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This is so wacky it's astounding.
You don't buy a company for their servers or employees, those can be found elsewhere for the same price. You buy a company for its users and its brand. To throw away one of the most icon brands in the world, which is present in the footer of every major website in the world, is baffling.
What is the end game here?
What is the end game here?
Bold of you to assume Elon has one.
I'm sure he has an end-game.
It's everything up to that point where he's completely at a loss.
I think his endgame is just boosting his ego. He tried to get this X thing to stick since the PayPal days.
We are just watching the midlife crisis of a guy with way too much money showing that billionaires are not immune to terminally online brain rot.
You don’t buy a company for their servers or employees
Clearly he didn't buy it for that either, since he chucked those out the window shortly after purchase. Pretty sure he spent billions of dollars to shitpost and create a safe space for nazis.
He realized pretty fast that he offered WAY too much money for Twitter. Like, we're0 seeing maybe 5x what it was really worth at the time. But, because he did everything out in public like the narcissist he is, he knew there was no way he was getting out of the sale in court.
So he got as much of the cash from banks and other investors as possible. An amount of debt that could ruin someone with even his net worth. Now he's driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.
Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.
Maybe I'm financially illiterate, but I don't understand how that works. Like... if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn't get me off the hook. If anything, I'll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk's debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?
Because laws are for poor people silly goose
Most of the money in the world economy is known as "Book Money." It exists only because an investor somewhere decided it did and invested based on that number. When a bank or investor stops thinking it's worth that much one of the things they can do is a Write Down. The money (which never really existed anyway) ceases to exist, the banks books (and possibly their rating as a lender) are affected, the investee should become considered a bad investment, and the money is deleted from the world. But there are no other real consequences unless the investor or investee destroys enough of their wealth that they become insolvent.
You bought your house with earned money. Real money. It can't just be erased in the same way because you played by the rules the whole time.
Lenders are not as stupid as you think. 75% of Twitter's purchase price was paid by Musk himself or loans secured against his Tesla stock. None of that will be "written off".
He bought the company to bootstrap his idea of his "X" app which he envisions becoming something like WeChat for the world outside of China.
I think it's a terrible idea that's a solution in search of s problem. WeChat works in China because the government literally enforces it's usage. The rest of the world isn't interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.
It's the problem of trying to be everything for everyone. You end up with mediocre or bad solutions for many problems instead of great solutions for a couple of problems. It works when there's no competition, see WeChat, but when there is competition that competition is going to beat you at their game because you're too busy playing a dozen others.
It’s funny if that’s his endgame, since Meta is already closer to that achievement than he is, and their Twitter alternative exploded in popularity immediately thanks to Musk’s own incompetence.
The rest of the world isn’t interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. Look at the constant posts and commenting on how people hate to deal with the complication of additional apps / sites. It's a major negative of the fediverse, it's one reason I think Signal shot themselves in the foot getting rid of SMS. It's why people keep using Amazon or Netflix even as they get worse and worse and more expensive. Heck, I'm not even immune - I wish we had one fast and cheap way to transfer money rather than Zelle, Paypal, various bank schemes, venmo and on and on. I wish we had a universal shopping cart thing like Paypal checkout more widely adopted vs making ever more accounts and typing in all my details for a one time order from a different website (and this is one reason why people gravitate to Amazon vs individual sites).
I'm not saying I'd like an all in one app, but I can see it potentially being interesting to people if it simplified their lives. I don't think Musk and X are likely to be able to do it, but I don't actually think there's no interest.
At this point it's foolish not to consider this as possibly the greatest tax writeoff in history. Elmo is setting himself up to never pay another dime in taxes the rest of his life. Not that he probably pays that much as it stands, but still.
You can't defer losses like this forever. You can throw your money in a fire, but in the end that's not going to help you very much.
which is present in the footer of every major website in the world
OMG, I just realize that the little blue bird will be replaced with an X everywhere. A generic looking, forgettable X.
I also realize that instead of saying "follow me on Twitter" or "I'm on Twitter," people will say "follow me on X" and "I'm on X," which sounds like you're talking about Ecstacy or Molly. Very 1990s club kid. (He's Gen X so I'm sure he's well aware of how this sounds.)
I am seldom a conspiracy theorist but I am really starting to think that he is deliberately trying to destroy Twitter, I mean X.
I don't think so, his "X" idea has been around for a long time, he really thinks it's his next big idea. I'm sure people have raised all of these concerns with him, but I doubt he's listening. Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are ideas that he bought, this one is his baby. I don't think he's open to ideas or criticisms on it.
Just to say you often do buy a tech company for it's employees. But he fired most of them anyway so this move seem pretty on brand.
You don't buy a company for their [...] employees
You can do that, and companies like Google have been doing it for years. The difference is that those companies are small teams of engineers, working on niche applications, that the big company wants to incorporate into them.
This isn't a logo. It's a cry for help from a severely distressed mind.
̷̛̰̣̠͛͊ ̸̳̼̹͂ ̸̳͕̳̔̈̉͝ ̸̛̲̋̄͘ ̴͎͐ ̸̝̃̽̚W̵͓̙̏̄̀̉Ḩ̶͚͍͗͠A̷̢̹̥͙͑͐͆T̷̫́̉̄̚'̸̧͍͌͆͜Ş̷̗͚̻̓̉͒͠ ̶̣̯̬͑̈́H̷̘͛̇̚A̷̭͗̓͘P̶̭̠̔͒͝P̵̱̯̲̓͌͘E̵̡̪̣͇̕͝N̵͓͊̇̿̋Ì̷̭̯̠͗̈́͠N̴̬̹̲͔͑̈͝G̵͎̖̥͇̀
He bought it to destroy it for his Saudi backers. Billionaires like Musk and the Saudis make more money with Republicans in charge. Twitter and Reddit were too good at educating voters that would keep Republicans out of power, and hold murderous Saudi princes accountable, so they had to be destroyed.
What is the end game here?
Musk: “Hey Everybody, look at me!”
Twitter gets their iconic branding enshrined in the dictionary as a verb - one of the very few companies that have achieved the feat - and Elon chucks it all in the bin.
And not even as a genericized term. (Google and Xerox HATE that they're used as verbs.)
"Tweet" is only ever used to describe posting to Twitter. It's a very unique position that's about as ideal as it gets for a company brand.
Genious.
He found the fastest way to burn 44B$, me reckons.
I got curious and did the math if $44B was denominated in $100 bills.
That's 496.85 cubic kilometers of cash. Or a pile of money that covers half of the continental US, stacked 1/4 of the height of Low Earth Orbit.
I honestly don't think one could physically burn that much cash since May 2022 in real life.
Edit: more mind bogglery!
The earth is ~40,000 km in circumference, so you could stack the bills almost 28m high around the equator (or circle the globe 256,482 times.)
I think you found an extra factor of a thousand somewhere along the way. I get 497 cubic meters: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%280.0043+inches++2.61+inches++6.14+inches%29+*+%2844+billion+%2F+100%29
This is the poster child for enshittification; RIP bluebird, we salute what you were.
It’s not even enshittification. If it were that at least would be understandable through a capitalistic lens, a natural part of an investor-owned process. It’s the actions and thinking of a man-child with all the brilliance of a 40 watt bulb. No logic is to be had here.
xXshitifiicationXx
The only reasonable answer is that Musk is intentionally killing Twitter, which is conspiracy theory levels of dumb.
The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.
I wouldn't say stupid, just narcissistic control freak who can't stop touching it. That way it doesn't dismiss him outright. It's a matter of essentializing language - "someone is stupid" isn't so dangerous vs "someone does something stupid" lets you recognize the emperor has no clothes but can still be dangerous. Reality is more complex than "xyz is stupid/evil", and falling into those patterns of thought does a disservice to yourself.
This is a stupid move. It's like Google changing its name to something else. Now everyone says "you need to Google this" instead of "you need to search this on the internet". Twitter has become a recognised brand and tweeting has become a verb in the dictionary. He's destroying years of work. At this point, we can safely say that his behaviour is not rational.
I'm happy they kill themselves by this name change. Haha
Are people really still convincing themselves this is a 5D chess move.
After everything else, are we still doing that?
The real x logo is of course from Xorg. Never forget that.
I notice that the x.org website seems to be struggling a bit right now. Are they being hammered by people going to the wrong site?
This is beyond dumb. Such an iconic logo that was already such a huge part of their brand. Not even a logo that needed to be changed. This will cause major confusion for some old people.
Seeing the care that went into designing the original logo, only to be replaced with... I keep wanting to call it clipart, but clipart is less lazy than this.
According to another post, it's an X stolen from a font, and was apparently used in an old podcast. So he just took an X from a font that looked neat and said "good enough"
I really don’t understand Elon’s plan with all this.
Maybe he never had one.
Everyone knows and recognizes Twitter, changing makes no sense.
So, if there's no more bird, then we shouldn't call them "tweets." What should they be called now? X-cretions?
This is just proverbial middle finger from Elon to the PayPal shareholders because he couldn't get his way, now he is in a position where he can do this and no shareholder can criticise him for doing so.
The brand 'X' doesn't have any meaning behind it. 'M' maybe so but that would be a stretch.
Between going back to X and the graphics on the redesign, it is pretty obvious he's stuck in the 90s. Twitter is his midlife crisis.