Elon Musk says he’s changing Twitter’s name to “X.com” and dumping all of the bird stuff
Musk apparently thinks a domain name with "sentimental value" to him is better than a domain with actual value
Aux News X.com
Ever since Elon Musk’s disastrous time as the owner of Twitter began, users have been waiting for the inevitable day when something important permanently breaks and the whole website just dies. Sadly, it looks like we’re not going to get to see that happen, because Musk has apparently just decided to kill off Twitter himself, along with what is presumably some very valuable and well-established branding. According to Musk, via Variety, he will soon be changing the name of Twitter to “X,” making everything black instead of blue, and getting rid of all the bird stuff.
But why is he doing this? Well, it’s because Musk had an idea for a website two decades ago called X.com, and he hasn’t had a single new idea since. The old X.com was a bank, one that Musk was the CEO of for a short time, with his replacement—who will go unnamed—overseeing X.com’s transition into a far more successful company called PayPal. (With the popularity of PayPal making even more money wealthy than he already was.)
In 2017, Musk spent (probably) a ton of money to buy the X.com domain from PayPal because of its “great sentimental value,” and now he’s grafting that name onto Twitter so he can take credit for “making” X.com into something since he couldn’t do that before. And all it took was buying someone else’s website, destroying the stuff about it that worked or made sense, erasing all of its identifiable branding, and replacing it with a dumb letter.
And he’s going to think that’s cool and that it’s all part of his great plan, and a bunch of dummies are going to agree with him and insist that actually it makes perfect sense for a company to burn down its existing branding so it can all be replaced with a single letter (a letter that happens to already have a dedicated use in the world of technology, since it’s the thing you click or tap when you want to close or delete something, which is actually a perfect representation of Musk-era Twitter).
At this point, it’s unclear when this change will happen, or even if it will really happen, but The A.V. Club has reached out to Twitter for confirmation or any kind of comment. For now, let’s just keep calling it Twitter, because X.com is a stupid name (stupider even than Twitter!) and because we don’t feel like learning another new batch of dumb social media verbs.
212 Comments
We’ve created a society where the uber rich can make the stupidest fucking decisions imaginable, ruin people’s careers and lives, and never face any consequences.Great. Twitter is now X. Facebook is now Meta. HBO Max is now Max. Change the name of McDonalds to Senor Fuckface’s Squiggly Burgers. Who the hell cares? Anything to make the corporate morons think they’re really using their brilliant MBA brains and not just constantly failing upward.These billionaire (and occasional trillionaire) assholes will continue to follow through on whatever half-assed idea they jizzed out during their last peyote pilgrimmage while the rest of us figure out how to pay our ever-increasing rents. When they fail (which they usually do), they just shrug it off and move on while enjoying their golden parachutes. When they succeed, they reap all the benefits and get called “geniuses.” Either way, they continue forward to buying/destroying their next industry while we all suffer. Over and over again.It really bums me out that the inevitable bloody revolution this is all leading to probably won’t happen in my lifetime.
Hey, the best time to start a revolution is always right now.
Well, you know, we all want to change the world.
It always feels like the cosplay revolutionaries like to talk big about such a thing but the quiet part is “you do it, I’ll sit home and tweet.”
You deserve a revolution today…!…
Right now?
No, not now. Right… wait… no wait… now!
You missed it!When?Just now.
When will then be now?
Soon.
To be somewhat fair to the Zuck, Facebook didn’t change its name, only the company that owns it was changed. That’s par for the course for big companies with money-grubbing, fart-sniffing CEOs with too much time in their hands. But at least he didn’t outright murder established, enormously successful branding like Musk is planning to do.
Yep, and it has been quite the long con too. A lot of these demons have been conditioning us that they are good people and they worked hard for their wealth like the working class, while robbing all of us blind, as well as making sure the government is on their side for an easy bailout if they even got a passing whiff of their poor decision-making leading to fiscal consequences, all to the point they are too big to fail. The country really is for the oligarchs. As they say: Blissful socialism for the wealthy and rugged, individualistic capitalism for the poor.
Facebook isn’t Meta. Meta is like Alphabet, which is the corporation that owns the company that is Google. Facebook still exists.
This is all very silly, but (only) slightly less dumb than you were saying.
We really are faithfully repeating Rome’s fall, except the Barbarians from ‘without’ are actually inside our own borders. We have truly arsed ourselves. Chidren being born right now won’t even know that they’re slaves. Welcome to the Idiocracy.
We’ve created a society where the uber rich can make the stupidest
fucking decisions imaginable, ruin people’s careers and lives, and never
face any consequences.
Are you insinuating that there might be flaws to meritocracy? That the richest of us -aren’t- the smartest?!
We’ve created a society where the uber rich can make the stupidest fucking decisions imaginable, ruin people’s careers and lives, and never face any consequences.I don’t know… in getting my history degree, and after, I’ve studied ancient societies, medieval societies, early-modern and modern societies, including liberal democracies, fascist dictatorships, various brands of communism, and…I think what you’ve said describes just about every time and every place.
I’ve been noticing the same thing as I (slowly) learn more about history. Almost every single civilization at every point in time is a small core of plutocrats exploiting everyone else’s labor.
True, but this time we’ve got the technology to witness it occurring on a global scale. It remains to be seen whether the ultimate consequences scale up as well…
All of which makes me really curious what the hell happened in the Indus Valley civilization, where the archeological evidence shows huge public works projects but basically no evidence of a wealthy elite.Not that I’m trying to say it was some kind of paradise, but it sure seems like *something* different was happening there.
I’ve been reading an unhealthy amount of history for a year now and my morale was nearly extinguished. How do you deal with all of the pointless death, destruction and solid proof that we keep doing the same stupid things over and over again?
You joke but a Big Fuckface with extra cheese sounds pretty good right now
Same. A rebrand like that could definitely spark my interest in eating at McDonalds on the occasion.
What would they call them in France?
A Royale Clusterfuck
With cheese.
That sounds like a menu item from a food kiosk in Idiocracy. Please tell me it is, because Google isn’t understanding me, lol
Oh man, I could go for some Senor Fuckface fries right now.
be the guillotine you wish to see in the world
FIRST UP AGAINST THE WALL WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMESDouglas Adams
McDonald’s seems to know by now they’re in the real estate business.
Heading over to Godaddy now and registering senorfuckfacessquigglyburgers.com. CHA CHING, AMIRITE?
Change the name of McDonalds to Senor Fuckface’s Squiggly Burgers.
I’m reading Cloud Atlas right now, and McDonalds should definitely change its name to Papa Song’s.Don’t eat the burgers, though. The ‘pink slime’ is even less wholesome in the world of that novel.
“peyote pilgrimmage”These morons are definitely NOT doing any drugs that kill the ego.
I wish I could dose them with LSD or DMT.
Let’s not pretend Twitter is some shining beacon of hope for mankind. If Musk wants to burn it all down while harming himself financially, I’m all here for it.
So why don’t you cry about it?
I don’t know how old you are, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on that last bit. If the tech-bro idiots get there way and start getting AI into everything without at least some kind of idea how they’re going to keep people who’s jobs they eliminate busy/employed/fed, then the guillotines might be coming a lot sooner than you think. You can only make so many people so angry and so desperate before they just decide to burn the whole goddamn thing down.
hey buddy, dont be so pessimistic, grab a molotov and chainsaw-sabre and you can be part of ye glorious start…
X-com? Elon has a 15 percent chance to hit. Misses!
This was my first thought X com has been around a long time!
He didn’t have enough time units to duck before shooting.
The X makes it sound cool him sound like a tool.
I pity the fool tool . . . !
That luscious tan! Those ruby lips! And hair so natural, only his undertaker knows for sure!
Elon: “Tesla employees who have time for exercise are clearly not working hard enough, and will be immediately terminated.”
I listened to his youtube screed on Working At Home. Holy sh*t this guy is an unrepentant twat. Because factory workers, food service workers and other hands-on, public facing employees can’t stay at home no one should get to. He literally says that it’s immoral.And I noticed that, during interviews he ‘stutters’. I know that this can be a real issue but I see a lot of alpha guys doing this faux verbalization in order to sound unimprovised and more relatable. A lot of politicians do it; it’s like a malignant narcissist performing humility.
Ugh, my niece married a Big-Time, small city banker and when they aren’t facebooking their kids on horseback and chatting with the Players on the ice hockey rink they are worshipping their gurus at a Crossfit gym. I go cold when I see photos of the place. There’s a huge banner that says “Punish Your Weakness.”
You just know they’re going to punish everyone else’s too.
Crossfit is a cult.
Indeed it is. I would say that banking industry is too.
What I see is a goddamn superhero
Leave it to Musk to be the one weirdo in the world who manages to be the exception to Liefeld’s “this physique can’t exist due to human physiology” rules.
Yeah, no guy’s chest is that prominent. He’s sucking that gut in very hard. The photographer should have waited until Musk took a breath ‘cause he’s got plenty of ‘back’ too.
That’s mean and I don’t care.
What’s going on in that photo? His chest is large, but his stomach isn’t also bulging out – is he sucking in his gut? He looks like that Rob Liefeld drawing of Captain America.
It’s like most of the fat on his body is behind his rib cage somehow.
Elon Musk is a guy who can afford abdominal liposuction and mammoplasty. Unfortunately, fat gets stored in places other than around your waist.
He looks like that Rob Liefeld drawing of Captain America.
“Heroes Reborn is peak Marvel Comics.” — Elon Musk, probably
Definitely sucking it in. He’s going full Hasslehoff.
Those nipples are rather pert, though.
OMG, brand X:
Why does homie look like he was drawn by Rob Liefield?
He stands like a one-year-old.
Someone told me he looks like a open take out box from a Chinese restaurant and I can’t not see it now.
lol
It’s all fun and games until 2K Marin and Firaxis get their legal teams involved.
The Enemy truly is Within!
Unlike Rome. the barbarians aren’t at the gates, they’re right here inside with us.
To be fair the barbarians in Rome were also largely inside the gates.
No doubt. Pretty sure the slaves were getting fed up too – so to speak.
Surest sign yet that Musk is surrounded only by yes-men who won’t push back on even the dumbest ideas.
Enablers are very well-rewarded.
You hold onto the tiger because the second you let go, you’re lunch.
…the whole buying Twitter thing wasn’t your first tip?
Must has been trying to turn every company he owns into ‘X’ since PayPal, but unlike every other company he has owned (including PayPal, which ousted him over it), there is no one left at Twitter to tell him ‘No.’
Musk is a parody of a cool guy like trump is a parody of a rich guy. trump does cartoonishly “wealthy” things that normal wealthy people would never do like have toilets made of gold and run a steak subscription company. Musk does cartoonishly “cool” things like giving his company the “edgy” name of X and declaring loudly that he would never wear pink.
He named a kid ‘X’ too didn’t he?
Considering he “stepped down” fro being CEO of Twitter, he still seems very active in it.
its like when you watch succession…its dramatized, but we all have that hunch that it is more or less exactly how the uber rich behave.
The to-the-x-treme early 90’s are back!
I rock the internet like a vandal!
Word to your mother(‘s Threads profile)
So will everyone be X-ing now?
I think I’ve seen the logo. It’s ugly af – depressing, sterile, dreary, thoroughly uninspiring. His obsession with the letter “X” is offputting. “Twitter” has a meaning – “A little bird in your ear.
Everyone will be deleting their accounts (hopefully).
You’ve just been xapped!
Elon Musk has told his staff that, internally, they are now supposed to call a “tweet” an “x” instead. But I really can’t see how the whole user base will start using it as a verb too. (“I exed earlier this morning, and I think I will ex later today. I need to ex back to the person who exed me.”) Sometimes it seems like he’s not even human, like he’s never met or spoken to another human.
Yeah. Never going to happen. He’s a narcissist. For all intents and purposes he isn’t a human.
So he’s basically going to use a porno domain name.This will end well.
A porno domain name that otherwise can’t be searched for at all because it’s a single letter!
well they didn’t say a good porno domain name…
There’s a reason he was able to buy it so easily of all the “X” names
*V: The Series fans have entered the chat*
After his takeover, there was a measurable increase in child pornography.I pointed out that fact on the sister site, Gizmodo, and one of his fans called me a communist.
The old MPAA rating for adult films before the NC-17. Look for lots of Midnight Cowboy memes.
He should just call it Douche.
GRILLO, you DEWSH!
I’m eggzdremely dumvounded!
Uwandjourbakebudada?
Dob shelv liggeh!
Whatever happened the the Blue Check thing? I”m probably missing a lot by avoiding twitter, but facebook has put me off social media. Only the loudest people get heard anyway, it seems. The loudest aren’t usually the best and brightest. Fame and too much attention do shitty things to people – even those with the best intentions.
Not an avid tweeter, but letting people pay for the blue check has been a great way for the loudest and dumbest to pre-brand themselves, it’s a decent warning system.
Musk actually did preserve unpaid blue checks on some notable users; I use the extension Eight Dollars to tell the difference, though I’m sure there are others that serve the same purpose.
Not
an avid tweeter, but letting people pay for the blue check has been a
great way for the loudest and dumbest to pre-brand themselves, it’s a
decent warning system.Unfortunately, now that there’s not an actual verification system for the purposes of fighting misinformation (i.e. the original purpose) events like the weird mini-coup in Russia mean it’s impossible to tell who’s a credible source, who’s a weird prankster and who’s some sort of shady Russian operative.Elon may have destroyed the system because the former blue checks hurt his tender feelings, but he’s inadvertently shown how important the old system actually was.
But isn’t it just a matter of paying? And weren’t a number of deceased celebrities given blue checks? It doesn’t sound like there’s anyone at the wheel.
Well, there’s Musky at the wheel, but of course there’s not much difference between him at the wheel and no one at the wheel. Musk primarily bought twitter because like all neckbeards buying shit is the only way he can possess cultural capital – the only way he can seem cool. He’s not cool, but can buy “cool” shit, which he thinks makes him cool. He’s that IT dweeb in the office no one likes being near who pulls out his latest gadget at every opportunity in the vain hope you’ll ask him about it. (See: all the shit The Boring Company sells – reskinned roofing torches, giant Lego bricks. This is their business model. Well, that and ripping off cities’ transport budgets.) And now he’s the gatekeeper of what he thinks is cool – because he’s a socially-inept neckbeard who doesn’t understand semiotics at the most basic level – so in order to show this to everyone, he hands out blue ticks, gratis, to a select few. He wanted to feel like the bigshot casino owner comping the high-roller suite to a celeb, or a nightclub owner letting a hottie in without the cover charge.Except because he’s such a fucking idiot the dipshit didn’t know that a good chunk of those people were dead. He just heard somewhere that these people were famous, but couldn’t be arsed to look into whether or not they were still breathing. And he’s also been leaning into the backlash, because he’s just an insufferable dweeb: plenty of high-profile users summarily rejected the new blue tick regime and told Musk to fuck off and said they wouldn’t be paying, because they did not want to be associated with the millions of CHUDs who bought the ticks.So Musk put blue ticks on their accounts without their permission. “Neener-neener-neener – ONE OF US. ONE OF US. ONE OF US.” This is how losers like Musk “make” friends: if you possess the same cultural signifiers as they do, then obviously you have to be friends. At least that’s what they hope. Stephen King was a big one, as was LeBron James and William Shatner.Of course, the CHUDs loved this, because now no one can easily tell if that blue tick is a legit celebrity, or just one of the millions of deplorables who paid for “cred”. They get to cosplay as someone with the socio-cultural worth they crave. Now Dwayne-Bob McFuckwit, a 23-year-old unemployed basement-dweller from the outer suburbs of Bumfuck, Iowa, avid Trump supporter whose bio describes himself as an “AI Thought Leader, Proud Patriot, Web 3.0 entrepreneur” gets to believe his voice is now as worthy as Kim Kardashian, which is what he always wanted…and will pay for.
Agree. I have actually seen some of his childish antics on twitter. How anyone can approve that is beyond me. I’m looking to go back to work and my worst fear is that I’ll end up working for or with someone just like this. Musk is a poseur and he is making that lifestyle acceptable.
People only ever tolerated him because he had money. That’s it. Even back in the 90s – while not as rich as he is now, natch – he still went over to America with a pocket full of emerald money, and more just a bank transfer away from daddy. He boasts about only arriving in America with “$10,000 in his pocket”, which I’m willing to bet is way more than you or most anyone else has had in their pocket – that’s what he considered a penurious amount of foldin’ money. His other famous origin story – the poor, beleaguered nerd, unloved at school – involves him being hospitalised after another kid pushed him down the stairs. What he leaves out from that retelling was that the kid had just had his father commit suicide – and that Elon was teasing him about it. Even Elon’s dad said of it: “I think Elon went too far”. The guys he worked with at X.com (the original one) only tolerated him because he had money. The coders at PayPal, when noted Nazi cloning experiment gone rogue Peter Thiel merged with X, stated they were constantly fixing his code and that he was a net drag on the programming. At Tesla…he has a few patents related to car door handles (and yet he didn’t put any on the Cybertruck, a design that was likely just him doodling on a KFC napkin while waiting for Grimes to call). Allegedly, the word around SpaceX is “thank god for Tesla” – because Tesla keeps him distracted and away from fucking things up too much at SpaceX like he does at Tesla (likely replaced by Twitter now). All he’s ever been is a cosplayer, sans the sewing skill. He’s always been able to buy his way into a crude simulacra of credibility and status, and doesn’t know any different. He’s at the nexus of insufferable mouthbreather and spoiled brat. He can buy the indicators of respectability, become respectable-adjacent, and even lawyer his way into “I invented this status”. That was Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who founded Tesla, did all the work, got the concepts going. Again, Musk just had cash, but like the kudos and respect Eberhard and Tarpenning were getting for being, y’know, actual visionaries and engineers.He’s not the Carmackian/Wozniakian geek beavering away in a garage with a fantastic idea and the moxie and talent to see it through. He buys the work of these sorts of guys and gets to be the public face of their achievements.There’s only a few rare occasions when he receives pushback. The Thai Cave Rescue is one – there’s a fantastic photo of him standing around the rescue site basically with his dick hanging out because no one was in any fucking mood to indulge him.Of course, we all know how he reacted. With luck, the Twitter buyout might be another. Normally, he gets away with his armchair engineer/scientist/genius behaviour because there’s a few thousands actual geniuses compensating for him, and at the end of the day, it’ll be him who gets to face the microphones and TV cameras and do the interviews. And take the credit.But that’s the secret to his popularity. There’s millions of deplorables out their who see him as their god-king, their role model. He gives the feculent basement dwellers hope!He does all the stuff they wish they could do. He has no real qualifications (a basic science bachelors and an business degree is about as far as he got), hasn’t actually designed much himself, yet gets lauded as an engineering genius.He’s a weird, ungainly, bald weirdo – yet he gets to talk those cute reporters, and even got to marry and bang GRIMES – the exact sort of girl who’d you think would never give weird losers the time of day let alone let them touch her bewbs. He says the sorts of crass, immature shit you’d hear on Xbox chat in public and gets away with it – 420 lol! Catgirl girlfriends on Mars! Pedo! – and society reacts with an “Oh, Elon! You scamp! When’s your next cool project coming online?”This is all the stuff they wish they could do. Instead, these mouthbreathers are told to fuck off because their grasp of the STEM is non-existent, they merely fetishise it. Any woman, Canadian pop-star or not, is extremely creeped out by them. Those reddit-grade meme jokes only highlight their social awkwardness when they say them. This is how they see themselves – the smartest, most important people on the planet who should be recognised as such but aren’t because of filthy normies too stupid to recongise their genius…but they recognise Musk’s.And if Musk gets normalised…welp, maybe there’s hope for them yet.
Dude, you are on a roll today!
I really loathe that man.
Lol. How can I subscribe to your newsletter? More than I wanted to know, but now I want to know more. Sort of?Underneath that grandiosity and narcissism is a fragile little kid with no self-esteem. Can’t say I feel sorry for him because narcs don’t think there’s anything amiss with them and they destory everything around them. It will be interesting to see how he self-destructs: drugs, or he’ll stupidly say something about eating babies (or dogs), or he’ll just become a scary obese recluse, living in a house completely run by AI. He’s unable to make real human connections – that’s hard on a body and mind.
I regret that I have but one star to give for this post.
Yeah, exactly, someone who needs to pay to be heard doesn’t need to be heard.
A plus for the header image.
It’s sure to be a ruff ryde with lots of barking.
I expected him to change it to funnyweednumber.fart, honestly.
with pepe the frog as the logo?
Surely it’s gonna be X and not X.com tho right…? May as well throw in a hashtag and lean into it if that’s the case.
#XtremelyStupid
It is not possible to have a name even stupider than Twitter!
I’ve seen the new logo. It’s less of an “X” and more of reversed pin wheel shape inside a white circle on a blood red background. I guess a bunch of Musk fans wear it now on their sleeves when they march around.
It looks like a stock application icon from the 90’s
Why is it that the richest people are always the best examples of the failures of capitalism?
Because you have to have considerable success in capitalism before you can really fail spectacularly at it.
Capitalisms meritocracy has always been a myth. Success if often built on parental wealth, connections, criminality, corruption, deceit, theft, oppression, dishonesty, etc. Eventually the mask slips. Especially when the “fail upwards” types keep testing their luck.
Capitalism hasn’t been around long enough for the generational wealth to be redistributed through generational incompetence.Give it time.
exactly, there were a few people who made themselves wealthy starting from very little, back in the early days of the US, particularly in the 1800s if they got in before our massive economic growth and expansion (which coincided with adopting the industrial revolution techs). They did so on the backs of slave labor, insanely exploitive labor practices, almost no government oversight, and even then, a level of corruption that it took trump to bring back out into the open, and then immediately used their wealth to seize control. There was a populist and labor movement that came about, but it took the worst economic melt down in US history to build any type of regulations and safety net. The rich learned, and planned, and spent every year since the New Deal chipping away at it, and consolidating media, destroying unions, and figuring out how to co opt half the working class population. So in the US we get the GOP is so wholly owned by the wealthy it is nothing. It stands for nothing other than what the uber rich want, and the hate and mysogny is all just red meat to give them enough votes to steal elections and make it seem like they could be legit. The Dems fractured post Kennedy, and that let Carter come in and drag the party to the center, and as Reagan dragged the GOP further right, Clinton came along and pulled the Dems center right to win elections…and here we are. The progressive wing of the Dems would be normal liberals in most countries, center left. But here, we call them radicals. The MSM pushes the talking point that progressives are too radical for the majority, despite their policy objectives polling well with the majority of both parties. So we have a fight between the center right and far right….and the far right keeps winning. Biden is the most liberal president in my lifetime…and he is, at best, a centrist.
What do you call capitalism ? Some people seem to mean “free market economy” but it’s something very different.
I think it’s the starving, homeless, and sick people where you really see the failures. A buffoon with a million dollars, okay. But people literally dying because capitalism doesn’t prioritize (in fact actively discourages) community care—that’s where it fails.
there can never be any societal success with capitalism only individual. Capitalism is nothing but greed and exploitation, these rich people and their actions are showing capitalism for exactly what it is
Dude’s vanity has no bounds.
Ok he is trying to ruin it on purpous. No one could possibly do this thinking it would help the company.
Is there a way he can make money that way? Seriously asking. Like, is there a trick he can do, short stock or something to make money off of tanking it?
Doesn’t matter. Since he bought out all the shares & took it off the public exchange, he can flush the company’s value down the toilet if he wants to & face no consequences. Even if his Saudi lenders come asking for their money back, he could pay them out of his personal wealth & never miss it.
The same way what happened to MySpace and even Friendster before that: he’ll sell it all to the next billionaire schmuck who’ll want it, eat the losses, and move on to his next stupid idea.
The question isn’t “can he make money?” it’s “does he need to?”At this point, I suspect Musk has just written off the entire Twitter purchase as a sunk cost and is just fucking around for the fun of it. He didn’t buy as a sensible investment, after all. He made a joke and got sued into following through on said joke.
I try very hard to know as little as possible about this person but even I can see that he has a self-destructive, self-sabotaging personality. His braggadocio is a cover for poor self-esteem. And I try to say that with some empathy because he seems like a very unhappy person.
Meh, whatever. F him.
Bold of you to assume he think he’s helping. He’s a kid with a toy. Think Sid in Toy Story.
I think he’s just indifferent to whether it helps or not. He’ll be insanely rich whether it succeeds or fails, and if it fails, he’ll find a way to spin it to sound (to him) like he succeeded.
Or, third option, he doesn’t really care whether it helps the company or not. He’s just got more money than literally anyone else in the world, so he just does whatever dumb fucking thing comes into his head, and a bunch of people say yes because it’s literally all they have to do to be in the 1% (maybe even the 0.1%) club.
He isn’t trying to ruin it on purpose and he isn’t “fucking around,” he’s just an idiot
You missed the best part: he asked his braindead followers to design an X logo and said he’d use the best one. He’s too damn cheap to even hire a graphics artist to make a real logo.Can’t wait for someone to spend way too much time working on a logo, get picked, and then weeks later sue Musky because they want royalties and not just kudos for their work.
Ah, our Agnes who calls herself Perditax.
And yet again another article chronicling the demise of Twitter fails to point out that Musk was paid very handsomely to destroy a tool of mass organization by the very people being organized against.
Stop treating this like a slow-motion slapstick routine. Musk is an idiot, yes, but a very useful idiot to a small number of people who think that the masses being able to communicate with each other on the Internet is a bad thing.
Elon’s ego and hubris got him into this mess, but once there he was absolutely steered into paths of usefulness by certain powers. There’s a reason the Saudis decided to stay on as stake-holders rather than sell at a huge profit.
fails to point out that Musk was paid very handsomely to destroy a tool
of mass organization by the very people being organized against
Assuming they won’t target you for typing their names, who the heck are you talking about?
Saudi Arabia for one.
A number of rather autocratic regimes in the Persian Gulf area (including the Saudis) are a) investors in the deal and b) not fond of Twitter for the reasons I mentioned.
To try to square the circle of this thread: I don’t think it was a conspiracy, but like someone said upthread, Musk is in fact a useful idiot. His colossal ineptitude and all-but-deliberate running of Twitter into the ground does benefit autocratic regimes (like the Saudi royal family) who stand to gain more from preventing another Arab Spring than they do from investing relatively little in a company that has never been profitable. It reminds me of what we heard about Trump early in his presidency—that his enablers had figured out that to get him to do what they want, all they had to do was 1) flatter him and 2) be the last person in the room with him reminding him to do whatever they were trying to get him to do. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Musk’s enablers have similarly figured out something similar.
Sure, because you could never communicate via the internet before Twitter.
As easily and openly for literally millions of people to see? No. In such a way that any random person could be informed about, for example, protest actions? No. For mass organisation of citizenry? Nope. As someone who definitely remembers pre-internet protest, Twitter sure as fluck makes (that is, made) it easier to organise and get messages out there. For better or for worse.
I never used Twitter but… was it the only way to do that? Is the understanding of the technology involved lost to time?
Notice I never said that there were not ways to organise people pre-Twitter. Of course there were — or else the civil rights movement (for one) would not have happened — but how did it happen? Mostly in churches and face-to-face planning in the neighborhoods. Slow and inefficient compared to – for example – Arab Spring, or BLM protest organisation which was revolutionised by the use of Twitter.
The Arab Spring was crushed though, and the regimes that changed almost all changed to be more autocratic and militarized. I find it kind of depressing that people in the West seem to remember that period as some kind of feel-good story, like they checked out before seeing the ending.
No, no — I definitely don’t remember it ending well in the long-run. The point was that regular citizens were organised and rallied by the use of the free-to-use app known as Twitter. That the outcome was ultimately negative wasn’t really the point of defending Twitter as a potential weapon for protest.
And while yes, I may have been raised in the West, I live in “The Global South” 🙂
Hahahaha yeah it’s like when telephones came out and people were all like “why bother we have horses to carry letters.”
Yeah no one said that.
Except twitter doesn’t represent the entire internet. It’s like everyone defending one brand of telephone when there’s several others that make calls just as easily. I’m annoyed at what he did, but Twitter sucked long before Musk came along. It’s way past due for people to delete their accounts.
And yet again another article chronicling the demise of Twitter fails to point out that Musk was paid very handsomely to destroy a tool of mass organization by the very people being organized against.Stop treating this like a slow-motion slapstick routine. Musk is an idiot, yes, but a very useful idiot to a small number of people who think that the masses being able to communicate with each other on the Internet is a bad thing.It’s not mentioned because it’s a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality, but say it’s true for the moment:Was Musk given explicit instructions to destroy Twitter (at the cost of his own personal wealth and reputation)? If so, why would he agree to do that? The Saudis’ investment in Twitter was nothing compared to his own wealth (on paper) thanks to Tesla stock.
Was Musk tricked into buying Twitter because “they” knew he would run it into the ground? If so, how on Earth could they know this plan would work, and how would this diabolical, Rube Goldberg-esque scheming prevent some other social media platform from taking Twitter’s place in the future?
Was Musk tricked into buying Twitter because “they” knew he would run it into the ground? If so, how on Earth could they know this plan would work…?I mean…have you seen what Musk does? He didn’t need to be tricked. He’s a loser who gets sad that no one invites him out for drinks on Friday, so he buys the bar where they all go drinking so they have to have him at their drinking sessions. That’s why he bought twitter. There was no trickery needed.And it doesn’t take a genius to realise he has no idea how to run a bar. Or a social media platform. how would this diabolical, Rube Goldberg-esque scheming prevent some other social media platform from taking Twitter’s place in the future?They’ll behead that dissident when they come to it cross that bridge when they come to it.
I mean, it wasn’t super hard to predict that Musk would break Twitter if he bought it. This thing you are trying to act as though it is an impossible conspiracy fantasty — buying a major company to destroy it — has happened many times before.I’m not convinced this is what happened, but it’s completely plausible. You’re really stretching yourself trying to pretend otherwise.
They want to destroy social media? Cool l I like the illuminati now.
And yet again another article chronicling the demise of Twitter fails to point out that Musk was paid very handsomely to destroy a tool of mass organization by the very people being organized against.Elon Musk? Who’s suing his own lawyers because they forced him to buy Twitter after backing out?Yeah, he’s not even that useful an idiot.
Never get into a war of words with a guy that buys bonesaws by the barrel.
sure man, whatever . . .
Elon Musk in 1999, paying way too much money for a single character URL:I wonder how many people will go into work tomorrow, and try to log into Twitt… X.com, but won’t be able to connect because the office’s ISP assumes it’s a porn site.
With the popularity of PayPal making even more money wealthy than he already was.What the fuck is this supposed to mean?
And of course Kinja fucks up the quotation. Doesn’t make any less sense though.
Paste as plain text is your friend when copy/pasting anything with a hyperlink on Kinja.
Peter Thiel and presumably others actually made Paypal successful and paid Elon to go away or at least not break anything.
It means that they haven’t had a proofreader on the payroll since 2014.
ChatGPT will do that sometimes.
I don’t think Barsanti is a good writer by any means, but this falls to editing.
Another terrible decision from Republican Musk. I continue to laugh out loud as Twitter sinks deeper into quicksand all because of Musk
Ok but it would be funny if Elon sold the Twitter naming rights to Jack Dorsey and then Blue Sky just because Twitter again.
So the real question from here is really just what do we call tweets now? Exes?
Ex-laxes.
‘Tis a Twix.
Don’t insult those candy people like that!
We still call them tweets, & we still call the site Twitter, because screw him.
Honestly that is the best thing to do. Just still call it Twitter.
Twitter? I hardly know her.
So, “get off my lawn”?
Xcretions, obviously
This is the one I like the most
Anything that accelerates the destruction of a social media platform, I am 100% in approval of. Please, change the name, by all means. Do it.
The man blows up cars, rockets, and now a whole ass company.
Er… um, nevermind.
this is all very sus
XCom:Twitpocalypse
So a 30 sec verification and you discover that x.com is still free. Musk was trolling probably. Anyway Twitter under him is not particularly different than what it used to be. Maybe even slightly better. But apparently it’s anathema to say something like that.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion dollars, its value has fallen to a mere $15 billion. Clearly he’s doing something different.
Man, sucks that it’s a private company now, because I would be HELLA shorting right now.
Submitted my logo design. Fingers crossed!
Break it down!
Ah yes X. Brilliant. Not generic at all.
Imagine championing an economic system that lets depraved morons like this own all the capital.
But someday I might be one of those depraved morons. Then people like me better watch their step . . .
Step 1: Buy established brand for about double what it’s valued at.Step 2: Ruin said brand as a brand.Step 3: RebrandHow is he possibly this stupid?
I know you can’t copywrite a letter, but I feel like John Doe and Exene Cervenka should be able to sue for emotional distress or SOMETHING. Also, to be clear, my avatar has been the same since I joined AV Club years ago.
I mean, most social media sites would kill to have something as deeply entrenched in the popular lexicon as “tweet” and “retweet”. They may have to keep those, which will just be incoherent without the bird theming.The actual twitter bird was a nice little piece of graphic design, the X they are using is literally a unicode character- 𝕏(U+1D54F). Using an unedited unicode character for your logo is a choice, I guess.
Welp. Looks like it is time to clean up the predictive texts on my phone and iPad.
Just wanna point out that X is what you click when you want something to disappear off your screen. Very on-the-nose.
Someone should tell him three Xs are cooler than one and see if he buys those domains.
I think it makes perfect sense. The X is a full stop, termination, or end, to anyone or anything Musk doesn’t agree with. If he doesn’t like you, first he limits or charges you, and then X’s you out.
Rotate the X, add little arms and you have the perfect sign for his philosophy.
Musk should put out an analog version and call it The Knitters.