very long time,” Yaccarino said in an interview with CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “Even when we announced that I was joining the company, I was joining the company to partner with Elon to transform Twitter into X, the everything app.”
So she's confirming what most have suspected and many have been saying: Musk wants to kill Twitter. (Indeed, has already done so!).
He wants to use its infrastructure as a base to make an entirely different product.
> So she's confirming what most have suspected and many have been saying: Musk wants to kill Twitter.
This feels like giving him too much credit for forethought. Killing Twitter would kill the "everything app" too. All of the everything apps (e.g. WhatsApp) that already exist have a messaging component.
By "killing Twitter", what I mean is that he wants to change it to address an entirely different market than what it used to address. That makes the name change make sense -- he wouldn't want the old brand because he doesn't want the old user base.
I have no dog in this fight, personally, as I stopped using Twitter years ago, but it's going to be very interesting to see how this shakes out.
My guess is that it isn't going to go well, but that's only a guess.
He doesn’t want the old business model, he doesn’t want the old brand, he doesn’t want the old codebase, he doesn’t want the old userbase, he doesn’t want the old offices, he doesn’t want… I mean what does he want? What did he pay 44 billion for? He’s destroying every bit of this company. It’s not that he doesn’t want it. He simply has no clue what he’s doing.
He didn't even want Twitter. He paid the 44 billion[1] because he trolled himself into the deal and couldn't get the courts to let him back out.
[1] And he didn't pay that -- most of that is owed by Twitter, not him, and it's why Twitter is in such rough financial shape. Servicing that debt requires more money every year than Twitter ever made. Maybe more than Twitter/X will ever make.
It's one thing to make an unwanted purchase, but quite another to burn to the ground out of spite. And I believe it's not out of spite. It's hubris and incompetence.
He didn't really want to buy it and was forced.
Then he noticed social media is hard.
So now he tries to copy WeChat.
> He didn't really want to buy it and was forced.
Sure. He was completely minding his own business when suddenly, out of nowhere, a judge forced him to buy Twitter for no reason. Poor guy.
Yes, this is true. It's why he wants it to be a different product -- he never wanted Twitter and now that he has it, he has to do something with it that he does want.
Nothing she says matters and everyone knows it and she knows it. But that’s what the job entails. To BS.
My theory is that Elon was getting blazed and thought it would be cool to change the name.
My understanding is that he tried renaming PayPal to X, and that's actually the event that led to him being replaced (because there were actually people around then to tell him that it was a terrible idea).
He's been trying to have something named X for a long time.
Almost. When Musk was fired from PayPal, it wasn't called PayPal yet. It was called X.com. PayPal was a competing company started by Theil.
The two companies merged, and a lot of discontent came about in that process, leading to Musk being kicked out.
Musk says it was because he was too insistent that the new company should be called X rather than PayPal, but everyone else says that it was because Musk was incompetent and that incompetence was hurting the company.
I don't claim to know who's closer to correct, but the ouster was brutal and each party had lots of vitriol to spew about the other.
It wasn't about the name obviously, Must was pushing grandiose plan of creating an Internet-based financial... everything really (bank, payments, investments, etc etc). While Thiel, Levchin, and Co were pushing for much more modest (but also more realistic) business model of "payment over the email". In addition Musk also decided to do a complete rewrite of the entire Linux-based system with Windows and M$ dev stack (which obviously also required replacing the entire dev team). Once Thiel and his gang came to the board with the ultimatum, Musk was done.
> ... complete rewrite ... with Windows ...
Whaaa...?
Remind me the timeframe, this would have been very early 2000s, right?
Does anyone care to speculate on valid technical or business reasons for doing this? Could they perhaps have been battling flaky tcp/ip implementations or something?
My app doesn't offer comment editing, but I asked as a kneejerk before searching (doh).
It was for the toolchain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729
> There were more smart programmers in the gaming industry than anywhere else.
Having worked in the gaming industry... yeah, no. (This is a really common belief amongst non-engineers, tho.)
> Microsoft had huge support libraries. So you could get a DLL that could do anything, but you couldn’t get—you couldn’t get Linux libraries that could do anything.
Having read that amazing post-mortem of Microsoft's BSD->Windows migration for (parts of) Hotmail at around the same time... yeah, very no, certainly for web stuff circa 2000.
"...to be writing our front-end code in Microsoft C++ instead of Linux."
deserves to be with "Opening Twitter timeline results in thousands of RPC calls" :-)
I read "The Founders" and it quotes Musk stating "The stuff that was being done in video games was way more advanced than in any other field" as the reason to switch to rewrite the _front_end_ (the Web app) with Visual C++ and host it in Windows. So... yeah.
> Musk says it was because he was too insistent that the new company should be called X rather than PayPal, but everyone else says that it was because Musk was incompetent
I feel like one of those is an example of the other :)
He, and his wife at the time, named one of his kids X Æ A-12.
Really.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a32388638...
I get it now
He’s trying to turn Twitter into WeChat - basically take an existing giant user base, burn off anyone that doesn’t want to hand their life away to an app like WeChat and then pull online transactions away from Amazon, Facebook etc…
I honestly didn’t see the plan until reading this article
He’s had an “everything app” obsession for years (to his modest credit, even before apps as such!), but I charitably put the odds at pulling such a thing off in the US at epsilon above zero. WeChat, LINE and the like developed under very specific regulatory and market conditions that don’t exist in the US, and trying to replicate their products without the gravitational pull that made them successful in the first place is a fool’s errand. “Twitter” could probably limp along indefinitely in a degraded state, but “X” is headed for the treetops at speed.
He says that openly at least for a year. Is it even possible to trademark a single letter name?
I wonder if he would even make it to the point where you would be able to pay somewhere/someone with his app. Hard mode: don’t search for places by accepted payment methods. With his current reputation it can be tricky. Who would even want to be banned from payments because he posted something he didn’t like on Twitter?
> Is it even possible to trademark a single letter name?
The letter by itself, maybe, but maybe not. The letter in a distinctive font, though (which is what they're doing), very likely.
Remember the purpose of trademark is consumer protection: to be able to tell that a product or service really is from who you think it is. As long as the trademark is distinctive enough in the product categories it applies to, it's allowed.
> The letter in a distinctive font, though (which is what they're doing), very likely.
But it’s not actually “X”. The symbol while obscure is called “ Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X “. Graphically the logo seems completely identical to the Unicode character. I don’t know if they can register it as a trademark it but would sure seem weird if you could that with something like “ ∫ “
Will be pretty hard when multiple IT companies already use X as name for products, services or companies.
Even the logo is mistakable.
Hell, even the open source. It also looks a bit better IMO.
Yes, you and croes have an excellent point. We'll see if someone challenges the trademark (or sues for trademark infringement). That might be interesting.
“You might not agree” with all posts - yeah that poll by a white supremacist about Jews having undue influence on the world I really did not agree with.
LOL - who is she kidding - who wants to advertise on such a toxic platform.
Coca-Cola and Visa apparently. They say they have new protections to keep your ads from showing next to content you don’t like, but given that Twitter is paying those people to produce that content, they are still directly funding it.
Who wouldn't?
Fools who fall into that kind of toxicity likely have money to throw at your products. You want people to buy your product as a for-profit company, right?
There's this odd phenomenon in US media (it is less of a thing in other anglosphere media) where coverage by the same outlet can gyrate from critical coverage of a thing to basically publishing press releases for the thing disconcertingly rapidly. This is a bizarrely softball piece, under the circumstances.
EDIT: Okay, CNN went with a rather less press-release-y headline: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/media/linda-yaccarino-elon-mu...
I get the hate on elon and his decisions around twitter/x, but the comment quality here is leauges velow what I expect from HN. Why are we enshittifying our own spaces out of spite? Dang, do you not care about this? While I agree with most posters sentiment in general, none make any good points or express anything but adhoms and insults. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard, particularly when we are critical.
> Yaccarino said X’s trust and safety team is “healthier” than it was when it was publicly traded. “You might not agree” with all posts, Yaccarino added.
What does it mean for the trust and safety team to be "healthy"? It's such a non-answer to any possible question.
Less bots and troll farms, perhaps? That may also be a consequence of overall user activity dropping like a stone.