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Usually when you rebrand, it's because you've run your brand name into the ground. Elon did it just because the letter X is very cool or something?
by datpuz 2y ago
Usually when you rebrand, it's because you've run your brand name into the ground. Elon did it just because the letter X is very cool or something?
- burnte 2y agoRevenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter, he made them regret it by killing it.
- lapcat 2y ago> Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter, he made them regret it by killing it. This makes no sense. The court forced him to pay the shareholders the agreed upon price. Consequently, the shareholders were paid, and now they're no longer shareholders. Why would they regret that?
- yifanl 2y agoTheoretically, there's a universe where Twitter wasn't bought out and the share price grew substantially, which will never come into place due to Elon's actions? (I'm grasping at straws, mostly because Elon's ability to spite the shareholders is fairly limited.)
- Macha 2y agoRealistically, Twitter's old leadership were just leading it to the same demise, just slower than Musk now is.
- jonathankoren 2y agoBecause it’s not about being a shareholder. It’s about trying hurt Dorsey’s pride. “Watch me destroy your greatest achievement!” Musk is trying to damnatio memoriae. That is assuming Muskbis doing this purposely.
- CogitoCogito 2y agoI thought that Dorsey was a supporter of the Musk Twitter boondoggle. Or at least less against all Musk's antics than other major shareholders.
- hackerlight 2y agoDorsey played Musk not the other way around.
- jonathankoren 2y agoAnd that's why Musk is mad. Man, I swear media literacy is trash anymore.
- lapcat 2y ago> It’s about trying hurt Dorsey’s pride. Dorsey was not part of the lawsuit and in fact rolled over his Twitter shares with the acquisition instead of taking the payout, so again the "Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter" theory makes no sense.
- jonathankoren 2y agoYou're thinking it's about money. It's not. It's about vibes.
- lapcat 2y agoI didn't say what it's about. I only said what it's not about: "Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter". Nobody has yet made sense of that nonsensical theory.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy_plugh 2y agoHe's been obsessed with this since the beginning with x.com in '99
- sumtechguy 2y agoAll he needs is a ufo defense org and he is good.
- duxup 2y agoI once worked at a company where the head of our department announced we were doing a re-org. He later explained that another department did so and at a board meeting the news was well received by the board ... so he was doing it too. Sometimes leadership just feels the need to put their stamp on things so everyone knows they're there.
- hackerlight 2y agoElon's personality means he can't be in anyone's shadow. He needed to refound the company to remove the mental association with Dorsey and create the association that he's the founder.
- ben_w 2y agoWhich begs the question: why buy it? (And when the answer is "someone knows how to pull his strings and push his buttons", that makes me more worried about prompt injection in organic intelligence than the same attack in artificial intelligence).
- hackerlight 2y agoHis initial offer was motivated by a desire to be the savior. In his information bubble of American culture wars, freeing the bird from woke censorship offered him a way to roleplay the archetype of the individual hero and get his fix of narcissistic supply from his flying monkeys. To those ends, it worked. I believe he tipped his intentions to buy it quite early in a private conversation with Babylon Bee writers.
- pjc50 2y agoSo this is actually a good line of inquiry; intelligent people like to assume they are invulnerable to propaganda and nudging, when this is far from the truth. It looks like he's fallen into the rightwing rabbit hole, to the extent of prioritizing particular posters such as the notorious "libsoftiktok". The persecution complex that comes along with this tends to make him view dissenting views as the work of invisible enemies.
- vondur 2y agoThe "X" makes it sound cool. At least that's what Bender from Futurama taught me.
- beretguy 2y agoElon rebranded to run Twitter into the ground.
- teddyX 2y agoImagine acquiring the Bugatti brand then changing the name to “Karr” Musks multiple unforced fumbles might be the biggest boneheaded blunders in corporate history
- mondobe 2y agoWhatever you say, teddyTwitter
- Isamu 2y agoHe owned the X.com name, this is a way to get paid for use of it. That reduces the sting of the bad overall investment.
- throwaway290 2y agoCurious if he sold his x.com to Twitter for profit, like Neumann sold to WeWork the brand and real estate
- rtkwe 2y agoHe bought x.com early and has probably paid stupid amounts of feed to hold on to it all these years so he's forcing it on his new pet project he totally wanted and had a plan for when signing legally binding documents. (/s) I do believe he's just been obsessed with having x.com since he got it in the 90s and had a chance to use it and jumped at it just to put his own imprinter on the site.
- htrp 2y agoI mean once you buy a domain (for whatever price you paid), isn't it basically 20 bucks a year to keep it?
- hbn 2y agoFrom what I understand, Elon has owned the x.com domain for a long time and in the past wanted to rebrand PayPal to X the same way he did Twitter. Seemingly at that point in his career there were still people around to tell him no. He also wants to make X into an "everything" app where you'll do shopping, calls, chat with friends, send payments, etc. And if that was pulled off successfully it doesn't seem like the craziest thing to distance from the Twitter brand which has long been associated as an app primarily for news and shitposting? But he has a long way to go to get people to think of it as anything other than what it was before. Everyone on the platform is still calling it Twitter and refers to posts as tweets.
- stetrain 2y ago> He also wants to make X into an "everything" app where you'll do shopping, calls, chat with friends, send payments, etc. And if that was pulled off successfully it doesn't seem like the craziest thing to distance from the Twitter brand which has long been associated as an app primarily for news and shitposting? But he has a long way to go to get people to think of it as anything other than what it was before. Everyone on the platform is still calling it Twitter and refers to posts as tweets. I feel like the way to go there would have been closer to the Meta/Facebook brand hierarchy. X is the platform / super app and Twitter is the first app within X. Twitter accounts become X accounts but you still use them to Tweet on Twitter. The destruction of the Twitter branding seems more out of spite than business development goals. Really the whole follow through of the Twitter purchase reeks of spite and destruction rather than building something new of value. But I'm not a successful billionaire so I'm probably wrong.
- zzzeek 2y agohe is an extreme narcissist and is very mentally unhealthy / unstable. X is his favorite letter. it's not "cool", he just fancies himself to be King Joffrey who can do anything he wants on a whim.
- rsynnott 2y ago> it's because you've run your brand name into the ground And even then it usually doesn't work. It's _very_ unusual for full-scale rebrands of consumer-facing companies, where the original brand is utterly expunged, to stick.
- maxlin 2y agoHe's spoken about this in length. When it actually happened it did feel like a bit out of nowhere though, but makes sense in the engineering mindset to get it out of the way clear before fanning out to other areas, regardless of the hard-to-estimate ETA's for those features (talking payments, "mega-app"-like features, different ways of integrating Grok, possible new UI flows for YouTube/Twitch-like fronts etc)