> It's just one childish rich dude with no adults in the room, case closed.
He didn’t do it all with his own money, he took equity investments and debt. A bunch of people had to sign off on this trainwreck, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, a16z, and Sequoia.
Yeah I do really hope they study that side of it in business schools, to teach young business people and financiers about reputational risk and survivorship bias.
The involvement of the banks was always the confusing part of that deal. Really made me lose respect for their judgement.
> The involvement of the banks was always the confusing part of that deal. Really made me lose respect for their judgement.
Agreed, but to be fair the bank transactions were for debt rather than equity, so they will still end up ahead unless he really does drive the company to bankruptcy. That’s a real possibility, but they’re in better shape than the equity investors who have in one public case[1] already written down the investment 47%.
The investment bankers lost money even before the transaction completed. Interest rates rose while Musk dawdled and delayed buying Twitter, so the debt lost value (this is the same issue that drove some banks into bankruptcy is the debt they owned - bonds - devalued as interest rates rose). Ordinarily what the investment banks do is sell the debt and then enter into other deals, but with the Twitter deal they either have to take a bath and sell the debt at a loss or keep their money tied up as the debt gets paid off.
Yeah but I think the debt risk was also way underestimated by the banks. I mean, bankruptcy risk was already pretty high for Twitter under its previous management. The terms of the debt seemed to me to reflect the acquisition reducing that risk, which was insane, and not just in hindsight. I don't think there's an explanation for it that doesn't involve the consumption of a large amount of kool-aid.
I’ve taken a business course in college that covered things like this. There’s plenty to learn by dissecting the many, many levels of failure involved.
In college, I studied the failed merger between GM and Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Essentially a study on egos and cultural incompatibilities.
Classic situation: too many yes men, needs some real friends who know him and can ridicule his bullshit until he thinks better of it. We all need real friends!
"Here's a really stupid thing someone did in the past, look what happens when you do this, don't do this" is a fairly normal business school thing (I think the classic branding one is New Coke). _Why_ they did it is somewhat beside the point.
I mean, that alone could make for vast magnitudes of study. It's the kind of thing that should lead us to question to nature of public/private companies, for a start.
There could be a whole course on the fall of Twitter. Musk has also wiped out 50%+ of the company value, which for a company of that size is wild. There's also the psychological side to study. Like/dislike Musk, he's done great with Tesla. Whatever skill(s) he has there has not transferred to Twitter.
I don't think it's the same person and leadership model working well for one company and not for another, I think the person changed. I think he was poisoned by internet obsession. He's just the most visible case, but it has happened and is happening to millions of people, sadly concentrated among adolescents.
Agree--the adoring fans, the huge amounts of money, the years of "this guy is the real-life Tony Stark!" talk went to his head, and he sort of became a parody of his worst impulses.
He already had the money. And plenty of people get lost down this "terminally online" rabbit hole that don't have all the fans and adulation, though I agree that's a component of it. But I think to some extent there are just some personalities that is predisposed to succumb to this, though I think we're all vulnerable to some degree.
That is, I don't think what's going on with him is actually unique at all. All that's unique about it is the level of impact and visibility his deterioration has been able to have because of who he is.
It’s very simple. As Tesla grew, the company figured out how to manage Musk’s worst impulses. It has an immune response to Musk’s malignant narcissism.
Twitter does not have an immune response. It’s like a colonizer introducing a new disease to an ecosystem. Twitter didn’t know how to handle Musk, and so it just amplified his worst tendencies.
He was always a malignant narcissist. But he probably did get worse. It’s like an alcoholic suddenly owning a bar.
There's nothing to study. It's like studying the bottles of piss of Howard Hughes. Elon Musk is simply not well. And his enablers will stop enabling him when the financial outcomes of this entire mess become unquestionable.
What real innovations has Tesla brought to the market? And I mean real innovations which benefit the consumer, not stuff like electrification that is something that needs to be done for the sake of ìstopping climate change'.
Driving a Tesla is essentially the same experience as driving a 1996 Mercedes, actually the Mercedes interior are higher quality.
The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.
> The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.
I believe there is more than one association with Twitter's branding and that depends entirely on how much of a Twitter user you are:
- Associated with a toxic cesspool of doxxing, pile-ons, harassment, bad faith arguments, etc.: you are an active user of Twitter, tweeting, replying, participating in the endless threads devolving into the usual social media toxicity.
- Associated with public announcements, breaking news, and insider info: you are a consumer of information shared through Twitter, that others sifted through and surfaced it through other means (Hacker News, Reddit, news websites embedding a tweet, etc.)
I say that because I was never an active user of Twitter, pre-Musk acquisition I had my account (and a pretty handle) since 2009 but I never actively used Twitter for discussions, posts interactions, and so on. I would go to Twitter from other media, check maybe a thread or two and get the fuck out of there. And that was exactly because interacting on the platform was not only toxic but pretty chaotic to keep track of, the whole "shouting into the void" style of communication never resonated with me.
I still got some value out of Twitter by seeing verified accounts of prominent people (not celebs) breaking news or sharing inside scoops sometimes by retweeting someone that wasn't verified but was an insider on the subject. All of that has crumbled for me, I can't use Twitter for anything anymore.
So there was brand value, even in the midst of being a cesspool of toxicity, for people like me, that casually ended on Twitter to find information that wasn't available (yet) on other media. That is completely gone, the big question is: what's actually left of value in the platform? I don't see anything that can be recouped.
> The Twitter brand is associated with being a toxic cesspool, harassment campaigns, pile-ons, doxxing, bad faith arguments, fake news and other things like that.
This only worsened recently. So the X.com brand is going to be associated with this.
I live in a country whose national broadcaster endorsed the platform — that's a broadcaster that is respected around the world, btw. Twitter's brand value used to be enormous.
I’m fascinated by the idea that anyone would use Twitter/X as a super app - I don’t see how Musk thinks anyone would use a mediocre social app over the ubiquitous Apple/Google Pay.
I think he's come to peace with the fact that he paid $44 billion for an unprofitable messaging platform and he's not going to be turning it around. He's now giving up on the concept of short-form pub/sub text messaging and instead hoping he can just capture those millions of logins for a completely unrelated platform (i.e. some hazy crypto payment stuff). This is a web property that for whatever reason, he was never able to build himself.
There’s a good chance that Twitter is being destroyed intentionally; it has been a very useful tool for people organizing against the political- and billionaire-class. Egypt really hated its influence; Saudi’s aren’t too thrilled, etc. Powerful monied interests financed the buy-out.
I think a major problem with it is that it sounds like a porn site. The value of short domains is probably overrated too, a single word is nice but a single letter? so what?
Is it just me or is X a stupid name? It's hard to google it and there are so many other associations with it (like X-Files, Mr X, etc - just so much). Twitter is a huge brand and they just kill it off like that?
I'm not on the Musk hate train, but this feels like a stupid impulse decision to me
We know for a fact it was a stupid impulse decision, because when asked "how should we call tweets and retweets now" he replies "x's" and for retweets he said "this should be completely rethought". Yet to be rethought? You think about stuff like this BEFORE you change your brand, not after.
He's nuts. Maybe that's part of his success throwing himself into areas no one else dares, like EVs and self-landing rockets, but he's just a chaotic agent, he doesn't have instinct for what will work, he just has instinct for being random and confusing everyone with it.
Of course they will. But branding the action is what every single company in the world is trying to do because it's like tattooing their presence into your brain.
Look at what the parent comment up there said: "it's hard to google it". Did you catch that? He didn't say "to web search it", he said a brand. He, and all of us, are like a free walking talking Google ads every time we say "to google it".
The same has been happening when anyone, or a media says "in a tweet" or "he tweeted" or "retweeting" and so on.
Everything can have "a post", and everyone can "post a message". But you can only "tweet" on "Twitter". And now there's no even sane way to use this new "brand" as a verb, or as a noun of a post. There's no sane way to use it at all. It's a horrific brand.
People will not even use it because it's unclear what you're talking about. Look at every single instance when Elon Musk says the name of his own son, he doesn't say "X", he says "Lil X". He has to prepend this "Lil" in front because otherwise it's absolutely unclear what the hell he's talking about.
It's also full of registered trademarks that use "X" in their name, because "X" is a letter. So now The Twitter Files... become The X Files. And "Twitter Videos" become "X Videos". I can keep going forever. It's a damn mess.
If it becomes a commonly used name for a type of operation. But "googling" and "tweeting" are such weird words, I feel as if they can never become generic, unlike "to xerox", which comes from "xerography".
Now... on the other hand... "X" is aaall over the place in brands, in words, in phrases...
Elon had X.com for ages. He had before they merged with Confinity to form PayPal, Inc. He wanted PayPal to be renamed to X.com back then, but PayPal had way better brand recognition, so (even though he was CEO) internal backlash talked him out of the idea.
The former Dutch brand Xs4all (ISP) had a marketing campaign where they asked input from their customers. It evolved around the X. It taught me X stands for a lot of things. It's a letter, for one. It's a cross. A railroad crossing. It's a knot. It also stands for trans (in the broad sense of the word, including but not limited to transsexual). There's also an association with masculinity.
That X stands for so much isn't coincidence. Musk wants you to think of his brand (X.com; not X) when you see the letter X, or even subliminal in the examples I gave above. My take is it could work out on the long term, but on the short term it further alienates Twitter's status quo. It could accelerate the domino effect.
That's a very large gamble for something that the twitter bird already accomplished. At least Meta kept the name Facebook as a brand and used a different sites entirely when it wanted to experiment with a new formet.
But him having that idea for so long explains a lot. He is very clearly stuck in the 90's/00's "extreme/radical" days if he is that beholden to having the name "X" somewhere in his portfolio. way before you consider factors like search ability and SEO and general professional communication on the internet. But I'm not surprised he didn't keep up with the times.
Like or dislike Elon, it seems like a stretch to say he didn't keep up with the times when he's the guy who started companies aiming to make satellite internet that doesn't suck, rockets used to replace NASA's old garbage, and popularize electric cars when every manufacturer had given up on them.
It may be a slightly contestable take, but I do stand by it. He got ahead on space tech because NASA has had it's budgets and missions slashed for decades. Satellite internet was deprioritized in 1st world counties because of physics (and political oligarchies, of course), and Tesla was far from the only competition in the EV space, even a decade ago. He does know how to (or maybe got lucky) find what isn't working and find the talent that can make it work.
(I will give him props for rolling out the super charger stations, though. And no screwing up with some proprietary schlock like other dealers would have tried to do.)
I very much feel like this is a Jobs v. Wozniak moment, too. It's clear there was was some unsung hero who could realize Musk's crazy dreams and even reel him in when he got too crazy. But for Musk, he simply had the funds and willingness to take the risk. I'm guessing that "Woz" left or is simply heads down at SpaceX/Tesla given recent decisions, though.
Changing Twitter to X has obviously been part of the plan with Musk from the start, sure.
But rushing it out in the past couple of days was absolutely an impulse Musk-only or Musk+1 decision, like many recent Twitter changes. Especially given what we've heard from staff at Twitter so far.
And, of course, given the fact that so little on the site was actually updated and Musk has already talked about not even thinking about things like retweets yet.
Interesting that he seems so set on X then. I don't think they'll be able to pull this off - it could work but X is too overloaded for it to be associated mainly with Twitter. I don't think they have the reach to make this work
Musk is trying to create a WeChat clone. He’s just using Twitter as a kind of starting point. A WeChat clone seems ripe for antitrust laws though, but what do I know?
He may be looking at Google, Amazon, and Apple as examples that big tech can destroy all the trust they want and monopoly away with little regard for legal implications
It seems like an inappropriate name to me. It does have an association with SpaceX though, which is viewed positively by most people. If he called it TweetX that would have been great.
If you really wanted to rebrand Twitter, then at least go via TweetX. Rebranding is normally a multi-year process. We have a supermarket chain that's rebranding all it stores from five or six different names down to two (two that still reflects that this is one company), they started years ago and won't be done for another two years.
Perhaps Musk just goes "Screw it, I'm building the app I always wanted" even if he has to build it on the ashes of Twitter, ejected Tesla auto-pilot code, a couple of rocket boosters and a domain he had in the draw.
For someone who looks at web trends occasionally, the association is pretty strong. Three of the top 50 domains start with x and these are all porn. xvideos, xhamster, xnxx.
>He also owns the X.com domain name, which now redirects to Twitter.
I get a GoDaddy parked domain page.
Edit: maybe some people aren't getting the parked page? It wasn't an attempt at a joke, that's what I see. Seems relevant given he's clearly pushing the idea. https://imgur.com/a/pi5B11K
The parked page happens to not be a redirect. It's probably DNS TTLs. If you get redirected to twitter, you're seeing A records like 104.18.16.213 (Cloudflare). I'm seeing an A record of 34.102.136.180, which gives the parked page.
I think they changed the NS records to Cloudflare and the TTL hasn't run out on the original for many downstream DNS servers....
$ host -t ns x.com
x.com name server ns71.domaincontrol.com.
x.com name server ns72.domaincontrol.com.
I'm far from a Elon bro, but I guess I've been fairly sympathetic to some of his more stupid decisions in recent years.
That said, I simply don't get this. I understand he has a grand vision for Twitter which he's keen to pursue, but either way this is just a dumb decision from a brand perspective. The reason people use Twitter over over similar sites is part because of the brand and part because of user base. Destroying one of those two pillars seemingly on a whim seems like a very bad move however you look at this.
My guess (and I acknowledge I'm being extremely charitable here) is that Elon will reverse this. I think sometimes he does this stuff because he knows it will get media attention and he likes to troll. But I guess we'll see. Even if this is just some elaborate joke for media attention it seems like a risky one – especially when Threads is doing so well and offers such a reasonable alternative to this chaos.
Also I thought he hired a CEO and was taking a step-back from Twitter? If anyone was going to decide to rename Twitter, surely it would be the new CEO?
But on the other hand, what is there really to protect here? Twitter’s reputation is in the trash bin anyways. And the cutesy branding is going to end up out of step with the toxic conservative cesspool he is trying to create. So yeah, maybe a solid move? The dumpster is already on fire, so why not.
I wonder if that will have an effect on copyright for the logo. I mean, you can’t just copyright the shape of an existing Unicode character, at least for such a simple one.
We already knew Musk was like this, but it's surprising that Yaccarino signed up for it. I hope she negotiated a massive cash signing bonus, because she's totally trashed her career.
We can hope for her sake, but I think it's much more likely that given her background in sales, she's just uninformed about building consumer products and services, and all in on that sales culture of promising everything and ignoring the execution.
It’s really hard to not look at a train wreck in progress. Especially when it comes with a large drink of schadenfreude and a bucket of virtual popcorn.
I’m sad for what the destruction of Twitter and the people it affects, but at least the fireworks are cool.
Usually this is too vacuous of a criterion for comments on any other topic on HN. For some reason any post on Twitter has pages and pages of “yikes” “derp”, people gossiping about “Elon” like he’s their wayward cousin. Pathetic.
Elon is a cautionary tale about what can happen when a slightly clever, asocial, ADHD, internet troll finds himself with more money than God. He is the archetypal HN user gone off the deep end. This is like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future for most of us.
I'm afraid I see many similarities with that older wayward cousin, John McAfee.
I truly hope Musk finds help, or finds that his coffers are harder to deplete than Johns, but it's not looking good.
"we", the hacker-crowd, indeed have some lessons to learn here.
I've only known one person brave enough to stand up to a toxic ceo in an "all hands" in 40 years of working. It's surprisingly hard to do. Nobody is really trapped but it can be very hard to just walk. I didn't. I wish I had.
Anyone in any kind of social media role, pretty much. And, although not literally forced, many others cannot ignore the advantage the platform brings: writers, gamedevs, journalists, etc.
Social networks have a moat so strong that can you stand all kind of abuse apparently.
Reminds me of 2balkan4you reddit community which has a humour style too crude for the Western cultures and gets banned all the time but because the Balkan people banter with each other in that way and banning a community does nothing more than re-grouping under a new name. It's actually the same thing with all kind of networks of people and as long as the reasons to come together exists, people will go in great lengths to come together.
Maybe it's in the similar vein of "you can't kill an idea", so as long as the communication tech can capture the core needs of people who would like to network no downtime or logo change will break your product because you will have very motivated users. The worth of the product from monetary perspective can change though.
Could you anyone explain how the same person that founded SpaceX could be so bad at managing Twitter?
I mean, he is so bad that a child you'd have managed it better.
On the other side, SpaceX is a pretty well managed company, a market leader that manages to sell its services for 30% cheaper than its closest competitor.
(I'm not referring to Tesla, as it might just happen that Musk took over when the teams were already efficient and the roadmap well defined. Tesla's success might be pure Musk's luck)
So my theory right now is that the people who need to push back against him have little leverage externally to use.
At spaceX, if an idea is stupid the engineers can say that the Government won't allow that, or something similar(ie laws of physics). It creates an external "No", so it's not the engineers fault and they get to continue working on what will work.
Similarly at Tesla, it's sometimes simple to say that it's against the law to make that change, but there are less regulations so more stupid stuff gets put in(for me it's the ues of the screen for so much, if it were legal he would have the turn signal controls on that screen).
At twitter/X there are basically no regulations, you cannot say that something stupid is not allowed, because there are no rules. He does not allow people to say "No" in his circle.
He found success in Tesla and SpaceX because people are empowered at some level to say No. At twitter/X, they are not.
They're such totally different products that I don't think you can meaningfully compare them. The big thing about Twitter is the social, mass-market angle that Musk seems to not get.
There have been a lot of CEOs that took control of a 2nd company in a totally different field, but have never been so catastrophic. Musk's takeover of Twitter is a total anomaly.
SpaceX has a highly competent COO and a team of passionate, skilled people who would put up with any kind of nonsense to build and launch cool rockets.
the weirdest thing about x logo is that it barely has any "volume" of sorts. It's just three very thin lines (and two very tiny ones which I disregard) stylized as letter x.
I use twitter every day but don't really care about this rebranding. I see arguments why it's bad and those are really valid arguments but personally it doesn't concern me at all
To everybody here saying this will kill Twitter: it won't.
- firing 75% of the employees didn't kill Twitter
- aggressive rate limits and requiring auth didn't kill Twitter
- a well funded competitor with 100 million signups in days didn't kill Twitter (and their engagement is down 70% in just 2 weeks)
And yet here we are on HN again prophesying doom because of a name change. A name change won't kill Twitter either. Their traffic is driven by network effect, not branding. The past year has been a case study in it.
I write sci-fi so I like to wildly speculate, so here goes:
I think the point of having X be the everything app is that as we experience extreme amounts of crime because of the neglect of the authorities, and transition to the privatized everything, no default trust future where you get nothing for just being a human who isn't in prison, when you get cancelled you'll really get cancelled. You'll not only get all your social media accounts cancelled, but your bank accounts, the lease on the place you live, your ability to go to grocery stores, your ability to purchase gas, your ability to get a loan, your ability to use public transit, your internet connection, your ability to use public bathrooms, your ability to use dating apps, etc. will all be cancelled. X will provide all of these, and X will not cancel you.
This has precedent. China, during Zero Covid in 2022, would lock you out of absolutely everything if you didn't go stand in line half the day to get a Covid test every single day. I could imagine all the private providers of absolutely everything banding together to implement the same thing in a private system with the cheering of the populace since it's the only way to protect against criminals when you get a San Francisco style situation where the government gives up on enforcing most laws.
I rarely use Twitter, had the amount of band really increased compared to the list 3 years?
I don't know if that data is actually public anywhere, but I'd be really shocked/appalled if they're banning more today then when Twitter (and others) where regularly working with the federal government to control what could be discussed related to CoV-2 and the pandemic response.
Yeah looking back again I misread the OP a bit. I'm still really interested in whether the number of bans is even close to the last few years, but that's a bit more off topic that I meant.
If you accept that great harm can occur when somebody is deprived of vital services by a private company, why on earth do you think it's a good idea for one single private company to control all those vital services? Even if their current owner weren't a ... let's say 'less than stable' individual.
All privatized innovation is by definition good, all government adaptation is by definition bad, move fast and break things up to and including global civilization I guess. The thought monoculture here is finally starting to go fetid in wider culture, perhaps?
Or we could just keep calling it Twitter forever just to enrage Elon that it'll never stick despite how much he wants it to, just so he gets a taste of what it feels like for other people that get stuck with their deadname?
For Stylus, Cascadea or whatever CSS writing extension you have installed. I did this months ago because the stupid doge was annoying me and forget I'd left it on, but it still works.
I did this too in response to the doge, but now i want the twitter logo. I very nearly copy+pasted the svg but I ended up hard-refreshing twitter and losing it :(
Elon Musk is either a genius or a fool. I don't understand business decisions at that scale nor am I not smart enough to know which one he is. Only time will tell.
But to me this seems tacky. The comments (on Twitter) that are positive about it, look like (possibly AI generated) bullshit hype comments with little to no content (see: NFT, web3, "AI" etc.)
The FB/Meta thing felt similar, but in hindsight also smarter, because they didn't change the name of the app.
But there is some (small) chance that they pull this off.
Twitter is the "microblogging app with a reputation for being a cesspool" that depends on prominent users. Maybe a re-branding and a shift (broadening) of scope is the right way to go? Maybe there's a chance that the new features make Twitter into something bigger that deserves its own name?
It's kinda standard practice in low journalism in the UK to describe people in lots of pointless ways in a single article. Usually the first mention includes their age in brackets for some reason. The BBC should really be better than that though.
Going to be studied by generations as a case study in wiping out decades of brand value overnight.
Also, the logo was selected by a competition, which is absolutely the way to rebrand a multi-billion dollar company.
Fascinating, in a car crash sort of way.