This is much worse that the blandification of the Slack logo.
Actually the X logo itself is good on it's own terms. And would be great for a newcomer startup, but not for Twitter. Twitter is the household name. This looks like a midlife crisis.
So I am removing all the obsolete bird icons (with links) from my site...
Not that Elon will exactly be quaking in his boots, but the search engines will notice me and others doing the same. Death by a billion hyperlink cuts!
Twitter has managed to get so many words to be common. Like it's a "tweet", not "a post on facebook". It's a "retweet" or "quote tweet", not "something I shared on facebook". Why throw all this deep brand recognition away?
It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
Thats's only when applied to things outide twitter, which I don't think it's the case. I have never heard anyone talk about retweeting on facebook or whatever. The fact they don't do this would make their brand even more valuable
It's pretty simple to avoid that. And no one really talks about Tweeting outside the context of Twitter, which made Twitter's job way easier than say Google's, where something like "I googled you on Bing" has become an acceptable and common turn of phrase.
I grew up in Houston and this was a common question (and answer) to the point where all the midwesterners in college arguing about “soda” vs “pop” just thought us Texans were crazy.
There are probably hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites out there that have the twitter bird logo at the bottom either to direct link people to share the article or maybe a link to the profile of the author or whatever.
Aren’t those little share buttons served via a CDN or third party anyway? All you need to do is swap out the image that the URL points to and any site that uses that URL suddenly starts serving the new image.
Elob has a fixiation on the letter. As I understand it, he wants to create a 'meta' platform for everything. I think in China such platforms exist (?). It's not to far away to say, that you need a 'meta' name for a platform like that. Probably wants to leave the 'private company' image and try to create an 'institution'. I hope it fails.
WeChat is extremely popular in China and on the surface it's a messaging app but below that is a whole swath of stuff, the most interesting IMO is the decentralized marketplace. My GF's mom is Chinese and she buys tons of stuff like vegetables and housewares from random people through the app.
People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.
If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.
WeChat's success lies in chinese culture that people value convenience over privacy bc the gov can already monitor everything its citizen do. It is a "Super App", a mini OS with conglomerate of apps that has everything users need. Without ever leaving the app, it drastically lowers learning curve for people. Instead of learning how to use multiple apps, they need to only learn just one.
I mean, you can also buy stuff on WhatsApp... But honestly, Twitter V2, or, well, X, looks more to me Facebook. Twitter was twitter for its simplicity.
Remember when everyone got pissed off because they doubled the characters? How many is on Twitter now, 5000? Markdown support too. And now they are planning banking, latex, some linkedin copy cat stuff...
In reality twitter is trying to become Facebook. Facebook only didn't had banking because FED/EU didn't liked the Libra idea.
I like Elon, I think he is smart.
I also think he has too much power and influence.
And along with that comes corruption, non sense and slew of other negative attributes.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Twitter, is in fact, X/Twitter, or as I've recently taken to calling it, X plus Twitter. Twitter is not a social media unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning X system made useful by the X corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full as defined by X.
I feel like "to google something" has by now become a generic term that means just to search on the web, not necessarily using Google. In particular, in Russian, I've heard people say "загуглить в яндексе", literally "to google in Yandex".
By the same token, the users of XXX dot com will probably still refer to their posts as tweets. Though as OP points out, "tweet" isn't genericized like kleenex or google, so it is less likely to survive the sudden brand shift.
No one quite understands that. But if you want just the search, there's ya.ru.
However, in Russia, Yandex is not just a search engine. It does everything and then some — search, cloud storage, email, maps & navigation, music streaming, a voice assistant with Amazon-Echo-like speakers, news, online advertising, event tickets, a marketplace, taxi, food delivery a-la Uber Eats, car sharing, online grocery store, e-scooter rentals in major cities, and this list goes on and on. And that Dzen ad-filled cringy blogging thing no one seems to like. But Yandex is literally inescapable, it's everywhere and you'd be somewhat excluding yourself from the society if you refuse to use any of their services.
> The company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted that while Twitter changed the way people conversed with each other, X will go further and will have features “centered in [...] payment/banking”
Good luck with that. I was permanently banned from Twitter for reporting Russian terrorist content.
If you fancy being locked out of your money for apparently a thought crime, then X (or rather Z) is for you, comrades.
It's really hard to be blocked from your money by the entire banking system. In my country, at worst you're banned from credit and investment, which is really not cool (cannot use checks, only have debit cards, no saving account trying to keep up with inflation...), but in the end you don't have to sue to get your money back.
It's quite different from payment apps (my father used PayPal once to collect a 7k payment, spent 3k in lawyer fees to get the money).
This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter. From an extremely valuable list of verified users to the name which is even used as a verb.
There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.
> From an extremely valuable list of verified users
Was it extremely valuable? I know a lot of people (myself included) viewed blue checkmarks as a "company PR account/mass-media journalist/celebrity account maintained by SMM" sign. The most interesting people I followed on Twitter were not verified.
A verified account managed by PR/SMM is probably better than a scam account of the same person offering you to get rich with this one weird trick.
A verified account of a newspaper is probably better than a fake one, spreading false news about the war in Ukraine, for example.
Managed by PR or not, a verified account stood for the person behind this account, and guarantees this is their (proxy or direct) opinion or a real fact about upcoming event, or information about a past event. Right now a verified account means nothing.
Yes because on a Twitter style platform it is those core influencers that are important to the growth and health of the overall network. It is not the random guy with 100 followers, no qualifications, life experience or expertise.
And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.
I feel like you (and the person above) are missing the whole point of Twitter for many people. I'm not interested in influencers at all, I'm interested in the random guys which often have a lot of interesting life experiences or expertise (shoutout to @foone, for example). And in crisis, video and witnesses from people on the ground are more valuable than second-hand opinionated media rewritings.
People use Twitter in vastly different ways, so it's difficult for each of us to appreciate the uses that others put it to. Even in your case, though, the flaw now is that you don't know if 'verified' accounts are bots, paid actors, etc.
You still don’t want a fake Russian Government announcing nuclear war on Twitter, do you? Of course non-verified accounts had value, but you also want to know if a supposedly official account is the real deal.
> You still don’t want a fake Russian Government announcing nuclear war on Twitter, do you?
Ugh, have you seen Telegram posts by the real Dmitry Medvedev (ex-President, ex-PM, now chairman of the Security Council)? I guess the line between real and parody is pretty thin here.
Besides, anyone falling for the nuclear war announcement on Twitter deserved that. Social medias aren't the trustable channel despite any verifications. What if the real account got hacked?
> And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.
So the elites who we should trust as opposed to commoners that we shouldn’t
Yes it was extremely valuable; the easiest way to tell is that shortly after Twitter leadership got rid of all legacy verified accounts, they had to frantically add some back. And even then the company lost about 2/3 of its value.
Including adding back dead people murdered by the same people who funded the Twitter buyout. The level of self-awareness surrounding Musk is astonishingly absent.
No, it was elitist and alienating, and people hated them until Elon was in charge, and then we were taught to love them because a bunch of blue check journalists with no followers and no likes instantly turned into journalists with no followers, no likes and no blue checks and lost the delusion that they were important. Then they wrote articles about it.
Imagine a bunch of nominal liberals advocating for royalty, and you have the blue check whiners.
"Royalty". Right. Now you have impersonation accounts of everybody under the sun selling you shitcoins and convincing low-information people that they're real because they paid eight bucks.
This is the angry-for-the-weirdest-reasons thing I will read today, and it is 9:10 AM. Coupled with your post elsewhere in the thread that somehow justifies this as paying to be "part of the conversation", and it only computes as "'tis cope".
Or to think intelligence in one domain transfers to another. There’s a long history of Nobel prize winners having stupid ideas outside the domain where they did the work for which they’re celebrated.
It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
liberals talking about billionaires always gives me a brain aneurysm, but regardless I'd just like to point out that whatever talent and intelligence Musk possesses in your minds, is very inconsequential in comparison to his families wealth through ownership of an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa.
This falls under the "curse of dimensionality"[0]. There are so many tasks/patterns/parts of life that humans can develop specialized skills in that most humans (nearly every human?) are exceptional at something. It might be "identifying the best cardboard scraps and arranging it to make a bed on the sidewalk which is optimally comfortable", or "knowing how to make one specific family member smile" but it'll be something.
If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.
One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."
If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.
Given the curse of dimensionality, I actually think most humans could be exceptional at something--just that something might be incredibly specific, like "washing dishes while hopping on one foot and having fifteen people tickle you with feathers."
Neither of you really have a conclusion. Your modality is overly-reductionist. His is overly broad. In both cases it's impossible to reliably measure. What had ought to reasonably be concluded, then, is that we're entirely ignorant as the the capacities of an individual. From that agnosticism, then, we can build a framework of expectations. And that is entirely elective - if you want to say that nobody is exceptional, you'll seek to reinforce that. If one elects to search in every individual for some special capacity, that's what they'll find. I don't know about you, but between those two framings I'd prefer the latter.
Then there's the objectivist train wherein no expectations are allowed, one must duly profess their ignorance and make baseless measurements in estimation and comment on the distribution of faculties per individual and the degree of resolution to which these measurements are allowed to take place - and it isn't to the degree which any great conclusions can be drawn, I assure you. There is no means by which you can splay out a person's whole and examine them. Time spent with one or two is time spent neglecting some other specimen. Not to mention the interference added by environment. And even in the best of cases that time spent may only be revelatory of some minute fraction of the whole, where again only some shallow conclusions may be drawn and they're only conclusive insofar as the observer has decided they are at some point in the context of time and space within their ever-evolvong system because there's hardly a tape measure suited to the infinite degrees of freedom that exist in the world.
Undecided. Society is not doing a good job of teasing talent out of people. The only exceptional thing is that some talent is exposed at all...despite our best efforts to stifle it.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
This is trivializing exceptional skill dimensions and exceptional achievements by equating them to the mundane and unremarkable ones.
The curse of dimensionality doesn't imply all skills are equal, only that finding meaningful exceptions in high dimensional data by just data analysis is hard, but we as a society don't find and filter for exceptionality in a data driven way like that, we have a very limited set of dimensions we assign to "success" (financial means being a big one). Someone making a great cardboard bed on the street will never be one of those dimensions.
I think being smart is more of a state of a person than a property of a person, kind of like health. Genetics plays a role in it (you can be born unhealthy) but so does the environment. I think extreme success in the modern world creates a very unhealthy environment for the state of your smartness.
After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality?
That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
Around a decade ago it was considered pretty dumb to spend all your time and money building rockets and electric cars. I sometimes wonder how high the bar is set for 'intelligence.'
I never understood this obsession with who founded what. How is founding something useful if it doesn't grow? Elon has a *demonstrated* talent for taking good ideas and making them wildly successful. Granted he seems to be off on a very weird tangent with Twitter and it will be interesting to see where it leads, but it would be dumb to just dismiss him as a childless out of control billionaire (seriously?).
There was zero way Twitter could have survived on the path it was going; if not for drastic changes he instituted - mainly in dramatically cutting costs and overhead - they would have been dead anyway. They are no longer bleeding. They have lots of debt, thus they still need to do something new to pay it off, but at least they aren't accruing more debt like they were before.
Twitter was a niche player anyway - it was disproportionately used by techies but was far from having a broad penetration so why not move in a bold, new direction? Its current model is already known to be untenable long term - even before Elon bought them.
The real issue is ads are no longer going to be enough to sustain the tech giants (ads were mostly a scam of bot farmed clicks, over promised results, etc.). I wouldn't worry about Twitter now X - it will survive, whether this crowd feels it's for them or not. What I'm really interesting in seeing is how Google, Facebook and others are going to remain relevant. In the near term I would expect layoffs to accelerate since that's the lowest hanging fruit for these companies, but at some point they are likely going to have to come up with something more substantial and of actual value.
well there's the alternative theory that this is a deliberate ploy to destroy the largest platform for grassroots public organisation the world has ever seen
I think you missed the point of the post you're replying to:
elmu's current wealth is owed in large part, perhaps the most, to wealth he received from his rich, apartheid African jewel mine owning parents: that is the money with which he was able to get the rest of the money
I understand that but and I think you missed the point of my post.
If I had multiplied the advantage provided by my upbringing in the same way that Musk had, I'd be massively wealthy (but not nearly as wealthy). From a relative perspective, Musk is still a massive success.
I haven't come close. I'm ahead in some ways and behind in others.
I think you're missing an even greater point: if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
though, don't get down on yourself and where you started vs. where you are: the relationship obviously isn't linear: the richer you are, the easier it becomes to turn 1 dollar into 2 dollars, especially when your family is wealthy, too
> had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
I definitely would have not done that. I am not that ambitious and I guarantee I would have been happy to achieve practically nothing while enjoying the comforts of my upbringing.
I understand and acknowledge that, and tried to account for it in the full sentence, of which you only quoted half. The relevant portion is italicized below:
> if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
Isn't that completely torpedoing your point though? Elon might have had a head start but he still lapped me 16 times on the way to where he is now.
If everyone had the exact same head start he did (or didn't, it seems disputed), we all wouldn't have achieved what he has. Just because he had a head start that we would all have liked to have doesn't mean we all could have accomplished what he has.
It'd be like dismissing an MLB pitcher throwing a perfect game because his parents could afford to send him to private coaches.
> Isn't that completely torpedoing your point though?
why would it? You aren't everybody, or anybody else but you, so saying you wouldn't want to do it doesn't really have any affect on the point (especially since we're discussing ability, not ambition)
He said that there's no proof the mine ever existed. He also said that his parents' wealth didn't help him that much. Which is why he also never bothered much about the mine.
I'm going on memory here, from what I read/heard online. I think people just want to write him off, tbh.
Does that imply that everyone who started with more money than Musk now has even more money than Musk? Or perhaps it implies that you just can't ever get poorer?
I don't think its possible, or fair, to reduce success to a single digestible dimension.
You deny that investment costs money? You deny that investment makes money? The more you make, the more more you invest; the more you invest, the more you make. Exceptions are irrelevant to the norm.
And somone had to come out the winner in a stochastic Market. It just halpened to be Musk. No competence requirer, at all.
I think Elon is a bit misguided, especially in his business ventures in the UK. For instance, it seems egregious to most people that Elon expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis.
Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. I think he's done good things, but in other ways he's not a very good businessman.
Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it. Tweet read limits, DM limits, and now the inbox filter for your DMs got silently auto-changed to "only verified accounts can DM you".
And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play".
If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
> I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that.
You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you".
Ah, I only recalled that there wasn't a way to prevent DMs from everyone, not even people I follow, and indeed Elon's innovation doesn't improve that. Oh well.
I don't have a Twitter account, but I would occasionally read threads, and obviously a lot of content linked to various Twitter posts. After all of these changes to limits and generally making it harder to read Twitter content without being logged in, I simply don't bother clicking on their links anymore.
Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
Currently if you try to DM most people, you'll get the message:
"Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue."
But it's what he's relying on to try to arrest the free-fall. He doesn't expect everyone to pay £100/year, but he expects a certain number to do so.
IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
Well, I was offering my opinion of why Twitter is failing from a business perspective, not from a moral or political one. You could well argue that the political bias is now open, and that such an outcome is a good thing. But from a business point of view, I maintain that it is bad for the company — overt politicisation is attractive to some, of course, but for a mass-market platform like Twitter/X, alienating approximately half of your potential audience is just bad business.
> Of course he did. He put his own money and reputation on the line for both businesses.
This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time.
The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
He is an investor and marketer who wants to be a seen as a genius techie, which he clearly isn't. Hence his fake titles such as "Tesla Founder" (he wasn't) or "SpaceX Chief Technology Officer" (he isn't) or "Technoking" (I'm sorry?)
If you think he's just an investor then you are grossly ignorant into the roles Elon has at his companies - he is the epitome of hands on. You don't will multiple, entirely new industries into existence by sitting on ass throwing piles of money at random people.
Good grief.
Well look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Totally different skill sets but they were complimentary, with Jobs largely taking Wozniak’s work and packaging it up in a form that sells.
“Slapping a name on other people’s work” is something leaders do. They also typically are the ones who gather those people together and create the environment in which they can do their best work.
Depends on your definition of "doing those things". He led the companies that achieved those things. Tesla's case is more complicated than SpaceX's but in both cases he was at the top in a crucial moment.
There’s an episode of the podcast On With Kara Swisher where she goes into detail about who he was and how he went off the rails. The date is 2022-11-14. I found it really helpful to square this circle.
I’m not as familiar with Tesla, but I’ve been following SpaceX pretty closely since around 2014. He’s not in the trenches doing CFD to optimize cooling on the latest iteration of the raptor engine, and who knows whether reusability was originally his idea, but he knows his shit. When you hear him talk about rockets, he sounds very competent, unlike when he talks about software. And I’ve never heard any actual rocket scientists say Elon doesn’t know shit about rockets.
(He does sometimes move fast and ignore established wisdom though, as with the concrete pad that got obliterated during the last launch. But sometimes that’s how you sidestep decades of cruft)
I do wish Gwynne Shotwell were more of a household name. She’s the one running SpaceX while Elon is off Eloning.
> Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon.
Well I do. Or at least I did.
He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it.
Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things.
But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.
I don’t know, is it really fair to attribute any of these to him? There are thousands of engineers/scientists that did the actual work. Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table. With a big enough wallet it’s not particularly hard. Also, spacex had plenty of government funds going to it — wouldn’t those same funds going to NASA resulted in similar results from taxpayer money?
Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
The people who did the work deserve credit. So does the person who had the vision and brought them together. Those engineers didn't get together of their own accord and nominate musk as a mascot. Regardless of how you want to summarize Musk's career in the context of his current behavior, which is getting tiresome, I think this is a false dichotomy.
So what if he did? What were they doing before he got involved?
If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.
There are plenty wildly successful people. There's a list of billionaires, and even more millionaires. Of course, these people tend to pull up ladders behind them, so they prevent other people from their opportunities. :)
> Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table.
I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol.
There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so.
I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX...
I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.
NASA (or perhaps a better comparison ULA) wouldn't have taken the risk to try to make reusable rockets. I think Elon's value in Space X (aside from hiring because he clearly has some brilliant engineers working there) is that he's crazy enough to risk it all on "crazy" ideas. He was REALLY close to failing on both Tesla and SpaceX because of this, but it wound up working out and producing things that almost certainly wouldn't exist otherwise.
What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.
The shuttle might as well have been disposable for all the inefficiencies in its design. If it was really reusable and cost effective we'd still be using it. Guess what - we aren't.
That’s a strange conclusion. A 1978 Ford Fairmont does everything the common person needs in a car. But there was room for improvement in terms of features, reliability, and efficiency. So we continued to develop cars. Expecting any vehicle to be perfect is unrealistic. Even the Falcon 9 has evolved. SpaceX is working on another vehicle that is even more efficient. The shuttle had flaws but it was reusable.
But the Shuttle was retired well before the US had a replacement ready. For quite some time, the US was dependent on the Russian Soyuz. It was technically reusable, but at a pretty steep cost. It was not very efficient.
With respect to the missions the US government cares the most about, the US did have replacements for the Shuttles. Namely Atlas V and Delta IV. After ISS construction was finished, there was little point in keeping the shuttle around just to ferry people around unsafely. Launching people into space is more of a side gig to keep a steady stream of young idealistic recruits coming in. Letting that lapse for a few years was demoralizing (less demoralizing than losing a third shuttle would have been) but not a real problem for the US government otherwise.
Incidentally, Atlas V used/uses Russian engines. Pretty bad idea in retrospect but at the time a lot of people thought it seemed reasonable.
It was a hell of a lot cheaper to refurbish and reuse a shuttle than to build a new one each time. That's why 135 shuttle missions were flown with 5 shuttles instead of 135 shuttles. It's true that refurbishment between use was far more expensive and time consuming than had been planned, however it was a hell of a lot cheaper than building a new shuttle each time. Refurbishing a shuttle took months but building Endeavour to replace Challenger took several years and cost several orders of magnitude more. There can be no serious question that the shuttle orbiters were mostly reusable.
> cost effective
That's another matter entirely. It would have been cheaper to use conventional disposable rockets. Even better than that is reusable conventional rockets; the economic sense of which has now been demonstrated by Falcon 9.
Falcon 9 and STS do not have the same capabilities. F9 can match STS on payload but only if the booster is expended. With booster recovery F9 payload to LEO is ~25% less than STS. Falcon 9 has no capability to recover payload from space like STS [1]. They're different vehicles with different missions. We didn't need the shuttle anymore so we reallocated resources. All the F9 ISS missions are only happening because we had STS to build the ISS in the first place.
Having money is necessary but not sufficient to achieve the things he did. There are other millionaires and billionaires who tried to do what he did but couldn't. Regardless of your personal animus towards Elon, give the man credit where credit is due. Tesla and SpaceX are great contributions to the world and he was instrumental in implementing them, from capital to the business core ideas.
I think you're massively underestimating how difficult it is to allocate capital and execute business plans.
When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.
For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.
On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
While you're not completely wrong, your estimation on replaceability of engineers in general isn't just "hey monster.com please send 5x general engineers my way" after you lose a few. Especially when it comes to senior positions, or unique aerospace roles like at SpaceX. There's a reason those salaries go sky high at times.
That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.
He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".
> But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified
My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs.
If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).
> He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.
There's a good reason why they started with sports cars and luxury sedans. And showing how ridiculously fast it could accelerate was a big part of Musk's marketing.
The space shuttle is a reusable upper stage. The shuttle successfully massively increased the cost of the upper stage by making it reusable falling incredibly short of it's initial design goals.
It’s also a massive stretch to describe the shuttle as “reusable” when the cost to refurbish the orbiter between flights was comparable to the cost of an expendable vehicle.
It’s not a stretch at all. That’s the definition of reusable. It might not be economical but that’s a whole other metric. Dismissing a first-of-its-kind state-of-the-art vehicle from the 1970s for not meeting the standards of 50 years in the future isn’t going to lead you to any insightful conclusions.
If you can't engage constructively then that is probably for the best. But you should reevaluate your assessment because you have come to an incorrect conclusion.
I have engaged constructively this whole time, and you've downvoted every comment of mine you could. (HN doesn't allow you to downvote direct replies to your own comments, and those are the only comments of mine that aren't downvoted, so it's easy to tell.) That indicates bad faith.
Amazing that people are so willing to dismiss economics to be technically correct. Hilariously, that kind of thinking is why we no longer use the shuttle.
Yeah, the whole point of reusability is cost efficiency. If your system is less cost efficient but technically reuses the vehicle, nobody cares (aside from maybe some checkbox-ticking federal bureaucrat).
The Shuttle also reused the SRBs which are the first stage. Only the fuel tank was single-use. The Falcon 9 is a (optionally!) reusable first stage but the second stage is discarded.
The initial design goals was to build a space cargo plane understandable and acceptable to taxpayers and is capable of capturing a Soviet spy satellite with a mockup left in the orbit all in just one orbit and divert to any standard 747 runway and may be operated by both NASA and USAF.
The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.
The Space Shuttle is only partially reusable, cost a $billion per launch, has long been retired, and has a poor safety record, having lost its crew twice. It was cool, but didn't really fulfill its promise.
Falcon 9 is also only partially reusable. The claim is that Musk gave us reusable rockets with no qualifier on economics or safety. By that standard the Shuttle was first.
The Shuttle in original form can fly on a "regular AF mission" and bring back a Soviet Hubble and land "diverted" straight into Area 51. That's the point. The thing is all built around that purpose.
That sort of mission is mostly speculation. Nabbing a Soviet spy satellite would probably be suicide, they could have easily had scuttling charges onboard that would destroy both the satellite and the shuttle.
What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.
The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.
> He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
True that.
> He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over.
Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team.
These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
The point is the market was positioned so that any participant would have benefited. Maybe Blue Origin or another company would have taken years longer to achieve what SpaceX did. Maybe more expensively, not as good, though one doubts hardly any less unreliably. But circumstances made it so that any player who tried could have gotten NASA the rockets more or less, if they tried, because the government was actively supporting private industry efforts to do so.
> IF he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success.
Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.
PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.
Yes, before the founders sold out, Paypal was very novel and unique. Now they seem to be more interested in tying up people's money to use for float as their primary business model, rather than providing value as a transaction clearing house.
When someone is that successful a lot of people will try and write them off. I wrote in another comment, I don't agree with everything he says or does. But he is undoubtedly in the firing line.
One thing I vehemently disagree with is the crazy hours he makes his employees work. I think it's wrong from a people perspective in general, and as a programmer I think this could only lead to bad outcomes.
Eberhard and Tarpenning had the idea to make an EV sports car (rather than the traditional "green" branding that EV's tried to go for), so I think they deserve credit for the "sexy" approach. Musk deserves credit for recognizing the opportunity, commandeering it, and keeping the idea going.
The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.
His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.
I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.
Did Musk originally go to Roscosmos to license their tech and it was only after the laughed him out of the door that SpaceX pursued it's current strategy? His original plan was literally to be dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
<< Elon expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis.
Honestly, this may be one of the good things he did. The entire population has gotten way too comfortable with free and it would be ideal if we could get away from this model.
While I agree that the free model is unsustainable, there are better ways than charging £10/mo for one social media site. A lot of people are struggling at the moment.
It's not. None of the donation-based instances are in the black, if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators. Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because it became too big for its own sake, the admin couldn't handle anymore then shuts it down.
Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.
> if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators
It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does.
> Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because
Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.
All of that is fine and good if we were talking about servers that were made for 100-200 people. This is not the case. When we are talking about servers that are house as many people as a large village, we are way past the realm of "community".
> human social structures don't endure like friendships do
IOW, the donation-based instances are not sustainable. If you want to have a service that you can rely on, you will need to resort to a professional service.
Nothing is indefinitely sustainable, and businesses are no exception. When the people involved don't want to do it any more, you have the same problem, whether it's volunteers volunteering, or professionals professionaling.
If I had a dollar for everyone that say this, I would have a lot more than the $20/year I am getting from my only two customers on my mastodon instance.
HN is a sort of ad. This place was made as a recruitment funnel for a VC firm.
Also there are occasionally overt ads for companies funded by said VC firm inserted into the list on the front page. You can recognize these because they have the comment sections disabled.
None of the YC companies pay for the job listings. So no, HN by itself is not a business, so it makes no sense to debate whether it "ad-funded" or not.
The fact that there is someone with deep pockets that see this whole network as an opportunity for building their branding does not mean that they look at a balance sheet, or find "advertisers" in case their fund makes an expected loss, or anything like that.
I understand what you are trying to say, but it makes absolutely no sense and it's terrible word-thinking.
Let me repeat. HN, by itself, is not a business. It is pointless to talk about its "business model", "funding", "revenue" or whether is breaks even or not. HN is not a core part of YC.
Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are at its core social media networks. They wouldn't exist as businesses if they are not expecting to get any type of revenue based on their social media offering. There is no way to compare any of them with HN.
Who said HN is a business? I never said that, you seem to be reading between lines, words I didn't write. To reiterate, you asked if HN is funded by ads. I responded that HN is an ad (an ad, not a business), and furthermore often contains overt ads. And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Anyway, if you want to argue with the version of me that exists in your imagination, you obviously don't need the real me here for it. So peace out.
Took me few minutes to find this one[1]. Looks like the pricing was $50/yr for full feature, with free plan for up to 40 following. Over 110k users at some point. Shut down in 2017.
I wouldn't mind the $8 per month for a platform I use frequently if I get some nice benefits in usage and this enhances the quality of the platform. It is a bit naive to think such a service could be obtained for free.
However, beyond the general development Twitter has taken since Musk took over and especially how the premium memberships were rolled out - the conflation of paying for the account with being verified has killed that as an option for me. Nowadays the blue mark rather is an anti-pattern to many. This is what you get when you sell "reputation".
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is the first novel by Douglas Coupland, published by St. Martin's Press in 1991.[1] The novel, which popularized the term Generation X, is a framed narrative in which a group of youths exchange heartfelt stories about themselves and fantastical stories of their creation.
It's not some obviously horrible decision to change a name that "isn't even that stained."
I've turned the corner on this. I think he's turning twitter into a place where blue checks publicly talk to other blue checks, and people willing to pay a recurring fee to try to be included in that conversation can try to get their attention. What it's going to be is a massacre of reply guys (who are going to lose visibility) and sockpuppets (whose new/unused accounts will be useless.)
I'm honestly interested in that. I don't even post on twitter, I read, so I'm not giving the perspective of an active twitter participant, but tbh 99% of non-blue-check twitter participants only cost twitter money, are dumb and their accounts should be nuked from orbit. Their only purpose was to make the room feel crowded, and thus to attract more broke users. Not that most of blue check twitter isn't terrible, but that's the terrible that people are actively looking for. Terrible with a fanbase.
So, in the future, you should be paying for twitter or have an account at least a year or two old in order to harass journalists, politicians, and people you watch on television. I could see that being appealing to almost everybody.
I'm having difficulty understanding this comment in relation to one you made elsewhere in the subthread, where you said people who liked the previous verified systems were elitists.
Here you are advocating a literal pay for play, and you're identifying certain classes of users as being "worthless" and advocating "nuking them from orbit."
That seems way more radically elitist than wanting to know if something is a parody account or not? Help me understand here?
Well, the check just served a different purpose, it was to distinguish parody and troll accounts from authentic ones. I think it's role as status symbol is exaggerated.
But charging in pursuit of removing "worthless" users from the platform - you see what I'm saying there right? That's literally constructing an underclass, deciding they are unwashed and unacceptable in refined company, and then charging money to keep them out.
It's the business model of a country club. Maybe it's a cheap country club, that's a difference of degree.
I've paid similar amounts of money to join closed forums before and found them to be enjoyable and relatively free of trolls. I'm not opposed to it in principle. What I was asking about was the contradiction.
"Free speech!" Meanwhile, Twitter's former management would have at least put up a fight when Erdogan wanted things taken down. And we know this because they did, regularly, with regards to requests from governments around the world.
What of Musk? Could it be that he just likes strongmen and weird bigots, and it's for them he wants free speech, and everyone else can hang?
Unless you have information I do not, you have no idea the content of those requests. But given the list of countries that Twitter refused demands from, I am willing to guess that no, it's not all requests aimed at your ideological brethren.
Previously people were banned for tweeting (...sorry x-ing): "men are not women". Twitter is the same anti-free-speech cesspool, just different management.
> Twitter's former management would have at least put up a fight when Erdogan wanted things taken down. And we know this because they did, regularly, with regards to requests from governments around the world.
Under Twitter’s previous ownership, the social media site complied with government takedown requests at a lower rate.
Twitter fully complied with 440, or 50 percent, of requests and partially complied with 377, or 42 percent, during the 12-month period before Musk’s takeover.
Turkey was also the biggest source of these requests at 27 percent, followed by South Korea with 20.6 percent and India with 12.8 percent.
I personally get both sides; at least the JP branch of Twitter was messing a lot with trends and pushing weird left-wing extremisms. That stopped because JP branch stopped existing. On the other hand, he's started running ethnic cleansing on the platform, so yeah it's what you said as well.
What Musk has changed in the time since he acquired Twitter is the following:
* Changed the moderation policies to allow more speech that had previously been considered impermissible hate speech or violent speech.
* Increased compliance with government censorship requests (which are predominantly of the form "please make this person stop saying bad things about me," and, in many cases, isn't actually permissible under that country's constitution).
In the actual sense, as in people discussing without being suspended left and right for ideological offenses. Not as in "people tracking other people's private jet flights".
He not allowing his own ass or companies to be criticized on his own platform, I can take as still an improvement free-speech-wise other the previous situation.
Yes, but HE has always loved the name X for a brand. He also wanted it for PayPal. He put it in SpaceX. And if he loves X, everybody else surely does too, so he's a genius for rebranding Twitter to X. I'm sure that's roughly his line of thought.
For him there is. Twitter at $44b cash was not a business decision, it's something he arrived at through a level of reality-deflecting hubris and vindictiveness that remains unmatched by anyone since.
Remember how he appealed to Trump to return to the site, and Trump ignored him and stuck to Truth Social? He then tried to back his rival DeSantis with a campaign launch on Twitter, which failed miserably.
It's not 2016 anymore, Twitter's lost its pull as a political kingmaker and/or disinformation platform. That was the one thing Musk could realistically have expected his acquisition to still be able to deliver. Now that users and advertisers are fleeing and news sites are using Twitter sources less, he may as well bury the site, as it's outlived its usefulness to him.
The sheer genius of throwing away the brand of one of a handful of companies that has a phrase that has entered common parlance: hoover it up, google it, and tweet it.
Feels like Musk has caught some of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 'Introducing Monday' nonsense. At least we could attribute that to the dotcom madness.
This is completely incomprehensible and very funny. It's also amusing how different this is to what Twitter has done. It seems incredibly unlikely that any consultants (overpriced or otherwise) were involved in Twitter's rebranding, whereas the Pepsi document seems like outsiders trying very earnestly to deliver to an executive they don't understand.
What if there were massive economic changes coming in the next 10 years? including gold backed BRICs currency competing with USD. Rise in a cdbc including carbon credit to limit spending and continued inflation globally.
Could this be a way to secure a global payment system away from a potential tyrannical alternative? Probably not. But if you were more in the know and were an insane billionaire, you might want to try..
Right? Why even buy the company if you’re going to throw away the branding? I’m pretty sure he could have built his own version for a fraction of the 44 billion he spent albeit without the user base, but at least the new user base is there by choice.
You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid.
Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?
It still has a boatload of users and is still the cultural town square of the tech world. To build X from scratch you'd have to convince people like Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, a bunch of other VCs etc to move.
Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
My entire tech bubble moved to mastodon and it's been great. No ads, no algorithms. Maybe the VC bubble is just stuck with it because of what it used to be?
Infosec/cybersec. If you just want CVEs, automatic updates, and LinkedIn-style influencers, Twitter is still fine. If you want the stories, the how, the why, and reading humans live updates, you go to mastodon/Activitypub (bonus if you're a student: make your own activityPub reader!)
Not in principle, we're just against paying to use Twitter.
(The dynamic is very different when it's voluntary and feels like supporting a community, though, and in practice it's going to be a few whales making donations)
No, I'm a big fan of paying for what I use, and I actually do give money to a small social media site that I use. However, I'm also strongly opposed to giving money to transphobes and Republicans, so Twitter is out.
Definitely a lot of electronics/EE stuff has also moved to mastodon (at least people that i was following). I follow a bigger group there than I have ever on twitter. Mastodon is still a bit quirky sometimes, but my mastodon feed is now definitely more interesting than my twitter feed.
There could be a market for one central Mastodon host with better UX that makes it easier to onboard non-tech people, but I'm not sure why making money is a pre-req here. Mastodon was never meant to be a for-profit enterprise as far as I'm aware.
You... probably don't? I continue to believe that there may be some small value in a single-person-instance-as-a-service product for celebs etc (particularly if Threads goes ahead with its embrace of ActivityPub; lots of value for celebrities in having the audience but having some independence from Facebook), but it's very niche.
Not everything has to be about making money, you realise.
It seems like a hassle to re-negotiate federation each time for each celebrity. What about a general PR themed instance (strictly moderated so that everyone will peer with it).
Thats actually a really cool idea. The big PR agencies who rep for actors, authors, musicians etc, could run an instance and that's where the person's identity would be.
Does anyone make money from your Mastodon use? I understand how moving to your own place could be good, hell, if you're just talking to each other you could even consider retroshare, but I don't understand the business loss when a bunch of IT professionals move their conversations to a private server.
> Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
I think this is pretty optimistic thinking. "Oh no, I can't pick my way through a bunch of bigoted garbage to which the owner responds 'Concerning' or read Marc Andreesen being deeply weird or see 30,000 reply guys to Paul Graham hawking shitcoins, whatever will I do?" is, I think, probably okay at this point.
Having the thinkfluencey types before the spam and impersonation taps were turned on to full was probably valuable; now Twitter is getting the stink on it and that's hard to wash off.
Personally speaking, Bluesky picked up pretty much everybody I care to talk to and remaining on Twitter in a material capacity is a flag that I probably don't want to hear from you.
Sure but like, Twitter's userbase is now a toxic asset. Starting there seems worse than starting fresh because you can't get rid of the baggage but advertisers also don't want to spend money on them.
Sure. Avoid the platform, continue to mock it and companies that use it to drive down its valuation to the point where he gives up and sells it for a massive loss.
It was a political game for journalists and now it’s officially instead of unofficially meaningless, but it was never serviceable and certainly not “harmful”. Hyperbole is a plague.
It is absolutely harmful for the user experience because it's tied to a boost in the visibility of your tweets. It's essentially made replies a useless avenue for interesting content.
Instead of the top replies to popular posts being tweets that have been boosted by a signal that arguably indicates quality (views, likes, retweets, replies of their own) tweets are boosted by a signal of the opposite - the poster's willingness to pay for visibility of content that couldn't rise to the top on its own merits or that of its poster.
Replies to popular content are now a wasteland for interesting content or discussion unless you've mass-blocked Twitter Blue subscribers - definitely harmful.
Could this all be part of Musk's plan, though? As Sun Tzu said, "when you are strong, appear weak". There's no denying that Musk is highly intelligent. If a play of his seems completely bone-headed, there's a good chance it's actually the opposite.
> "there's a good chance it's actually the opposite."
There isn't a "good" chance. It's extraordinarily, extremely rare that someone makes such a genius play that other experts consider it foolish. These events in sport buisness or other areas are often stuff of legend because of how rare they are. Sure, if this play works out and turns to have been undoubtably right, it will be studied for years in buisness schools around the world. But up until that moment, we can be reasonably sure that this isnt one of those exceptionally rare cases
API rate limits for external API clients sure. API rate limits for their own application is insane (caveat, super high rate limits to prevent against truly exceptional use would be fine, but anything that impacts even the 98% user is nuts).
There’s no argument for it. Every goal of these sites is to increase time on site. A rate limit that kicked normal users of the site off in 10 minutes is… well, a truly and unambiguously bad choice.
> On February 13, Musk expressed concern over the fact that his tweet about Super Bowl LVII had garnered fewer impressions than U.S. President Joe Biden's. Summoning another meeting with engineers, Musk ordered an 80-person team to address the perceived issue, under penalty of being fired. As a result, engineers altered Twitter's algorithm to boost Musk's tweets by a factor of 1000
> By December 17, Twitter was blocking some links to Mastodon as being "potentially harmful" or "malware".
I initially thought buying twitter was about converting massively overvalued TSLA stock into only somewhat overvalued TWTR stock. I now think I was wrong.
If he was stupid, he wouldn't have so much success with both Tesla and SpaceX. Compare Jeff Bezos, who was highly successful with Amazon but not with Blue Origin. Which suggests that his success with Amazon was significantly due to luck. There are very few people who manage to create two world class companies.
I think you're confusing wealth, luck and general privilege with intelligence. Sure, intelligence depends a lot on your viewpoint and some people, especially in economics, take general success as an important factor. Not me though, anyone taking this hyperloop nonsense seriously can't be very intelligent from my point of view.
Maybe you could call Musk charismatic, but then he's rather atypically charismatic, cause his rethoric isn't exactly smooth. He stutters, mumbles and keeps repeating the same weird points like "interplanetary species". As if we need another hostile planet while we turn our own planet to desert. Don't get me wrong, i think exploration is great fun, but the way he's claiming it a necessity is just delusional.
There are like 8b people in the world. With that many people trying so many things, someone is bound to be successful. Elon was in the right place at the right time with his first big exit, which compounds to create additional opportunity, but you're right: that's no guarantee of continued success. However, someone at some point is going to be in the right place at the right time successively 3 or maybe even 4 times. That person will become exceedingly rich and everyone will think, as you have, that it must be due to their skill. However, eventually their luck runs out and they're exposed as being just as frail as the rest of us. Elon is no smarter than Jeff.
> There are like 8b people in the world. With that many people trying so many things, someone is bound to be successful.
Yes -- once, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But for creating a highly successful company twice, luck can't be a similarly major explanation, since it isn't "bound to happen" that someone who was highly successful once will be highly successful again. Because the number of people with one highly successful company is very small, unlike the number of people with zero highly successful companies. (If you throw a die ten times and get a six ten times, that is massive luck, which means that you almost certainly won't manage to do it again.)
So when people have one successful company, that may well be partly due to sheer luck, but if so, on their second attempt they almost certainly won't be so lucky. That's exactly what Jeff Bezos shows with Blue Origin. He started earlier than Musk did with SpaceX, had more money, and still is far less successful.
> Yes -- once, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But for creating a highly successful company twice, luck can't be a similarly major explanation, since it isn't "bound to happen"
It totally is bound to happen to someone. They get the right people involved and find the right contracts and make the right decision, it’s mostly timing.
The Amazon.com e-commerce store, Kindle (category-defining), the Amazon fulfillment network (rivaling UPS/FedEx), and of course AWS. That's at least 4 distinct very successful companies. But the way in which one success enabled the next is more obvious, so you don't want to separate them.
The comparison to Gates is just pathetic -- instead of Twitter and private space programs, his second act has been focused on things like food security, HIV/AIDS, and polio.
These things are all part of Amazon, not separate companies. Moreover:
> The Amazon.com e-commerce store
This was mostly a copy of eBay which used the existing Amazon market dominance.
> Kindle (category-defining)
Kindle came after the excellent Sony e-book readers. The reason why Kindle was so much more successful was the existing market dominance of Amazon combined with the fact that they used a proprietary Kindle-specific file format to squash the competition.
> The comparison to Gates is just pathetic -- instead of Twitter and private space programs, his second act has been focused on things like food security, HIV/AIDS, and polio.
SpaceX was not a "second act", except if you count PayPal as his first successful company. SpaceX was founded before Tesla. They do offer a global satellite network which brings Internet to remote areas around the world. That's quite different from a mere "private space program". As for the Gates foundation: This is not a profit driven company, so it is difficult to estimate how successful it is relative to the funds it has. I was talking about Musk's abilities as a founder and manager, not about altruism. (He definitely did things which people might classify as altruistic, such as paying for Ukraine's Starlink access for several months.)
> Gwynne Shotwell is he one running SpaceX and she's by all accounts very capable.
For all we know she is "running" SpaceX in the sense that she handles most smaller day-to-day decisions, but there is no evidence that she makes the large and important decisions about Starship and Starlink. All the evidence points to Musk making those decisions. It is even doubtful if she is more capable by herself than Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, since she hasn't started a large successful company, unlike Bezos. The situation is probably similar for Linda Yaccarino, the new Twitter CEO. For the big decisions, Musk remains in charge.
I wonder if it’s something that happened as years rolled on. He didn’t seem to be very contrarian or even social say over a decade ago.
Elon is self described with Aspergers Syndrome. This is from an interview :
“Other features of Asperger's syndrome include difficulty interacting with peers, inappropriate social or emotional behavior, and engaging in repetitive routines. Both children and adults with Asperger's syndrome are at an increased risk for depression, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mood and anxiety disorders, and other mental health disorders.”
My (very personal and unsubstantiated) opinion is that his thinking was something along the lines of "You say I can't buy Twitter for 44 billion $ and then drive it into the ground?! Ha! Watch this!"
Another stupid play is to merge verification with membership. I thought he would add a new membership tier along blue check mark to have some extra income. Instead he actually chose the bizarre route and sabotaged the verification.
Maybe he is really being paid by the Saudis to intentionally ruin Twitter to reduce the freedom of speech
> I thought he would add a new membership tier along blue check mark to have some extra income. Instead he actually chose the bizarre route and sabotaged the verification.
Because the sell the whole time was to let people roleplay as famous people. And that would have worked a bit more if the actual celebrities didn't immediately respond with "ew, no"
The features are ... pretty crummy. Longform tweets nobody wants to read, up to what ... 40 hour videos that nobody will watch. A basic functionality like edit?
And now the funniest one: getting paid to tweet, which the biggest accounts on Twitter got joke RPM to entice people to sign up for blue. I feel really bad for anyone who thinks they're going to make their $8 back.
He can't get any of this right and he seriously is already talking about becoming a bank or payment system? Good luck.
> Maybe he is really being paid by the Saudis to intentionally ruin Twitter to reduce the freedom of speech
Conspiracy theories aside, one has to wonder how all the geniuses running the sovereign wealth funds and investment banks that backed his Twitter takeover missed all the red flags. It's almost as if they don't have any idea what they are doing. Or they really bought into a cult of personality rather than a business strategy.
What does the path to success look like for "the everything app"?
I can't picture it. So far it looks like they're acting like a FAANG in a "fake it til you make it" move to try to attract money. But not only do they not have the scale, Twitter is also losing its place as the reference app for live text updates.
This is what he's been envisioning since back in the PayPal days.
The problem for Musk is that the US, EU, UK, AU etc are not remotely interested in a mainstream commerce platform that takes a lax approach to KYC/AML.
And despite Musk's delusions the "blue tick" program is not a suitable verification foundation to build payments on top of.
There isn't a chance that I'll ever use something like WeChat. I keep all of those components on separate companies because I don't ever want to be tied into something that has that kind of power over my life. Having choice is far better than integration.
I've switched banks 3 times over four decades, ISP more times than that, comms channels a couple of times as well (most recently due to Musk's acquisition of Twitter) and will probably do so again at least once. Tying it all together with an 'everything app' seems like a stupendously stupid move to me (from the consumers perspective). Especially with an unhinged guy like Musk at the helm.
Indeed, just hearing the stories here on HN about how people are suddenly locked out of just their gmail or other accounts without explanation or recourse is pretty good reason to not but all your eggs in one dystopian corporate basket.
There is a reason why Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram is not in one app called Meta.
It does not work too well with western audiences - cluttered and too busy mobile apps do not succeed.
If Whatsapp failed to become WeChat organically, even though it's installed in most phones around the world and in some places you can already make payments through it, do you really think Twitter can pull it off by brute force?
I don't know how he can be this stupid to try such a thing. Many companies tried to replicate WeChat in the west, and they all failed because nobody wants to have some gigantic clusterfuck of an app on their phone. It works in China only because of China's political system, as in people literally have no choice.
I half think some of the issue with the everything app idea is that the west already has everything apps, they're called "Android" and "iOS". It's the slightly weird regulatory / political situation in China that's led to WeChat becoming a thing.
And that tracks perfectly with what he's doing, because he's betting on the fascists winning the next election cycle, so they can bail him out by making X-Twitter the official "free speech" platform of the new dictatorship.
An "everything app" is just an operating system. There is nothing to picture, we've been having them since the 1950s [1].
We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3].
But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you".
Thank you for the read. The idea of an OS supplanted by an AI is fascinating.
> "everything must be controlled by me, not by you"
Right, the end goal I had in mind for "the everything app" is the control of the software (including communication), the data and the payment system by the same company.
Few companies have achieved that outside of China. I'm thinking, Apple, Google, Samsung in Korea maybe?
And no one I know personally is fully tied to one ecosystem. My friends only use the individual services they need. Becoming WeChat will not happen.
Even the idea of Twitter growing into a Google size company seems completely unrealistic. Meta struggles with achieving this and right now they're more popular than Twitter.
Nobody (in power) want's a (foreign) app that can essentially ban a citizen from live arbitrarily.
Regulators are no longer asleep at the wheel when it comes to tech, as can be seen on the HN front page every other day, and in this case it might be better to have nothing than something controlled by Elon Musk.
Such an App is a political risk and the only reason it works in China is because it's basically an extension of the governemnt.
* Get clowned on every day on the very platform you own
* Lose half of your advertising revenue because you insist on platforming fascists
* Destroy any brand recognition you had, including having created a damn verb out of it
* Have your puppet CEO spout some vapid shit about your new platform being all about AI
* Have your logo be blatant copyright infringement of a well known typeface
Eagerly awaiting Paul Graham to tell everyone how Elon is a complete genius and that he puts rockets into space, making a WeChat clone can't be this complicated.
It seems like Elon Musk has a vision of creating a platform business model that encompasses all his business endeavors and more.
I don’t like Twitter, nor do I like Elon Musk, but it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan. I doubt he gives two shits about what Twitter is or was - when he bought Twitter he acquired a lot of talent, and a place to start to launch his platform - of which he envisions the world being beholden to, and he will be the king of that castle.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he will have some kind of X crypto, X digital wallets, X online shops, he’ll probably even have his own X-onion sites too, for all the people who want his X branded LSD and MDMA.
> it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan
I highly doubt that because he originally didn't want to buy the thing in the first place. He's just making one hail Mary pass after the next to try to get it to turn a profit and failing so his last card - the one he always seems to play at some point - is to set it up for acquisition by one of his other companies to bail himself out.
That may work, or it won't, in which case Twitter (sorry, 'x') may well end up taking the rest of his empire with it.
He did acquire a lot of talent. Then he fired the majority of it and slagged off/alienated the rest, losing most of the institutional knowledge gained over years. He then systematically torched any external goodwill with both advertisers and users, before torpedoing the brand identity which had cut through to non-tech culture.
At some point, you have to just admit that he might not be playing 5D Chess, but 1D Connect Four, and he's still losing.
If you assume that it's simply linear, then depending on length you could certainly lose if sufficiently incompetent. Of course, then 1D Connect Four would be effectively a tape, and thus a Turing machine capable of encoding 5D Chess... I'll admit the simile doesn't stand much in the way of stress!
I was thinking connect four with only one column. But if you do only 1 row, it is indeed winnable. In fact, in 2D connect four, that is one of my favorite strategies with a new player - try to get two pugs next to each other on the bottom row with space on both sides
On the one hand, Musk was always obsessed with X, so the change may be organic.
On the other hand, a name change together with new product announcements is standard for American CEOs if they don't know what to do and have to show to their investors that they are doing something. I believe Musk has a number of Saudi investors.
Let's see what he does. If he goes into streaming like with Tucker Carlson the renaming may be appropriate. Perhaps he'll buy Fox News, who knows.
I have little hopes for the payment processor. I've avoided PayPal and I sure will avoid this one.
Now that Elon no longer wants the Twitter brand, somebody please steal it, make a new "twitter" clone hosted in Kosovo so they can't take it down (cough) and we all just move there.
I embrace this change! Now I might just stop impulsively clicking on links that report on the Twitter trash fire. Because now it's the X trash fire and whatever is X anyway.
I remember when Facebook turned into Meta. Made it much easier to ignore them.
Was jokingly musing that perhaps the "brand change" is to intentionally create a dust-up with Microsoft, claiming MS needs to change the icon for Excel from the green X to something else. The intent would be to create a distraction in the news from the other chain of poor choices made around Ex-Twitter.
Twitter was dying even before Musk bought it. There was no way of running Twitter profitable in a market where ad revenue is shrinking and VC founding is drying up. Forcing Musk to actually buy Twitter, at a grossly inflated price, was one of the smartest business moves in the past 10 years.
I don't know, I think the rebranding is a bit silly, but I also think Twitter should have gone bankrupt years ago. Musk paid $44 billion dollars of other peoples money for what was a billion dollar company at best. Trying to turn that around probably require someone as reckless as Elon Musk.
The dream of the everything app just seems to fare way. The potential early adopters shy away because it's Musk. Unless his own branding (as in "Elon Musk") is enough to get other businesses to jump onboard I don't see how it will ever get off the ground.
It's a calming thought, that once you have too much power, there is no one left to question you and stuff like that is the result. Fortunately there are no actual lifes of people involved here, opposing to some similar political situation of the past.
I agree, its messy. But in a week, it'll all be X, and we won't care.
However, I do strongly feel this is a big mistake and will act as a jarring moment for a lot of people who will not want a 'new' thing. This may be the move that spikes the platform as the relevance of X becomes less and less because now it's history is disjoint from twitter and it's relevance to current events over the last 20 years.
The problem isn't that you said Musk has Asperger's.
The problem is that you are saying Asperger's causes impulsive business decisions. Nothing in your quote supports that contention, and it's a terribly ableist thing to say.
In fact your quote suggests the opposite-- people with Asperger's tend to be bound to routine rather than impulsive.
I don't think your comment was wrong to express. We've spent a lot of time cataloging human behavior over the last 100 years, so it's natural to be curious how the definitions relate to Musk's behavior.
I think the parent comment is just especially touchy to these comments.
Very true about prox's response. I also now regret saying "terribly ableist" -- in retrospect the right words would have been something like "unintentionally ableist." Reasonableness begets reasonableness...
I would still call that ableist and an abuse of therapy language. You don't need to tarnish everyone with ADHD to criticize a single person. You shouldn't use therapy language as a cudgel.
Discriminatory intent isn't required, a discriminatory outcome is. Random people with ADHD don't need to catch strays here.
The criticism is that he is impulsive and that he isn't properly managing himself. No diagnosis is required.
I think you might be seeing criticism where there isn't because it's about Elon Musk. I agree with the sentiment that you don't need to "diagnose" everyone and everything, but I think that's also a symptom of our tendency to want to apply labels to everything we see.
I understand you may not be levying a criticism, and I don't mean to put words in your mouth because I know you didn't make the claim which is at issue, but it's difficult for me to read "he makes impulsive business decisions" as not being a criticism. Especially given the context, where a bunch of people are explicitly being critical.
For me criticism has a "judgey" connotation whereas I see this as more of an observation, but I understand associating a negative trait with Asperger's as if it inevitably leads to that trait being off-putting.
It’s clearly ableist to attribute one individuals dumb action to their condition. Imagine if someone said “Musk only did this because he’s white/male”—that would be racist/sexist.
There's a big difference between attributing a set of behaviors to a mental condition that is known to influence patterns of thinking and behavior, and attributing it to skin color.
You can clearly tell that Musk has Asperger's just from hearing him speak or even reading some of his tweets (at least I can, maybe because I have it too), is making that observation also "ableist" or do you only consider it to be ableist because it is attributing his managerial decisions to that?
We may be arguing semantics because nowadays "-ism"s are used as shorthand for generalization instead of prejudice and I prefer to stick to the latter definition to avoid attributing discriminatory intent.
Also, please don't post the same thing in two places in a HN thread, unless you have an exceptionally good reason. You can link to a previous comment. URL is in the "x minutes ago" link. Hah, x!
I think the relevant part of Asperger’s would be a difficulty experiencing an automatic social-emotional reaction in response to the opinions of others. A sort of congenital tone-deafness.
I could see this being a factor in someone doing things that appear reckless, not because the person is actually impulsive, but because they are unable to intuitively care about the reactions of other people. And so, in a situation where most people would decide against a course of action primarily because of the expected social reaction, an Asperger’s person may just do it anyway.
Also, I suspect the ableist accusations are coming from people who do not themselves have Asperger’s…
Bizarre yet totally on-brand for Musk. I’ll bet the people responsible for the rebranding work had next to no notice this was happening. It must be an absolutely miserable existence to need to follow your boss on Twitter to get a jump on his unhinged ideas.
Remember when Facebook was a product of Facebook and not a product of Meta? I don’t know what road this is going in, but maybe the plan is for the product to be called Twitter, and keep the company distinct from it.
The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).
I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.
1,921 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 543 ms ] threadActually the X logo itself is good on it's own terms. And would be great for a newcomer startup, but not for Twitter. Twitter is the household name. This looks like a midlife crisis.
Not to mention that we speak of "tweets" and "retweets", not "mini-posts on Twitter" and "shares on Twitter"...
But they certainly are throwing away the Twitter brand.
Not that Elon will exactly be quaking in his boots, but the search engines will notice me and others doing the same. Death by a billion hyperlink cuts!
It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
The issue is when it becomes generic which is a difference concept.
"What kind of coke do you want?" "Dr. Pepper"
the best meme I have seen so far, is musk has out Gavin Belson'ed, Gavin Belson.
I think "Relentless" isn't terrible, but "Amazon" is vastly better for international branding.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos
May be in certain cultures. I have never made that connect. I am from India.
Sounds plausible to me.
(See _A Wind in The Door_ or _A Swiftly Tilting Planet_)
They are never going to change to the X logo.
People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.
If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app
Remember when everyone got pissed off because they doubled the characters? How many is on Twitter now, 5000? Markdown support too. And now they are planning banking, latex, some linkedin copy cat stuff...
In reality twitter is trying to become Facebook. Facebook only didn't had banking because FED/EU didn't liked the Libra idea.
This is just basic old man 101: trying to regain the glory days of your youth.
X is full of Xcrement
However, in Russia, Yandex is not just a search engine. It does everything and then some — search, cloud storage, email, maps & navigation, music streaming, a voice assistant with Amazon-Echo-like speakers, news, online advertising, event tickets, a marketplace, taxi, food delivery a-la Uber Eats, car sharing, online grocery store, e-scooter rentals in major cities, and this list goes on and on. And that Dzen ad-filled cringy blogging thing no one seems to like. But Yandex is literally inescapable, it's everywhere and you'd be somewhat excluding yourself from the society if you refuse to use any of their services.
Good luck with that. I was permanently banned from Twitter for reporting Russian terrorist content.
If you fancy being locked out of your money for apparently a thought crime, then X (or rather Z) is for you, comrades.
The entire banking system is for you*
It's quite different from payment apps (my father used PayPal once to collect a 7k payment, spent 3k in lawyer fees to get the money).
There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.
Was it extremely valuable? I know a lot of people (myself included) viewed blue checkmarks as a "company PR account/mass-media journalist/celebrity account maintained by SMM" sign. The most interesting people I followed on Twitter were not verified.
A verified account of a newspaper is probably better than a fake one, spreading false news about the war in Ukraine, for example.
Managed by PR or not, a verified account stood for the person behind this account, and guarantees this is their (proxy or direct) opinion or a real fact about upcoming event, or information about a past event. Right now a verified account means nothing.
But you are absolutely right, that trust was very important.
And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.
Ugh, have you seen Telegram posts by the real Dmitry Medvedev (ex-President, ex-PM, now chairman of the Security Council)? I guess the line between real and parody is pretty thin here.
Besides, anyone falling for the nuclear war announcement on Twitter deserved that. Social medias aren't the trustable channel despite any verifications. What if the real account got hacked?
I believe what you just did is called “moving the goalposts”.
So the elites who we should trust as opposed to commoners that we shouldn’t
Yeah no thanks…
Imagine a bunch of nominal liberals advocating for royalty, and you have the blue check whiners.
This is the angry-for-the-weirdest-reasons thing I will read today, and it is 9:10 AM. Coupled with your post elsewhere in the thread that somehow justifies this as paying to be "part of the conversation", and it only computes as "'tis cope".
It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
Most people are average, many are below average.
The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.
One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."
If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
Not even remotely true. At best, most humans are good at something. Not exceptional. That's massively rare.
I'm sorry, but most people have nothing, even the tiniest exceptional thing, about them. There's no latent kingfu master, hidden in pandas.
Then there's the objectivist train wherein no expectations are allowed, one must duly profess their ignorance and make baseless measurements in estimation and comment on the distribution of faculties per individual and the degree of resolution to which these measurements are allowed to take place - and it isn't to the degree which any great conclusions can be drawn, I assure you. There is no means by which you can splay out a person's whole and examine them. Time spent with one or two is time spent neglecting some other specimen. Not to mention the interference added by environment. And even in the best of cases that time spent may only be revelatory of some minute fraction of the whole, where again only some shallow conclusions may be drawn and they're only conclusive insofar as the observer has decided they are at some point in the context of time and space within their ever-evolvong system because there's hardly a tape measure suited to the infinite degrees of freedom that exist in the world.
Just look into the endless pit of nothingness, the void that is a myriad of vacant, rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms, that is the average person's eyes!
There is nothing there. I think they're all chatgtp clones!
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
The curse of dimensionality doesn't imply all skills are equal, only that finding meaningful exceptions in high dimensional data by just data analysis is hard, but we as a society don't find and filter for exceptionality in a data driven way like that, we have a very limited set of dimensions we assign to "success" (financial means being a big one). Someone making a great cardboard bed on the street will never be one of those dimensions.
After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality?
That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
But I give him credit for scale and gtm. I just think he doesn’t get social software
There was zero way Twitter could have survived on the path it was going; if not for drastic changes he instituted - mainly in dramatically cutting costs and overhead - they would have been dead anyway. They are no longer bleeding. They have lots of debt, thus they still need to do something new to pay it off, but at least they aren't accruing more debt like they were before.
Twitter was a niche player anyway - it was disproportionately used by techies but was far from having a broad penetration so why not move in a bold, new direction? Its current model is already known to be untenable long term - even before Elon bought them.
The real issue is ads are no longer going to be enough to sustain the tech giants (ads were mostly a scam of bot farmed clicks, over promised results, etc.). I wouldn't worry about Twitter now X - it will survive, whether this crowd feels it's for them or not. What I'm really interesting in seeing is how Google, Facebook and others are going to remain relevant. In the near term I would expect layoffs to accelerate since that's the lowest hanging fruit for these companies, but at some point they are likely going to have to come up with something more substantial and of actual value.
elmu's current wealth is owed in large part, perhaps the most, to wealth he received from his rich, apartheid African jewel mine owning parents: that is the money with which he was able to get the rest of the money
If I had multiplied the advantage provided by my upbringing in the same way that Musk had, I'd be massively wealthy (but not nearly as wealthy). From a relative perspective, Musk is still a massive success.
I haven't come close. I'm ahead in some ways and behind in others.
though, don't get down on yourself and where you started vs. where you are: the relationship obviously isn't linear: the richer you are, the easier it becomes to turn 1 dollar into 2 dollars, especially when your family is wealthy, too
I definitely would have not done that. I am not that ambitious and I guarantee I would have been happy to achieve practically nothing while enjoying the comforts of my upbringing.
I understand and acknowledge that, and tried to account for it in the full sentence, of which you only quoted half. The relevant portion is italicized below:
> if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
If everyone had the exact same head start he did (or didn't, it seems disputed), we all wouldn't have achieved what he has. Just because he had a head start that we would all have liked to have doesn't mean we all could have accomplished what he has.
It'd be like dismissing an MLB pitcher throwing a perfect game because his parents could afford to send him to private coaches.
why would it? You aren't everybody, or anybody else but you, so saying you wouldn't want to do it doesn't really have any affect on the point (especially since we're discussing ability, not ambition)
How much wealth was he gifted with? Order of magnitude would be a sufficient response.
I'm going on memory here, from what I read/heard online. I think people just want to write him off, tbh.
And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?
Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.
Founders aren't the ones with the money. They're making it for someone else and then being paid for that.
In any case, it's what happens on average that matters, not minuscule exceptions. Money makes money.
I don't think its possible, or fair, to reduce success to a single digestible dimension.
And somone had to come out the winner in a stochastic Market. It just halpened to be Musk. No competence requirer, at all.
Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. I think he's done good things, but in other ways he's not a very good businessman.
Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.
And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play".
If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
nitter.net works wonderfully!
> DM limits
I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that.
You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you".
"Thanks Elon", indeed.
Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
"Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue."
I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.
IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party.
Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban.
However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
Doesn’t seem to know anything about tech though. And he’s burned his reputation to the ground this last year.
There's a reason he was lauded before this Twitter/X debacle.
This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time.
The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
I didn't know this one and just read more about it. This is so absurd.
“Slapping a name on other people’s work” is something leaders do. They also typically are the ones who gather those people together and create the environment in which they can do their best work.
…that said, yes, I think Musk is an idiot.
There’s an episode of the podcast On With Kara Swisher where she goes into detail about who he was and how he went off the rails. The date is 2022-11-14. I found it really helpful to square this circle.
I’m not as familiar with Tesla, but I’ve been following SpaceX pretty closely since around 2014. He’s not in the trenches doing CFD to optimize cooling on the latest iteration of the raptor engine, and who knows whether reusability was originally his idea, but he knows his shit. When you hear him talk about rockets, he sounds very competent, unlike when he talks about software. And I’ve never heard any actual rocket scientists say Elon doesn’t know shit about rockets.
(He does sometimes move fast and ignore established wisdom though, as with the concrete pad that got obliterated during the last launch. But sometimes that’s how you sidestep decades of cruft)
I do wish Gwynne Shotwell were more of a household name. She’s the one running SpaceX while Elon is off Eloning.
Well I do. Or at least I did.
He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it.
Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things.
But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.
Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
Maybe you should review these pages and get your facts straight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.
I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol.
There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so.
I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX...
I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.
What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.
Incidentally, Atlas V used/uses Russian engines. Pretty bad idea in retrospect but at the time a lot of people thought it seemed reasonable.
> cost effective
That's another matter entirely. It would have been cheaper to use conventional disposable rockets. Even better than that is reusable conventional rockets; the economic sense of which has now been demonstrated by Falcon 9.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A
When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.
For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.
On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.
I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".
My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs.
If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).
What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.
The Space Shuttle would like a word.
The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.
What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.
The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.
True that.
> He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over.
Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team.
These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success.
Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.
PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.
Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.
The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.
His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.
I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.
Honestly, this may be one of the good things he did. The entire population has gotten way too comfortable with free and it would be ideal if we could get away from this model.
Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.
It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does.
> Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because
Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.
> human social structures don't endure like friendships do
IOW, the donation-based instances are not sustainable. If you want to have a service that you can rely on, you will need to resort to a professional service.
Also there are occasionally overt ads for companies funded by said VC firm inserted into the list on the front page. You can recognize these because they have the comment sections disabled.
The fact that there is someone with deep pockets that see this whole network as an opportunity for building their branding does not mean that they look at a balance sheet, or find "advertisers" in case their fund makes an expected loss, or anything like that.
Let me repeat. HN, by itself, is not a business. It is pointless to talk about its "business model", "funding", "revenue" or whether is breaks even or not. HN is not a core part of YC.
Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are at its core social media networks. They wouldn't exist as businesses if they are not expecting to get any type of revenue based on their social media offering. There is no way to compare any of them with HN.
Who said HN is a business? I never said that, you seem to be reading between lines, words I didn't write. To reiterate, you asked if HN is funded by ads. I responded that HN is an ad (an ad, not a business), and furthermore often contains overt ads. And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Anyway, if you want to argue with the version of me that exists in your imagination, you obviously don't need the real me here for it. So peace out.
And that is a ridiculous statement.
> And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Then you interjected without any relation to the context of the conversation, and instead made this flawed and unrelated argument about "HN as an ad".
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
However, beyond the general development Twitter has taken since Musk took over and especially how the premium memberships were rolled out - the conflation of paying for the account with being verified has killed that as an option for me. Nowadays the blue mark rather is an anti-pattern to many. This is what you get when you sell "reputation".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Acc...
I've turned the corner on this. I think he's turning twitter into a place where blue checks publicly talk to other blue checks, and people willing to pay a recurring fee to try to be included in that conversation can try to get their attention. What it's going to be is a massacre of reply guys (who are going to lose visibility) and sockpuppets (whose new/unused accounts will be useless.)
I'm honestly interested in that. I don't even post on twitter, I read, so I'm not giving the perspective of an active twitter participant, but tbh 99% of non-blue-check twitter participants only cost twitter money, are dumb and their accounts should be nuked from orbit. Their only purpose was to make the room feel crowded, and thus to attract more broke users. Not that most of blue check twitter isn't terrible, but that's the terrible that people are actively looking for. Terrible with a fanbase.
So, in the future, you should be paying for twitter or have an account at least a year or two old in order to harass journalists, politicians, and people you watch on television. I could see that being appealing to almost everybody.
Here you are advocating a literal pay for play, and you're identifying certain classes of users as being "worthless" and advocating "nuking them from orbit."
That seems way more radically elitist than wanting to know if something is a parody account or not? Help me understand here?
But charging in pursuit of removing "worthless" users from the platform - you see what I'm saying there right? That's literally constructing an underclass, deciding they are unwashed and unacceptable in refined company, and then charging money to keep them out.
It's the business model of a country club. Maybe it's a cheap country club, that's a difference of degree.
I've paid similar amounts of money to join closed forums before and found them to be enjoyable and relatively free of trolls. I'm not opposed to it in principle. What I was asking about was the contradiction.
What of Musk? Could it be that he just likes strongmen and weird bigots, and it's for them he wants free speech, and everyone else can hang?
(Hint: it's this one.)
Twitter used to fight those, as I mentioned. And won a lot of them. Again: what of Musk? Surely it's not just an act and he's a simp for dictators.
Under Twitter’s previous ownership, the social media site complied with government takedown requests at a lower rate.
Twitter fully complied with 440, or 50 percent, of requests and partially complied with 377, or 42 percent, during the 12-month period before Musk’s takeover.
Turkey was also the biggest source of these requests at 27 percent, followed by South Korea with 20.6 percent and India with 12.8 percent.
- https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
* Changed the moderation policies to allow more speech that had previously been considered impermissible hate speech or violent speech.
* Increased compliance with government censorship requests (which are predominantly of the form "please make this person stop saying bad things about me," and, in many cases, isn't actually permissible under that country's constitution).
He not allowing his own ass or companies to be criticized on his own platform, I can take as still an improvement free-speech-wise other the previous situation.
For him there is. Twitter at $44b cash was not a business decision, it's something he arrived at through a level of reality-deflecting hubris and vindictiveness that remains unmatched by anyone since.
Remember how he appealed to Trump to return to the site, and Trump ignored him and stuck to Truth Social? He then tried to back his rival DeSantis with a campaign launch on Twitter, which failed miserably.
It's not 2016 anymore, Twitter's lost its pull as a political kingmaker and/or disinformation platform. That was the one thing Musk could realistically have expected his acquisition to still be able to deliver. Now that users and advertisers are fleeing and news sites are using Twitter sources less, he may as well bury the site, as it's outlived its usefulness to him.
Feels like Musk has caught some of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 'Introducing Monday' nonsense. At least we could attribute that to the dotcom madness.
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
So great it inspired a song.
The corporate PowerPoint visuals just adds so much.
It's like someone read about Time Cube for too long and then tried to port that reasoning to the logo redesign.
Holy crap, to be a fly on the wall in the room when this was presented lol
Could this be a way to secure a global payment system away from a potential tyrannical alternative? Probably not. But if you were more in the know and were an insane billionaire, you might want to try..
Good, never liked these massive social media conglomerates. Give me back my forums.
This is a straw man - like many other of the comments here. Full of emotion, but vapid in real substance.
Good.
I've got to say, the verified list was not very valuable
Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?
Changing behaviour is very hard. You'd have to get people to install new apps, get use to new workflows etc and humans are creatures of habit so this is very hard.
The non-technical tech sphere hasn't really moved though, but maybe my circles are quite different to yours.
(The dynamic is very different when it's voluntary and feels like supporting a community, though, and in practice it's going to be a few whales making donations)
Not everything has to be about making money, you realise.
That's not really how it works. Federation happens ~by default in general; restriction is reactive, not proactive.
But you still breathe, right?
Why pay (as much) to advertise to an empt(ier) room?
I think this is pretty optimistic thinking. "Oh no, I can't pick my way through a bunch of bigoted garbage to which the owner responds 'Concerning' or read Marc Andreesen being deeply weird or see 30,000 reply guys to Paul Graham hawking shitcoins, whatever will I do?" is, I think, probably okay at this point.
Having the thinkfluencey types before the spam and impersonation taps were turned on to full was probably valuable; now Twitter is getting the stink on it and that's hard to wash off.
Personally speaking, Bluesky picked up pretty much everybody I care to talk to and remaining on Twitter in a material capacity is a flag that I probably don't want to hear from you.
The conversation was about X being built from the ground up and attracting new users which is much harder.
BlueSky only started gaining traction after Musk started pissing people off, doubt prag would have done the same.
To you.
Verification was serviceable, now it is harmful. There is a big difference there. Even if formerly was not perfect.
Instead of the top replies to popular posts being tweets that have been boosted by a signal that arguably indicates quality (views, likes, retweets, replies of their own) tweets are boosted by a signal of the opposite - the poster's willingness to pay for visibility of content that couldn't rise to the top on its own merits or that of its poster.
Replies to popular content are now a wasteland for interesting content or discussion unless you've mass-blocked Twitter Blue subscribers - definitely harmful.
There isn't a "good" chance. It's extraordinarily, extremely rare that someone makes such a genius play that other experts consider it foolish. These events in sport buisness or other areas are often stuff of legend because of how rare they are. Sure, if this play works out and turns to have been undoubtably right, it will be studied for years in buisness schools around the world. But up until that moment, we can be reasonably sure that this isnt one of those exceptionally rare cases
API rate limits for external API clients sure. API rate limits for their own application is insane (caveat, super high rate limits to prevent against truly exceptional use would be fine, but anything that impacts even the 98% user is nuts).
There’s no argument for it. Every goal of these sites is to increase time on site. A rate limit that kicked normal users of the site off in 10 minutes is… well, a truly and unambiguously bad choice.
> By December 17, Twitter was blocking some links to Mastodon as being "potentially harmful" or "malware".
Other top contenders
What do you think now ?
Yes -- once, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. But for creating a highly successful company twice, luck can't be a similarly major explanation, since it isn't "bound to happen" that someone who was highly successful once will be highly successful again. Because the number of people with one highly successful company is very small, unlike the number of people with zero highly successful companies. (If you throw a die ten times and get a six ten times, that is massive luck, which means that you almost certainly won't manage to do it again.)
So when people have one successful company, that may well be partly due to sheer luck, but if so, on their second attempt they almost certainly won't be so lucky. That's exactly what Jeff Bezos shows with Blue Origin. He started earlier than Musk did with SpaceX, had more money, and still is far less successful.
It totally is bound to happen to someone. They get the right people involved and find the right contracts and make the right decision, it’s mostly timing.
The Amazon.com e-commerce store, Kindle (category-defining), the Amazon fulfillment network (rivaling UPS/FedEx), and of course AWS. That's at least 4 distinct very successful companies. But the way in which one success enabled the next is more obvious, so you don't want to separate them.
The comparison to Gates is just pathetic -- instead of Twitter and private space programs, his second act has been focused on things like food security, HIV/AIDS, and polio.
> The Amazon.com e-commerce store
This was mostly a copy of eBay which used the existing Amazon market dominance.
> Kindle (category-defining)
Kindle came after the excellent Sony e-book readers. The reason why Kindle was so much more successful was the existing market dominance of Amazon combined with the fact that they used a proprietary Kindle-specific file format to squash the competition.
> The comparison to Gates is just pathetic -- instead of Twitter and private space programs, his second act has been focused on things like food security, HIV/AIDS, and polio.
SpaceX was not a "second act", except if you count PayPal as his first successful company. SpaceX was founded before Tesla. They do offer a global satellite network which brings Internet to remote areas around the world. That's quite different from a mere "private space program". As for the Gates foundation: This is not a profit driven company, so it is difficult to estimate how successful it is relative to the funds it has. I was talking about Musk's abilities as a founder and manager, not about altruism. (He definitely did things which people might classify as altruistic, such as paying for Ukraine's Starlink access for several months.)
They literally are separate companies. There's no debate to be had here. Your assertion is just not true.
> I was talking about Musk's abilities as a founder and manager, not about altruism.
Gates doesn't fire and forget. He plays an active role in his foundation.
You can also be lucky several times.
He is, and the success of SpaceX compared to Blue Origin is explained by the difference between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
> You can also be lucky several times.
Yes, but that's very improbable.
That one specific person will be very lucky multiple times is indeed improbable, but that someone will be lucky will over time be expected.
For all we know she is "running" SpaceX in the sense that she handles most smaller day-to-day decisions, but there is no evidence that she makes the large and important decisions about Starship and Starlink. All the evidence points to Musk making those decisions. It is even doubtful if she is more capable by herself than Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, since she hasn't started a large successful company, unlike Bezos. The situation is probably similar for Linda Yaccarino, the new Twitter CEO. For the big decisions, Musk remains in charge.
Elon is self described with Aspergers Syndrome. This is from an interview :
“Other features of Asperger's syndrome include difficulty interacting with peers, inappropriate social or emotional behavior, and engaging in repetitive routines. Both children and adults with Asperger's syndrome are at an increased risk for depression, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mood and anxiety disorders, and other mental health disorders.”
Maybe he is really being paid by the Saudis to intentionally ruin Twitter to reduce the freedom of speech
This is giving me "homophobes are actually raging homosexuals" energy.
Not sure what kind of rationale could arrive at ur conclusion
Because the sell the whole time was to let people roleplay as famous people. And that would have worked a bit more if the actual celebrities didn't immediately respond with "ew, no"
The features are ... pretty crummy. Longform tweets nobody wants to read, up to what ... 40 hour videos that nobody will watch. A basic functionality like edit?
And now the funniest one: getting paid to tweet, which the biggest accounts on Twitter got joke RPM to entice people to sign up for blue. I feel really bad for anyone who thinks they're going to make their $8 back.
He can't get any of this right and he seriously is already talking about becoming a bank or payment system? Good luck.
Conspiracy theories aside, one has to wonder how all the geniuses running the sovereign wealth funds and investment banks that backed his Twitter takeover missed all the red flags. It's almost as if they don't have any idea what they are doing. Or they really bought into a cult of personality rather than a business strategy.
I can't picture it. So far it looks like they're acting like a FAANG in a "fake it til you make it" move to try to attract money. But not only do they not have the scale, Twitter is also losing its place as the reference app for live text updates.
Problem is that the CCP is basically intimately tied to it so WeChat has massive advantages there.
The problem for Musk is that the US, EU, UK, AU etc are not remotely interested in a mainstream commerce platform that takes a lax approach to KYC/AML.
And despite Musk's delusions the "blue tick" program is not a suitable verification foundation to build payments on top of.
I've switched banks 3 times over four decades, ISP more times than that, comms channels a couple of times as well (most recently due to Musk's acquisition of Twitter) and will probably do so again at least once. Tying it all together with an 'everything app' seems like a stupendously stupid move to me (from the consumers perspective). Especially with an unhinged guy like Musk at the helm.
We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3].
But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_operating_systems
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjJaFG63Hlo
[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/opena...
> "everything must be controlled by me, not by you"
Right, the end goal I had in mind for "the everything app" is the control of the software (including communication), the data and the payment system by the same company.
Few companies have achieved that outside of China. I'm thinking, Apple, Google, Samsung in Korea maybe? And no one I know personally is fully tied to one ecosystem. My friends only use the individual services they need. Becoming WeChat will not happen.
Even the idea of Twitter growing into a Google size company seems completely unrealistic. Meta struggles with achieving this and right now they're more popular than Twitter.
Nobody (in power) want's a (foreign) app that can essentially ban a citizen from live arbitrarily.
Regulators are no longer asleep at the wheel when it comes to tech, as can be seen on the HN front page every other day, and in this case it might be better to have nothing than something controlled by Elon Musk.
Such an App is a political risk and the only reason it works in China is because it's basically an extension of the governemnt.
* Fire 90% of the workforce
* Get clowned on every day on the very platform you own
* Lose half of your advertising revenue because you insist on platforming fascists
* Destroy any brand recognition you had, including having created a damn verb out of it
* Have your puppet CEO spout some vapid shit about your new platform being all about AI
* Have your logo be blatant copyright infringement of a well known typeface
Eagerly awaiting Paul Graham to tell everyone how Elon is a complete genius and that he puts rockets into space, making a WeChat clone can't be this complicated.
Every single one of them, clowns failing upwards
I don’t like Twitter, nor do I like Elon Musk, but it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan. I doubt he gives two shits about what Twitter is or was - when he bought Twitter he acquired a lot of talent, and a place to start to launch his platform - of which he envisions the world being beholden to, and he will be the king of that castle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he will have some kind of X crypto, X digital wallets, X online shops, he’ll probably even have his own X-onion sites too, for all the people who want his X branded LSD and MDMA.
I highly doubt that because he originally didn't want to buy the thing in the first place. He's just making one hail Mary pass after the next to try to get it to turn a profit and failing so his last card - the one he always seems to play at some point - is to set it up for acquisition by one of his other companies to bail himself out.
That may work, or it won't, in which case Twitter (sorry, 'x') may well end up taking the rest of his empire with it.
At some point, you have to just admit that he might not be playing 5D Chess, but 1D Connect Four, and he's still losing.
I think we're down to noughts and crosses.
oops...On the other hand, a name change together with new product announcements is standard for American CEOs if they don't know what to do and have to show to their investors that they are doing something. I believe Musk has a number of Saudi investors.
Let's see what he does. If he goes into streaming like with Tucker Carlson the renaming may be appropriate. Perhaps he'll buy Fox News, who knows.
I have little hopes for the payment processor. I've avoided PayPal and I sure will avoid this one.
Something as generic is X is bad for an "everything platform", and something where lots of the existing use has specific connotations is worse
I remember when Facebook turned into Meta. Made it much easier to ignore them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
Everything he does with twitter only makes sense to me given the assumption that all users have to stay and they can not possibly leave.
How many people are like "I don't want an everything app, I just wanna read silly tweets"? This demographic apparently doesn't exist in his mind.
I like that. Permission to re-use?
Of course, go wild.
I don't know, I think the rebranding is a bit silly, but I also think Twitter should have gone bankrupt years ago. Musk paid $44 billion dollars of other peoples money for what was a billion dollar company at best. Trying to turn that around probably require someone as reckless as Elon Musk.
The dream of the everything app just seems to fare way. The potential early adopters shy away because it's Musk. Unless his own branding (as in "Elon Musk") is enough to get other businesses to jump onboard I don't see how it will ever get off the ground.
* Primary logo in top left of web changed to X
* Favicon still old Twitter logo
* Search bar says "Search Twitter"
* Meta title still says Twitter
* Tweet terminology still in use
* Footer updated to © 2023 X Corp.
* Dialog for upgrading to Twitter Blue now has a blue X logo but copy refers to Twitter Blue
* Communities still called Twitter Communities
What's the plan here and why so inconsistent?
The problem is that you are saying Asperger's causes impulsive business decisions. Nothing in your quote supports that contention, and it's a terribly ableist thing to say.
In fact your quote suggests the opposite-- people with Asperger's tend to be bound to routine rather than impulsive.
I think the parent comment is just especially touchy to these comments.
It wouldn't be wrong if you replaced Asperger's with say ADHD.
Be careful of slapping -ism/-ist labels on anything that offends you personally when there's no clear discriminatory intent.
Discriminatory intent isn't required, a discriminatory outcome is. Random people with ADHD don't need to catch strays here.
The criticism is that he is impulsive and that he isn't properly managing himself. No diagnosis is required.
You can clearly tell that Musk has Asperger's just from hearing him speak or even reading some of his tweets (at least I can, maybe because I have it too), is making that observation also "ableist" or do you only consider it to be ableist because it is attributing his managerial decisions to that?
We may be arguing semantics because nowadays "-ism"s are used as shorthand for generalization instead of prejudice and I prefer to stick to the latter definition to avoid attributing discriminatory intent.
No, you can't. Not even a certified medical professional would claim to be able to "clearly" diagnose a patient based on their public persona.
I could see this being a factor in someone doing things that appear reckless, not because the person is actually impulsive, but because they are unable to intuitively care about the reactions of other people. And so, in a situation where most people would decide against a course of action primarily because of the expected social reaction, an Asperger’s person may just do it anyway.
Also, I suspect the ableist accusations are coming from people who do not themselves have Asperger’s…
He owns X.com, which was supposed to be his “everything app”. Has that plan been scrapped or is this a phased launch?
The x.com domain just redirects to twitter.com, not the other way around.
I can't imagine continuing to care about the designs, consistency, feature quality, etc. since it would be a futile and impossible fight.
That kind of brand exposure is literally priceless. Throwing is away is absolutely bonkers... it's just next-level idiocy.
We might be witnessing one of the greatest branding mistakes of all time.
The footer is this way for month already. And secondary resources like developer.twitter.com will likely stay inconsistent for a long time (probably forever).
I'm still kinda surprised they actually changed the well known bird logo. I would be even more surprised if they actually try to fully replace the name Twitter.
Where all the 'cross' people hang out.