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[–] 246 points 3 years ago (45 children)

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?

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  • [–] 100 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    What is the end game here?

    Bold of you to assume Elon has one.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I'm sure he has an end-game.

    It's everything up to that point where he's completely at a loss.

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  • [–] 62 points 3 years ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

    Not only wacky but hideous? I mean if you are going to re-logo (forget that it be for idiotic reasons...) the least you could do is make the design look decent.... this?? 😂

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago*

    This isn't a logo. It's a cry for help from a severely distressed mind.

    W̸͖͆H̵̡̹̖͂̂̑̅Ǎ̷̲̩͔̿͜͠T̷̩̫͗'̶̺̩͖͚́̚Ś̴̭̺̼̳ ̶̼̱̗̓̄̾H̸̡̗̫̝͘A̵͍̥̔̾P̸͇͎̾́P̵̙̦̀́ͅE̸̢̧̹͐͝͠N̸̫̲͙̘͝I̵̳͍͇̼̾̋̀̕N̶͚͖̪̒̈́̈G̵͕̱̓̃

    ̷̛̰̣̠͛͊ ̸̳̼̹͂ ̸̳͕̳̔̈̉͝ ̸̛̲̋̄͘ ̴͎͐ ̸̝̃̽̚W̵͓̙̏̄̀̉Ḩ̶͚͍͗͠A̷̢̹̥͙͑͐͆T̷̫́̉̄̚'̸̧͍͌͆͜Ş̷̗͚̻̓̉͒͠ ̶̣̯̬͑̈́H̷̘͛̇̚A̷̭͗̓͘P̶̭̠̔͒͝P̵̱̯̲̓͌͘E̵̡̪̣͇̕͝N̵͓͊̇̿̋Ì̷̭̯̠͗̈́͠N̴̬̹̲͔͑̈͝G̵͎̖̥͇̀

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 99 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    Genious.

    He found the fastest way to burn 44B$, me reckons.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    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.)

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    [–] 40 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    This is the poster child for enshittification; RIP bluebird, we salute what you were.

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  • [–] 36 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

    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.

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    [–] 34 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    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.

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    [–] 32 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Are people really still convincing themselves this is a 5D chess move.

    After everything else, are we still doing that?

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    [–] 30 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    The real x logo is of course from Xorg. Never forget that.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 22 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    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"

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    So, if there's no more bird, then we shouldn't call them "tweets." What should they be called now? X-cretions?

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    [+] 10 points 3 years ago (7 children)
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    [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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