72 replies
3h54m
Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it. Second, these hamfisted attempts to try to get the new (terrible) name to stick. It's just not going to work. The huge number of existing users will always think of it as Twitter. It will at best become The Service Formerly Known As Twitter. It just feels like in software when you get a new Product Manager on the project who just wants to superficially "leave his mark" on the product in some way and then move on. Except this PM paid billions to do it.
Apparently Elon has been trying to push the "X" brand on things throughout his career, but always had someone stop him until he had complete control of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...
Is there a company he owns where "X" is not a thing? There's X the social network, Tesla Model X, SpaceX.
Don't forget he also named one of his kids X (the Æ A-12 part is their middle name so it's just X for short).
There's also xAI, which I think is technically another distinct company rather than part of X/Twitter.
The guy's a kook. He's like Michael Jackson: a very rich guy, with complete control over who he meets. Unsurprisingly, the people he does meet all tell him what they think he wants to hear. I mean, who's going to tell him something he doesn't want to hear, and then see their name smeared all over Twitter by the richest man in the world?
I expected Twitter to crash and burn as soon as he took over; I was wrong. I guess it's like Truth Social - if you're fabulously wealthy, you can run a social media site that's a complete train-wreck, without it ruining you.
/me never had a Twitter account. Nor Faceache.
Not fair to Michael Jackson. He had talent and defined multiple cross cultural trends/memes (not memes as in internet memes).
He was deeply troubled, but he still had a huge, lasting impact
Are you suggesting that Musk is not having huge lasting impact? Perhaps his name won't be as sticky as Michael Jackson, but some of his companies are definitely changing society, partly thanks to him.
Musk likes to take credit for things he at most participated in. Electric cars where already gaining traction by the time Tesla got their production in order, so if he had an impact there, its only in marketing a product you could only buy from other companies. The charger network maybe? But wasn't most of that heavily subsidized?
SpaceX's success is massively overstated, every time it's brought up. Their rockets are still not stable and if you actually tally up all the money they've received from the state, it'd be way more expensive - even adjusted to inflation - then the space shuttle launches from the nineties.
What other impact are you thinking of? The hyper loop? The solar rooftop's? His vaporware robots? The boring company? Everything turned out to be pure hype with hilariously overstated success. Or maybe the autopilot which is still only usable by people that enjoy gambling with pedestrian lives?
Musk’s true talent is hype, fundraising, and getting buy-in from a crowd of people who Want To Believe. He does an incredible job of this, attracting capital investment on absurdly favorable terms.
(Delivery on his wild promises, well, sometimes the true believers he hires make that happen, sometimes not.)
I'm as cynical about Tesla as anyone, as my comment history will show. I think they played fast and loose with financial data when celebrity and anything tech put you above the rules. If he had the enemies he has now, I don't think they would have made it.
But...Elon Musk is a force. I was skeptical of him in, maybe, 2016, but the guy has managed to continue to do stuff no one else seems capable of, even in the face of haters. There's no way pre-Elon Tesla does what he did, I don't believe it for a second.
Even Twitter; yes he fired too many people and it's a bit of a fiasco (and hard to kill, apparently). But the fact that he's using it to explicitly push an agenda is wild. There's no one else like him.
Exactly. Musk makes a passable "hype man" that would do great on a sales pitch. But it's the same story as every sales team where he promises so much that isn't feasible to deliver on the timelines he promises.
I'm not a Jackson fanatic, but everything Musk is doing could have (and very likely would have) been done by someone else in a relatively close timeframe. I won't claim Jackson couldn't have had a similar counterpart on an alternate timeline or there won't be more like him, but there are remarkably few artists and performers who are so prolific and talented to such a degree that they noticeably shift the direction of popular culture for decades. If Musk went away today, frankly I don't think many people would think of him within 5 years or so.
I didn't mention Jackson's talent (nor Musk's). I mentioned the singer in passing, in the context of a "rich kook", and I implied that he was a kook because he was rich. The Orange Man is another example.
It does seem to me that extreme wealth is a severe risk factor for untreatable kookiness. And arguably, being a talented entertainer is a risk factor for extreme wealth.
I don't deny Jackson's talent, and I assume Musk is very good at several things I've never tried. I would cheerfully forgo even modest wealth, if the deal was I didn't have to be like them.
It's more that extreme wealth allows kookery without consequences.
As Musk said it himself when asked what he thought about the fact that his tweets may cause billions of dollars of stock drops: "I don't care".
He took a roughly breakeven business and turned it into a money incenerator. If Musk actually had to answer to a board or investors things would shut down or change drastically. That'll still happen at some point but he has enough money to subsidise his crazy vanity project for a long time.
Because Tesla has been significantly underperforming the rest of the S&P 500, Elon is not the world's richest person anymore. He's in like 4th place or something.
Well Michael Jackson is also one of the most talented musicians and entertainers of the last 100yrs. His wealth is the least impressive or defining thing about him.
I do get the point you're trying to make though. Just thought that emphasis was a little off.
Just like with Elon, you have to consider that extreme outcomes are the result of extreme people or people that were forged in extreme circumstances (which is certainly true of Michael Jackson).
He literally got removed from Paypal, "his first company" for trying to push the x.com thing there. That's why he owns the domain. It was stupid then and he held a grudge ever since which is why he's pushing it everywhere else since.
No he got removed for trying to switch their servers from linux to windows.
He also got removed for creating systemic, existential risk for the company by handing out $10k line limit credit cards to anyone who wanted one, resulting in a 50% chargeback rate. There are so many reasons for them to have gotten rid of him that the answer is highly underdetermined.
I haven't seen any strong evidence that that was the real reason he was ousted. It seems more to me like something that was too good not to go viral, rather than actual fact.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...
He owned x.com before he went to PayPal (they acquired his company which was called: x.com). When ousted, the domain continued to be owned by PayPal until later they ended up selling it and eventually he bought it back.
Correct! I had an @x.com email address when I worked at PayPal a long time ago.
There was quite an extended period where all the developer docs for PayPal were on x.com/something ... I found it all quite confusing.
Ex-Wives
His first payment company before he merged with PayPal was X.com
Seems Musk always had a desire to use "X" from his pre-Paypal days. He made a boastful post about buying Twitter, didn't actually want to follow through but was forced to do it by the courts.
My take is that Musk then sorta went "f-it, I had to buy Twitter. I might as well try and make it into X."
Everything about the purchase and the way the company has been run since Elon took the reigns has been baffling. The bizarre forced-push of the X brand is just the tip of the iceberg.
I dunno, is it that baffling? It seems like he really loved using the product but didn't like the leadership, and he just wanted to own it so he could mess around and have fun following his own whims.
Once you get the idea that he doesn't actually care about financial success it all seems pretty reasonable. Like any hobby, for X/Twitter to be a "success" it just has to amuse him, and based on his usage of the platform it seems to be doing that.
The amounts of money he's losing are staggering to us but also meaningless to him. Our society has allowed him to accumulate so much wealth that nothing he could do "wrong" in a business sense would meaningfully impact his lifestyle.
This is the frustrating part. If I went around my office tomorrow endorsing nazi propaganda, I would be out of a job by the end of the day and probably struggling to pay my mortgage in a few months.
But this fuckstick can do whatever he wants and never face any real repercussions. He could bankrupt Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla and just decide to retire early on a private island.
It's so incredibly hard to actually fuck things up when you're rich that it's downright impressive when someone like SBF comes along and manages to actually do it.
So you're incredibly envy of person who actually can express freedom of speech?
If anything, the problem is with your workspace which forces a particular political viewpoint on you.
No, I think actions should have consequences.
I'm frustrated that being born into money can make you functionally immune to most of those consequences.
There are two sides to freedom of speech. You have the freedom to say dumb shit, and I have the freedom to not associate with you because I don't like the dumb shit you say. If one of my employees started expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at the office, I would fire them, because I have a right to do so and because I believe the rest of my employees have a right to a safe working environment where they don't have to put up with people who think they are inferior just because of their race or cultural background.
If the money he is losing is meaningless to him, why has he launched lawsuits to back out of the purchase and sue media watchdog orgs? Why did he replace himself as CEO with an advertising exec? Seems like the money is pretty meaningful to him.
It's really just an extreme version of a boat. They seem like fun, but they're money pits, and a lot of work goes into keeping them running. Alternatively, it's the Cartmanland scenario.
I imagine you're right that the lost cash does have meaning to him, but it doesn't appear to be the primary motivator for his decisions (and is definitely not driving his near-term decision making).
So far I really haven't seen anyone seriously call it just X. Most news orgs seem to resort to "X (formerly Twitter)" or similar. Some still call it Twitter, not even an acknowledgement that it's been renamed. At least Meta had the sense to just change their app splashscreens and such (e.g. Facebook by Meta). And it seems that Alphabet doesn't make any effort to make their presence known.
I mean, if nothing else, "X did [something stupid]" just looks like someone forgot to fill in a template; no-one is going to publish an article with 'X', unqualified, in it.
X also makes search harder. I'd like to see HN add a recommendation that in headlines about X the submitter should change the X to Twitter.
The thing that really bothers with me with this is why couldn't it just be "Twitter by X"? You want to make an "everything app", that's great Elon, let's call that X. Now what do we call all the mini apps inside the everything app? Oh, they're called "X", too? So you're using "X of X" to call a cab, and "X of X" to send a message, and these are different apps inside the mega app? How does this naming make sense?
That would be too sensible.
Sarcasm aside, they probably were hoping to convert the brand name twitter has to 'x', but failed to realize how sticky the name was/is.
Even X itself resorted to putting "Formerly Twitter" in its App Store and Play Store taglines after their daily installs fell off a cliff. Previously the tagline was just "Blaze your glory!" but nobody knows what that means.
Nearly a year into the rebrand x.com still redirects to twitter.com, rather than vice versa, which you'd think would be the first thing they'd want to fix.
Because domain names are tied to security model, they're often the last thing you can fix.
So let's say, hypothetically, they build in a redirect from twitter to x-dot-com. Off the top of my head...
- All logins are now busted. Some percentage of users is lost forever because they can't remember their login credentials and instead of going through the recovery flow, they go use Bluesky.
- A huge amount of third-party integrations are busted because they aren't using client libraries that understand redirects
- A full code audit is necessary. Someone has hard-coded twitter.com into a critical system somewhere. Other people have referenced a variable, but it's the wrong variable. Still others are looking up the value in a database somewhere that doesn't have a search frontend anyone knows about. And some other database has a huge cache of absolute URLs it vends and everyone who built it got fired by Musk. This is probably the most predictable-cost step, but it's still a cost to be paid.
- A significant number of users are confused. The median of web user is profoundly ignorant of how the web works, and no matter how much you warn them and how much you prepare them, day-of-switch they will panic. Staff up your support team. Customers-lost-forever-two-point-oh.
- Every business integration needs to be updated. Google App Store, Apple App Store, Amazon Appstore... They all have bindings to twitter.com, and some part of their flow will panic and flag a security issue if they see it's turned into a redirect to elsewhere. That probably triggers a security audit of every version of the Twitter client (and those companies aren't particularly inspired to foot the bill on Musk's behalf, billionaire that he is...). Hell, Google indexes twitter.com via a dedicated side-pipe. Will that side-pipe handle a redirect?
(source: I've been in the side-seat for a merger-become-rebrand, and the number of things people expect to "just work" and don't is impressive).
That includes everyone who had 2FA active before Musk made that a "premium" feature and subsequentially lost their 2FA device. What a clusterfuck, that one.
And that's assuming the integrations even support changing the primary domain name in their OAuth backend, which a lot of them will not. Or you have appliances that got made years ago when Twitter integration was the fad of the day - I 'member there's a fridge out there that showed tweets on its screen -, game consoles or other devices that don't get firmware updates any more.
That's one of those situations that feels like: "Executive just hasn't noticed / lost attention span, and engineer is leaving a workaround for a bad call in place."
I imagine that changing it would break a lot of things, otherwise they would've done it already. Copying a link to a tweet already makes it an x.com link too.
Stated goal is to gradually transform it into an “everything app” — https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-aims-to-turn-twitter-i...
First, fire 80% of developers. Then, make the remaining developers create an "everything app" (in addition to the workload they already have with the Service Formerly Known As Twitter app). Something, something. Profit ???
Aside from being a long-standing obsession of Musk's, the thing about the 'everything app' is that it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+, Musk's reputation, and several years of his rapidly-shortening QALYs. If you force as many people as possible to subscribe, you can then flip them to the 'everything app' and bootstrap a big enough bloc of customers to matter that you control their demand. (cf. Stratechery).
It's not going to work, but it is the only story you can tell yourself and employees about how the Twitter saga ends in any way other than Musk losing interest and getting distracted by AI again and Twitter spiraling into the drain and possibly being dumped into bankruptcy by its debt load.
I think the "everything app" already exists. It's called a web browser.
He really likes X. He even named one of his kids that (well X Æ A-12, with the spaces). The A-12 is indeed a reference to the plane that came out of the oxcart project. Æ Musk pronounces "Ash" which is apparently an accepted name for the character, which was (among other things) used as a latinization of the futhorc rune[1] that means "ash tree"
1: HN won't let me paste the rune, not sure if it's limited to BMP on purpose but you can see it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansuz_(rune)
They government let him name his kids that? I remember a story a long time ago about a couple that tried to name their kid "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" which is about as meaningful as "X AE A-12", but was blocked by naming laws
That was in Sweden, which has naming laws. The US does not have similar laws.
Two kids! (A girl, named Exa, in addition to X).
Presumptuously:
It's stupid and irrational because this wasn't a decision that was made based on reason - it was an emotional one. Elon is a bag-holder. He bought x.com in the dotcom boom and doesn't want to admit that the domain he paid a good chunk of money for is worthless - hence the (failed) attempt to make a brand out of it.
Any ideas how much he paid for the domain back then?
It was actually bought back from paypal in 2017, for an undisclosed sum. https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...
Everyone I know has partially adopted the new brand and started calling it Xitter.
Until just now, every time I saw someone in HN mention Xitter I assumed it was a third-party client like Nitter.
Which is especially fun to pronounce with the Pinyin 'x': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
The purchase was never about business in the first place, so the running of it could be just as bad.
Exactly! Ownership is not in it for revenue. They'll say they don't care about revenue to everyone who asks. To be baffled, one has to ignore all of that.
There is strong nostalgia for aw-shucks persona of an inventor-turned-business-owner.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dealbook-summit-2023-el...
Well, admitting otherwise would be admitting failure of managing that company and we can't have that!
This is how it goes in all big companies :(
True but there is no way it would be implemented in such a half-assed way at any other big company (including pre-Musk Twitter).
Stuff like this makes it obvious that the people who are still there no longer give a fuck, they just do what they are told with the minimum effort required to collect the paycheck.
Was thinking almost exactly this while reading a recent BBC article — their style guide appears to be that the company's name is "X, formerly Twitter,"
You have to write that (or similar) in UIs too since X just looks like a mistake/null value.
I always thought the rebrand was a complete shame, if only for the reason that "tweet", meaning "to make a posting on the Twitter online message service : to post a tweet" is in the dictionary!
What a waste to throw that away.
What can you do if he likes "X". It used to sound cool at some point decades ago.
To understand, you must look through the lens of "gran autismo".
Ketamine is a hell of a drug. https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...
The best new name I've seen is Xitter. Very fitting, IMO.