That's the context needed, someone can call their car a Nissan Silvia and expect to fight a Toyota Silvia trademark infringement. But I suspect you may not even beable to fight say, a Ferrari Silvia, since they aren't likely competing contexts.
You can only trademark the use of that letter in a specific context - you can't blanket stop people from using an 'X' or even calling themselves 'X' - so long as there's no brand confusion. As mentioned in a different post there's Delta Airlines, Delta Faucets, Delta Fans and Delta Power Supplies. The Microsoft/Meta trademark happens to be literally the use of 'X' as a brand in the social network domain, lol.
Between that and the requirement that they be defended, honestly, I think trademarks are one of the forms of IP that I like the most.
You might very well think that, but I've read articles saying [1] that Apple has engaged in legal battles with Fruit Union Suisse and a cycle path. It has even set its sights on logos that involve other fruits, like oranges and pears [2].
While you and I might think it's obviously legal to start Apple Airlines or Apple Faucets or Apple Fans, apparently this is not obvious to Apple's trademark lawyers.
I'm not sure intellectual property law operates according to any rational rules that can be understood by us mere mortals.
this is just how trademark works, and it's mostly okay. it also sounds dumb that park tool can trademark the color blue, or kubota can trademark the color orange.
but park tool's trademark is only in the context of bicycle repair tools, and kubota's is only for tractors. the law just isn't that dumb, it's interpreted by courts and real people, who are capable of saying "no, that's dumb" if something is dumb. kubota can keep their trademark, and everybody else can keep making orange things as long as those things aren't tractors or tractor-like things that are going to get confused with kubota products.
similarly, any somewhat reasonable person will be able to see that twitter's rebrand to "X" isn't really going to confuse anybody into thinking they're using a microsoft product, so depite it being a very bad name it's probably not actually going to run afoul of anybody's trademarks.
>any somewhat reasonable person will be able to see that twitter's rebrand to "X" isn't really going to confuse anybody
I feel that reasonable people and the people who suffer from Musk Derangement Syndrome (seemingly a lot of the people here...) are two very different groups.
If it is just a trademark issue and not logo design, could Twitter just make it x.com? Elon made x.com in 1999. He could pitch it as a revival rather than simple X the company.
I don't know how that works though. What if it just dies on the grapevine and no one uses it for 2 decades? AFAIK It got merged into Paypal then was mostly just killed off as a functional trademark
Meta, Microsoft Apple and Google have all used X for one thing or another. Most recently an X trademark in the context of social media was bought by Meta from Microsoft when they acquired Mixer, which became Facebook Gaming.
No one even mentions Google X which rebranded to just X years ago. Clearly it’s been effective that no one even points this out. Yet another winning project.
As an “extremist left winger” I can tell you that this is false. We got banned all the time for talking trash to nazis and proud boys (many of whom are now in prison for trying to overthrow the country).
I keep hearing people say this, but I'm just not seeing it. Who are these extremist right-wingers that are now on Twitter? I don't know of anyone to the right of Tucker Carlson, and he's a bog standard center-right civic nationalist.
As far as I can tell the actual extremist right-wingers are on Gab rather than Twitter.
Perhaps you don't see the extreme right on Twitter because you think Tucker Carlson is center-right. He is about as right-wing you can get without actively doing the Hitler salute. The fact that he has a slight populist, anti-corporate bent doesn't affect that significantly.
And I'm speaking from a US politics perspective, where Hillary Clinton is considered center-left. If we were to take a more international view, then Joe Biden is somewhere on the center-right, and Trump and Tucker are so far on the right that you can barely see the spaces between them and the nazis. For context, far-right Marine Le Pen of France is to the left of Tucker on most issues, except that she's a bit more openly racist.
As unpleasant as these right-wing figures are, do you really think that any of them are truly genocidal or likely to engage in military conquest? (and therefore genuinely worthy of comparison with the Nazis)
Regarding their views of minorities, muslims, women and jews, well, let's say they arw frightingly close. For now, they also seem to be rather non-interventionlist, so now outright conquest. But then, people forget that the first country the Nazis conquered was Germany.
Not saying all right winger are Nazis, but the "jews will not replace us" crowd definitely is. And the rest is at least authoritarian bordering facist. Same goes for some European parties: the AfD in Germamy, whateber LePen calls her outfit now in France, the current government party in Italy, the current politics of Nethanyahu (arguably not a Nazinof course, but a straight up authoritarian with religious tendencies and disdain for democratic seperation of powers), Hungary, the FPÖ in Austria... The list way too long.
The Nazis weren't genocidal until well after they held absolute power. I suspect the same will be true of a lot of these ultra-right-wing figures if they ever get into power. To be clear, I'm talking more of the Richard Spencers of the world, not so much the Tucker Carlsons. But I'm sure Tucker would very much rather see an actual nazi in power than a Bernie Sanders.
That’s exactly what people said about Vladimir Putin 15-20 years ago. “Sure, he has an unpleasant authoritarian stripe, but surely he wouldn’t actually engage in military conquest and genocide.” And here we are.
>As unpleasant as these right-wing figures are, do you really think that any of them are truly genocidal or likely to engage in military conquest? (and therefore genuinely worthy of comparison with the Nazis)
Haven't some of them been clamouring for an attack on Mexico recently?
Anyway, there are worse figures than Tucker Carlson on Twitter. Some are outright nazis. Others can name them if they wish, but I won't amplify them here.
At first the NASDAP tried segregation, then deportation, then imprisonment, and then finally extermination of the Jews and Roma. This is how fascists operate. It’s a slow burn, a slow boiling of the frog so it does not leap from the pot and protest it’s ultimate fate.
You think he wasted his co-investors (including Saudis themselves) about $20 billion and took on a $13 billion dollar loan himself, and was forced to sell billions in Tesla stock, to get a "payout". Like how large a "payout" that has to be for any of this to make a lick of sense?
There's no payout. There's no conspiracy. Just a man and his arrogance and mental issues.
I agree with you, but fwiw, the conspiracy is that the Saudis want to avoid a repeat of the Arab Spring that was heavily fueled by Twitter, so in that sense, $20 bil would be the price tag to destroy Twitter, not an investment that needs to be recouped.
Surely they wouldn't pay $20 billion to a guy who purportedly is buying Twitter because he's a "free speech absolutist" and is "defending the future of democracy of the world".
Even if it's just PR (and it is just PR, evidently), it's an additional burden to have your PR and your actions be consistently at 180 degrees.
Also, $20 billion aren't the "price tag". That money didn't go to Elon. They went to Twitter's shareholders. Elon only ended up with losses and loans, so far, to the tune of another 20-30 billion at the very least.
So where's the "payout"? If you "hired" Elon to do this for you, as a Saudi, and you spend $20 billion as a co-investor, and need to cover Elon's $20-30 billion loss, "the price tag" is now up to $50 billion, but we're still only at break even in the short term, and only when we don't consider opportunity cost of Tesla stock dropping last year and future losses to Elon's company brands and so on, because he's coming off as a lunatic and wasting his time on Twitter, instead of being at Tesla and SpaceX.
So what's the price tag now? $80 billion? $100 billion? $150 billion?
Reminder, the entire Saudi family, all of them, together, have about $1.4 trillion, and that's not cash in the bank, but assets, oil, real estate, all of it.
Which means any such "price tag" would imply them giving up all their liquid assets and maybe liquidating more assets, in order to afford this "price tag" so quickly.
Thanks for this delightful breakdown of how dumb this theory is.
By now I am very much aware that there are lots of people who believe conspiracy theories, yet I am still surprised when those people are from the tech scene. A developer who believes in the dumbest conspiracies is such an odd thing to me. It is so odd to me that someone who supposedly things about problems in a systematic way and has to break them down into their parts, can fall for something as dumb as the richest man in the world taking some sort of payoff to kill twitter.
I should know better by now, but it still takes me by surprise sometimes
Elon seems strangely desperate for money sometimes though. Despite his vast stock holdings, he feels compelled to play games with announcements that manipulate stock prices, and try pump-and-dump schemes on minor crypto.
Come on, conspiracy theories are fun. It's fun to engage in thought experiments about what could be going on behind the scenes and even more fun to throw them out there to see what other people think.
The original guy didn't even say he 100% believed it as fact. It's just a thought experiment
The conspiracy theory does not exist in a vacuum. People simply don’t want to admit to themselves that they were wrong for idolizing him, or they have a distaste for the kinds of people who attack him, so they choose to believe in the 5D chess game as a way of saving face or refusing to give ground.
It's nonsense but your first two sentences are nonsense. Elon Musk never demonstrated any genuine interest in "free speech". There never was any reason to believe this is an ideological core value to him. He always clearly just wanted crowds to cheer for him.
It's also not at all a burden for your PR to be diametrically opposed to your actions, especially if your actions are seen as bad. Absolutist regimes love portraying themselves as the victims because it gives them a moral justification (no matter how flimsy). And "free speech absolutists" are a great example given how many people publicly adopt that stance but then use it to justify shutting down their opposition for being "against free speech".
The reason people are creating nonsensical conspiracy theories about the Twitter buyout is that they want to believe there's a rhyme and reason to the madness, the same way they created nonsensical conspiracy theories following 9/11 because it meant that the US was in control after all and not actually (figuratively) brought to its knees by a handful of foreigners with box cutters.
The truth is that Elon Musk shitposted his way into being forced to follow through on an acquisition he never really wanted, used his business connections to coordinate a hamfisted leveraged buyout and got too high on his own supply after being the dog that caught the car. Now he's stuck in a midlife crisis trying to relive the failure that was his involvement in X.com but without Peter Thiel being able to stop him.
Musk never had any genuine interest in "free speech", as opposed to playing to the gallery of his fanbase, but from the POV of the Saudi conspiracy a Twitter takeover by an utterly boring conglomerate who quietly made it as compliant as possible with local laws (including Saudi ones) and tweaked the algorithms to make political stories less likely to surface would have been much more helpful than one by a fame-magnet pandering to a fanbase which loves populist politics and has no love whatsoever for the House of Saud. If you're working for the Saudis and playing 5D chess rather than 2D tech investing, that insincere posture isn't much use because he and his acolytes aren't holding that posture for you.
> The reason people are creating nonsensical conspiracy theories about the Twitter buyout is that they want to believe there's a rhyme and reason to the madness, the same way they created nonsensical conspiracy theories following 9/11 because it meant that the US was in control after all and not actually (figuratively) brought to its knees by a handful of foreigners with box cutters.
Exactly. People want to believe that the richest man in the world somehow deserves to be so, mainly through their effort. They want to think "if only I put a bit more work in, I could have it all!" The thought of somebody becoming the world's richest man AND being as unstable and erratic as Musk appears to be is disconcerting for those who want to live in a world with some kind of order in it.
> The truth is that Elon Musk shitposted his way into being forced to follow through on an acquisition he never really wanted
Yup. The real reason behind all of this is not the market or the Saudis nor anything else. It’s because Musk wanted to be on the board, and he was rejected. He suffered a huge narcissistic injury, and then said “Fine, if I can’t be on the board, I’ll be the board and just buy the whole thing outright”
That’s why he waived due diligence and offered so much money. He was high off his narcissistic rage and flexing. He was on the warpath and forcing a hostile takeover. But then he cooled down, of course, and realized what he did was a fucking mess for himself. So he threw a tantrum in court.
This is all explained very easily by his personality disorder.
Your $50 billion math is obviously wrong. You try to add up all the pieces and total $50 billion. But we know the total - $44 billion. Of which we know $12.5 billion came from the banks (secured only by Twitter itself). So for the Saudis to repay him (and his investors) would cost $31.5 billion.
Meanwhile, you've offered Elon the opportunity to justify liquidating billions of TSLA stock at its height without triggering a massive crash right before the entire market sank. And his reputation outside running a social network doesn't seem to have suffered much at all. Do you need to offer him a premium or does he offer one to you?
(And on financing, the Saudis' credit is fine)
Now, it's nonsense because controlling Twitter and using it to silent dissent algorithmically is better than blowing it up. But the math could easily work.
How would destroying it prevent that again, people would just go elsewhere. You’d prevent it by Twitter thriving then clever use of algorithm suppression and shadow bans.
I don’t ascribe to the theory, it was in jest. However, he’s just so unfathomably bad at managing Twitter that I almost can’t imagine any other reason.
This is hilarious, it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN.
It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.
Just an hour ago on some news show from a US TV channel, NBC or Fox or what was it, the host said (about the X rebrand) "it doesn't make sense, so there should be a bigger plan here".
And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.
Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart.
The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued.
Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications.
I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.
By what measure is Tesla "the best car company"? According to every metric I could find the company is clearly overvalued and stock price is the only measure it seems to truly excel in.
Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge.
If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech.
His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.
Makes the most EVs, makes the most profit per EV, has the best charging, self driving, efficiency, software.
But if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone else bothered?
All space programs run on government contracts, what's new? He's providing the only reusable rocket, and 10 years later no one else has done that, why?
> But if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone else bothered?
Because to most other automakers, EVs are a side business that competes with their core business, not their core business, and the rest of it because its not true, e.g., Tesla doesn't offer the best self-driving, they just spend more effort trying to sell the idea of self-driving to individual buyers.
> You can't buy another car that can do even 10% of what FSD beta does
Right, because Tesla is the only company that sees individual car owners as the target market for self-driving, everyone else in the business sees institutionally-owned robotaxi fleets as the target market. Actually, so does Tesla, fairly overtly—though they are behind at actually having auch a thing—they just see individual vehicle owners as a way to defray costs, especially development costs.
They aren't ahead at self-driving, they are just more creative at how they are financing it.
> You can't buy another car that can do even 10% of what FSD beta does
That's an odd statement, as "the first self-driving system to be approved for European public roads" and "the first automaker to receive government approval in the US for a Level 3 driving feature" is from Mercedes-Benz.
"This geofenced Level 3 system works at up to 40 miles per hour on select highways"
It's just worse cruise control, can't even go at highway speeds, there's about 1% chance you could use it.
Meanwhile FSD Beta is driving around cities the same as Waymo/Cruise are, except every city in North America.
We know a few things about AI, it needs lots of data, and lots of CPU. Tesla has 2 million cars with 8 cameras gathering data, and a top 10 in the world supercomputer.
"During the second quarter of 2022, SpaceX delivered 158.7 metric tons to low Earth orbit which is four times more than second palace China’s space corporation CASC at 38.8 tons.
Roscosmos at 17.2 tons was third, United Launch Alliance 4th at 13.0 tons, and Arianespace at 9.8 tons was fifth."
Telsa has the best selling car in the world, while Ford loses 200% on each EV they sell (according to Ford)
Are there any reports on the results of NHTSA investigations instead of just saying they've been started?
Doesn't seem that bad really, 2 FSD reports, first one FSD braked suddenly, maybe, no results from investigation it seems so far. And people driving incorrectly behind them were too close and couldn't brake on time. If only all the cars had FSD and not humans.
And the other FSD report was about driving into a junction where the car they thought was going to hit them had already stopped to let them go, and beeping to warn it was getting close to a cyclist. That's why it's still beta and warns you every time to be aware and it will do stupid things. So far in 300 million miles driven, it's apparently hit 0 people. So that's way better than humans, who kill someone every 100 million miles.
I note that you switch from "not proven yet" to "zero" which is not honest. Like a Tesla, you need to pick a lane.
Fundamentally, "just a beta" is not as far along as an approved shipping product. The shipping product is harder to fake, and we cannot rule out deception here.
> Meanwhile I've found 0 evidence of any member of the public who owns a Mercedes using Drive Pilot 2 years
I honestly don't know why that's supposed to be relevant. I see plenty of videos of it on YouTube after a 5-second search. No, it's not the HN crowd who have it and post here, but so what, that proves nothing at all. It's actually a bit of a weird outlier to have your ego tied up with promoting someone else's product for free online. "I've never seen it, therefor it doesn't happen" is not really true.
> FSD works on highways.
Legally though, "Statements about the "FSD works" should not be taken to imply that this is out of beta and therefor works unambiguously, or is technically actually "full self driving".
being "just a beta" gives them wiggle room to make claims that they don't have to back up properly. It is a key point that you do not engage with. I know that you want to believe, but I refer you to my comments above on the topic. Legal lines do make a difference, and not being able to meet them, while claiming otherwise, is a red flag.
My point about Drive Pilot is no one is using it, how can it be known to be safe if it's not actually used? There's plenty of videos of Mercedes demoing it to journalists, but who's actually bought one and used it, has it even been actually released yet?
That article says it's about Autopilot, not FSD. My claim that FSD has hit 0 people still hasn't been refuted by anyone. Meanwhile humans have killed 3000 people while driving today.
All these graphs from NHTSA data ignore the warning on NHTSA's page that the data is not useful for statistical analysis. When they actually publish the cause of the crashes, and what software was being used at the time, we will have actual knowledge. If it turns out that FSD was killing 1000s of people they'd probably have said something by now
> Common falsehood that people believe is that rich people are smart.
I agree with all the rest of your points, but I think the problem with this is that Elon really is smart. It is just that you can see that he was mostly a really good salesperson of his personal brand. He also had his finger on the pulse of what was "cool" (internet, space, electric cars) for awhile (a lot of that is probably luck, but there has to be a certain amount of talent there I think--but that talent for fashion always wears off).
He's also smart enough to be able to regurgitate what SpaceX engineers tell him and to manage to sound like he's got a PhD. He must actually study that pretty well and be at least decent enough at physics/engineering that he's clearly above-average intelligent. But it is other people making the breakthroughs in the mathematics of how to hoverslam rockets, he's a bit more like a CEO version of a science communicator.
The thing is that people are largely just ignorant about where all the technology comes from (Lars Blackmore worked at NASA JPL when he published the first articles on successive convexification of the landing problem -- so the US Government really invented hoverslamming rockets), and they are horrible at judging what kind of intelligence a public personality actually has. They also think that smart people are smart at literally everything.
And as much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump was also smart, but his talents are almost purely sociopathic. And one of those talents is being able to actually lean-in to a shitstorm of stupid that he creates around him, and make his sycophants write it all off as 4D chess. That is actually a talent. A genuinely stupid person wouldn't be able to pull that off.
I imagine it's like turning to religion to make the universe feel less chaotic and random, but the reality is that most people are repeatedly playing the bongcloud opening and simply getting lucky.
That doesn't feel quite as fair as having earned success, so 4D chess it is.
> it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN.
Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money.
> It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.
The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter:
- Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only.
- Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public.
- Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates.
- Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view.
The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.
The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1], the personal wealth of the dictator clan is estimated at 1.4 trillion dollars [2] and the real value is likely significantly higher than that, especially if you include assets owned nominally by the government or national companies, but factually under clan control.
So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing.
We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can.
Raises some good points indeed, however it assumes that the Saudis ordered Musk to buy and crash Twitter directly, and it assumes that the Tesla shares he used as collateral would go to zero.
It's also possible that they got approached by Musk and saw a good timing to exploit a rich Western idiot to further their interests. I mean, Musk being deranged enough to call a rescue diver a pedo, smoking weed in Joe Rogan's podcast or give names to his children that are completely bonkers even for celebrities?
The signs that he's not completely well mentally were there for years. Loaning him 20 billion or whatever dollars was an extremely high risk move alone for that factor, so either the Saudis have gone off the rails as well or they see some hidden aspect that makes the deal worth their while even if the risk event materializes.
> The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1]
That was revenue (?) when oil prices were much higher.
> particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the
But yeah, I guess arguing about monetary amounts is a but pointless since I think the whole premise is just absurd..
Organizing the WC or buying European fotball clubs is a much better investment (if there only reason they invested in Twitter is what you’re suggesting, which of course makes no sense).
I don't buy this theory — Elon holds the X branding dearly to an absurd degree and wouldn't burn it as an exit plan — but the question that I have is: how is Elon going to transfer x.com to X Corp? He reportedly owns it personally after buying it back from PayPal, so is he going to donate the domain to the newly-formed company or is he going to sell it to X Corp for a fee?
As for what he's doing, I think it's pretty transparent. He thinks Xs are really, really cool. And perhaps that bird-themes aren't very cool. He loves the idea of an everything app 'like they have in Asia'. And he's addicted to Twitter enough that he got stuck buying it.
So now we have this insane situation where he's going to throw away a strong brand that has an outsized influence in global media by converting it to become the do-everything app, and rename it to his favourite, cool letter. I don't think there's a secret plan beyond that.
I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).
Doing it this way instead of your suggestion seems to be garnering a lot of free press. Many companies would pay large sums of money for the reach he's gotten just for changing the logo to a letter (and it's yet to be seen whether the change is permanent, or just a temporary publicity play).
He can get easy press doing anything including with the route I'd outlined. Meta got global coverage for Threads without sacrificing Instagram or Facebook.
This is textbook Management by Logo. When you're out of ideas you change the name/logo and now suddenly you're dynamic forward-looking innovative etc.
Except not really. Management by Logo is like respraying a car engine because you don't know how to fix it. There's a fair-to-good chance you'll make things more broken rather than less.
Musk bought Twitter (RIP...) because he wanted to use it as a propaganda outlet for his own crazy Randian/Trumpish ideals. It was never meant to continue as a free and open discussion site for humans.
Musk appears to have plans to spray AI and other magic dead chickens all over everything to create a new automated kind of propaganda outlet.
I suspect that won't work. Outside of his circle of immediate fans, people don't like being talked down to - especially not by bots.
My theory is that he is desperate. He was forced to buy it. The interest from his loans to buy Twitter are estimated at a billion a year - and now interest rates are high so he can’t swap them for cheaper loans. That’s not an insignificant amount of money even for someone like him.
Thus his cutting cost to the bone, even refusing to play bills/rent for as long as possible, and all the harebrained ideas about what to do with Twitter - clearly staying the course is not acceptable since Twitter turned a profit I think only twice in its entire existence; both times where during the pandemic.
He wasn't forced to buy Twitter. He was forced to complete the sale he insisted he be allowed to start.
But the changes in the market were not entirely against him. It's not that interest rates are high so that he cannot refinance. He had semi-floating rate (floats up to a maximum), so refinancing would never be necessary. It is currently pegged to the highest level. But it is still locked in at a much lower rate than the market rate.
And a billion is less of an estimate than a rounding. The amount of the loan, the interest rate, etc. are all public knowledge because he had to file the terms and contracts with the SEC.
Meanwhile, I'm not convinced it's "not an insignificant amount of money" is the appropriate phrasing. It's a lot of money to him, but certainly something he can afford. Jeff Bezos famously put that much each quarter (so 4x the rate) into Blue Origin.
> Meanwhile, I'm not convinced it's "not an insignificant amount of money" is the appropriate phrasing. It's a lot of money to him, but certainly something he can afford. Jeff Bezos famously put that much each quarter (so 4x the rate) into Blue Origin.
Still the billion a year is paid out to the banks and not used to run Twitter.
I wonder how much Twitter is making/losing now. Sure they cut a lot of staff but income must be in the toilet with ad revenues down due to advertisers getting cold feet and now rate limits further reducing the number of eyeballs.
> My theory is that he is desperate. He was forced to buy it.
Yeah, and now people are deriding him for that, which makes no sense. As far as I know, he made an offer, had to publicly announce it beforehand (due to law), then the stock market tanked, making the Twitter purchase nearly unaffordable for him. Then Twitter was loaded with massive debt. Very bad luck. But people hate him so they are satisfied with any misfortune he may have.
People have been mocking him for the price, the no-due-diligence clause, and other aspects of the contract since they became public. While later movement of the stock market may have made it even worse for him, it was a ridiculous deal, on its face, at the time negotiated (and even worse for Musk as a buyer given his public comments about Twitter.)
How was it a ridiculous deal at the time? He paid what the company was worth just a few months before. I think it is normal for acquisitions to be higher than the current stock price. Initially it wasn't even clear whether the deal would go through. Had his offer been significantly lower, he may have not succeeded.
He purchased a huge amount of twitter stock, and simultaneously made the public offer at like 4x twitters current stock value. Twitter pumped on the news, which was exactly Musks plan.
The stock market crash did not all of a sudden make twitter worth next to nothing on the offer. Musk was attempting to pump and dump the stock, and it backfired on him.
Even at the “rainbows and unicorns” drug induced tech stock valuations we’ve been seeing lately, twitter wasn’t worth 1/3 what musk offered to buy it at.
The stock market tanking has literally nothing to do with why this was a bad deal.
When you’re a public company and some coked off his ass idiot billionaire offers you 3x your companies current already highly inflated value, you are essentially forced by the shareholders to sell.
I think he's cultivated that negative reaction himself; he just can't help himself. Once upon a time, his reputation was primarily as the action man heavily driving forward key industries. There might've been a few "he's just the figurehead, others do the work despite him" sorts on here, but mostly sentiment on a tech site would've been favourable. Hell, years back, I thought he had a decent claim on Person of the Year.
He's really gone out of his way since to polarise the public, for limited benefit.
> As for what he's doing, I think it's pretty transparent. He thinks Xs are really, really cool.
Long before X was the holding company he used to buy Twitter, which he is now trying to turn into a do everything (including finance) app, X(.com) was the online financt company Musk openly wanted to turn ibto a do everything app, and was dump as CEO from multiple times, the last time just before it was renamed after a product it had acquired with another company, and which (unlike the products Musk tried to launch internally) was its only meaningful success, PayPal.
> I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).
Because he overburdened it with debt, meaning the turnaround has to be quick to work at all, and his do-everything plan is premised on a change in revenue model from traditional big ads to free/low-paying users to a more regular-user fee-for-service model.
>What is he doing? We can ask but I doubt he knows himself.
Muxk likex X and xe doexn't gixe a fux.
But seriously, Musk likes X. When you have the kind of Fuck You Money(tm) that he does, you don't need a reason to like something or use something you like.
Really have no idea what you’re referring to with the legal bill things. Other than the company that represented the Twitter deal, which is in the middle of a lawsuit over their charging practices. Seems like you’re mixing up trumps legal history with Musk.
afaik that's why the domain x.com was registered in the first place (by Marcel and Jeff). x.org was used for X11 purposes and x.com was registered to prevent someone squatting on it.
The "X" trademark owned by Meta belongs to Mixer, a game streaming site formerly run by Microsoft, which was shut down in 2017, but its operations were taken over by Facebook Gaming. The "X" trademark of Mixer was also given to Meta at that time.
Isn’t it only the logo that’s trademarked, rather than the name “X”? I am not an expert on trademarks by all means, how likely is it that Meta would actually have a case here?
> But could you even get a trademark for X, a single character?
Yes. In fact there are at least a few registrations in the TESS database of X for various goods and services. They don’t conflict with each other unless the goods and services are the same.
> Providing on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games; providing on-line electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games
> Entertainment services, namely, providing interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the Internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefor via the Internet
So for _those narrow usecases_, Microsoft can (in theory) enforce a trademark over the character "X". Any attempt to use that trademark here would be tossed immediately IMO.
Trademark are there to reduce confusion in the marketplace so it’s not about the look of X alone but also the products involved. Acura’s A logo is very distinctive but Audi couldn’t just swap their logo an A in a circle using a different font and be ok. They are both car companies so having different A logos would be confusing.
Where the specific design of the logo is critical is for shirts etc. If you’re selling clothing with other people’s logos that’s a problem, but a distinctive X design is going to be fine.
This is (to my understanding) the difference between a character mark and a design mark. The Acura logo is a design mark. Acura don't, AFAIK (but I haven't searched because searching the USPTO for "A" sounds like hell) have a character mark on the letter A for use in cars. Consider the counterexample in the same industry: Honda and Hyundai both have H in a frame as a logo, and I have no knowledge of a trademark dispute between the two.
The X trademark in question appears to be a Service Mark[0], meaning it is a name to represent a service (in this case some kind of social media chat service). My understanding is that the trademark applies to competing services regardless of the artwork or logo, so the social media chat service formerly known as Twitter may have trouble avoiding a collision with it if they want to rename themselves X.
Yes, though my point about the circle should have been more clear. I think Audi could be fine with an A inside of an triangle because it would be plenty distinctive.
Similarly the Honda and Hyundai logos use very different frames rather than the common circle which makes them far easier to distinguish than different fonts inside a circle. Namely a box with rounded corners vs an oval. Honda’s H also floats in the frame where Hyundai connects to the oval etc. The point of a logo is to be distinctive and they are.
Microsoft's trademark is for just the letter "X", not the specific design.
This is extra-confusing on the USPTO site[1] because it says "Standard Character Claim: No" (which usually means not text), but it also says "Mark Drawing Type: 1 - TYPESET WORD(S) /LETTER(S) /NUMBER(S)".
And that last part is merely the old way of saying it is Standard Character Claim (that's the newer terminology). See their documentation[2] (page 7); the terminology changed in 2003.
So my understanding (not a lawyer) is that Microsoft's "X" is indeed generic text, though still limited to the specific goods/services listed in the application.
Those narrow use cases definitely seem to overlap with Twitter though. Obviously Twitter is not exclusively about video and computer games, but a subset of Twitter users certainly use Twitter "for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games"
Not a lawyer but I don’t think that matters. Twitter isn’t using the mark for a service about video games, inasmuch as nobody would describe Twitter in one sentence as “a messaging platform about video games” any more than they’d describe email or SMS that way.
You never know but I think this would be too far of a stretch to pose a real risk.
Isn't the bigger issue that they haven't been actively enforcing the trademark since at least 2020? You have to enforce trademarks otherwise they lapse.
You can look at the trademark's registration in the USPTO site that was linked[1]. See the "Documents" tab. This one was first issued in ~2018, so would not need renewal until 2028.
You don't generally need to sue every infringer in order to keep your trademark. My understanding is it can vary by court and it gets a bit legally complex, and the final decision will depend on various factors (eg: [2]).
It's true that they use the text "X" in the (textual) description of the trademark, but that is not what's being trademarked. See the "Mark Information" drop-down on the page[1], for more detail.
Everyone seems to be missing the interesting part here.
It's that Twitter is using a generic Monotype font letter for their brand.
Which would mean that their brand will not be able to be trademarked and thus anyone could use it to associate their dodgy product with the main site. So I wouldn't worry about Meta, Microsoft etc but about the insane number of X ripoffs we are going to see in the future e.g. X crypto coin, X bots.
Trademarks don't have to be original. It's very common for a mark to be just a word or words written in a standard typeface. Perhaps you are thinking of copyrights?
People are hopelessly confused in this area, which is intentional FUD by the "intellectual property" advocates. People, even tech enthusiasts on a platform like this have no idea what the origin and purpose of 1) copyright, 2) trademarks and 3) patents are, even though they are very distinct from each other and even more distinct from the oft-imagined purpose of protecting the company's creative whatever. The overall original purpose of all these laws pointed towards the interests of the public, not the interests of some "intellectual property" owner, similar to protecting actual ownership rights.
The original purpose of trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. That's it. It's not to protect the profits of a company.
The original purpose of patents is to encourage disclosing new innovative ideas in order that others can build on top of the invention after having read the patent text (and in exchange for revealing how the innovation works, the inventor gets exclusive rights for a set time, but this is an instrument in achieving the former main purpose). Similarly, copyright incentivizes creative output. (But it only protects the actual expression, not the underlying general ideas etc.)
I think the "single letter" part is important here. AFAIK trademarks can't be too simple and generic. Sort of like how Intel couldn't trademark 286/386/486, so instead of 586 we got Pentium.
Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures.
It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.
It does say "Standard Character Claim: No" which (as best I can tell from [1]) means it is the particular form of that letter[2], not the letter itself, which is trademarked.
They did trademark 386, it was later invalidated under pressure from AMD because they argued, successfully, that it had become generic in the market (not least because they had the Am386). Intel then trademarked i386 instead.
In general, nothing stops you trademarking numbers. 501 is a trademark of Levi's, for example, and 747 a trademark of Boeing.
I thought that Peugeot had a trademark on car models of the form X0Y (where X and Y were single digits), resulting in the Porsche 901 being renamed to the 911 that we now know.
3M, Scotch, Crate & Barrel, Lufthansa and Jeep all have legitimate trademarked word marks that consist of nothing more than their name written in Helvetica.
The typographical and design treatment of the word can have separate trademark protection.
That can be true whether or not a design mark is registered.
If you started a car company called ‘Beep’ and write its name in olive green Helvetica Black, Jeep might struggle to make a case about your name’s similarity to their word mark (beep is a different word and rhyming is not a crime), but they for sure could take you to court for stealing their trade dress.
Not in the word mark registration, sure. But registration is not the whole of trademark law is it?
‘Word mark’ is also just a term of art in graphic design referring to a logo consisting of just text - another word for logotype. Should I have said logotype instead?
Monotype Executive Creative Director Phil Garnham Executive told The Messenger in a statement that the company “can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s “Special Alphabets 4.”
I loved how American Airlines and Apparel both used Helvetica.
These days, the one I find shocking is Monday.com and Slack. Both have names in lowercase black Circular, their logos use pill-shaped elements in similar shades of primary colors, and they're both in the business productivity space. The branding is so close you'd swear they're sibling products like IntelliJ and CLion.
This has to be the most moronic part of Elon's plan.
Firing everyone to improve operating margins, I understand that.
Iterating on features rapidly, even if they're not quite ready for prime time? That makes a lot of sense if you're trying to beat out the competition.
Rebranding your website and conference rooms? This sounds like a stupid waste of time and effort. If you wanted to create X the next twitter, just do a start up. Everyone would have signed up just because Elon Musk was using it. You didn't need to buy twitter for that.
At some point in the process, there is a worry that Musks public statements about buying Twitter when he owned like 10% and then not making a real effort to do so may have been investigated as a pump and dump (especially if he followed through in his threat to sell his stock if he wasn't allowed to buy it).
Now, I would say that was maybe a month of a long process when that was true.
Musk's apparent thinking was that it would have been easier to wriggle his way out of the Twitter purchase than the fines (around 1bn, if I recall correctly)
He could have easily created a second app and done exactly what Meta did with Threads and had instant signups with a Twitter account, connecting the two. His plan is comically awful. Unfortunately, I loved Twitter, and felt it was the most valuable social network in terms of instant content, but it is now being ruined.
The new prioritization algorithm tends to shift the lowest quality posts to the top in comments and the algorithmic feed. They also broke old (good) Tweetdeck, and have announced that new (bad) Tweetdeck will cost money. The quality of ads on the service has also declined tremendously. They've begun restricting other functionality as well like rate-limiting tweet viewing and direct messages.
The sibling explains well, although it's missing key detail. If you pay Musk $8/month, your replies to tweets will appear above those who do not. Just imagine how that might work here at HN, and multiply it by the "way worse actors" factor to get an idea of the result.
Since 'verification' is now just a paid service, it's also much harder to separate bad actors from good actors. There are other minor changes that have degraded the service, but it's difficult to tell if they're permanent or just another live experiment.
>Since 'verification' is now just a paid service, it's also much harder to separate bad actors from good actors.
Doesn't the fact that a payment method has been setup _help_ and not _hinder_ the process of separating bad actors from good? I'm not a huge Twitter user by any means but I would think that verification step would cut down on automated spam.
I believe the old verification system actually checked that somebody was who they claimed to be — obviously this required human intervention. Verification now just checks that somebody can pay $8/month (or promise to as a once-off, then cancel, maybe?) So a bot pretending to be Joe Biden or Donald Trump would appear to be legitimate.
if twitter were very strongly moderated it might have helped, but as it stands now it's a $8 fee for scammers to push their scams to the top of any thread. Even if they get banned every so often it's a great value proposition. Can't tell you the number of verified 𝕏 crypto scams I've seen since the rebrand, most of which seem to still be up.
I think you're right, HN and news websites are the only places that Facebook is referenced as "Meta", and that's been the name for a couple of years now.
It's interesting to examine this website with the thousands of trademarks for "X". Some are extremely stylized while others are just the letter X. Some are specific to particular colors. Some cover very narrow areas. Microsoft has a lot of trademarks here, but Apple shows up too.
Elon Musk also did own x.com in the 1990s. [1] It was sold, but he repurchased it several years ago and left the page to resolve to a simple "x" index. [2] This usage was before Microsoft's 2003 registration.
No it doesn't, it's been redirecting to twitter.com for a couple of days now. If you're seeing a GoDaddy page then theres some incredibly slow dns caching in your setup.
Godaddy? That made me chuckle. The former richest man uses GD. GD is not known for it's absolutely strong guardiance of domains as a registrar. The web ist full of examples. Even namecheap has a better reputation as a registrar.
Trademark law is fairly complicated . One of the aspects that is often overlooked is that you actually have to enforce your trademark rights in order to keep your trademark. Failure to do that, weakens your grip on it.
In the case of this particular trademark claim, it's likely to be fairly weak for MS. There are countless legitimate uses of the letter X. They've not been going after a lot of companies over this. And there's also the notion that MS launched the x-box after the x.com domain was registered by Elon Musk. So, any dispute over this could end up being quite hairy for MS. I doubt MS lawyers are going to even bother with a cease and desist letter.
Not a laywer of course; this is just my understanding of trademark law. It gets even more complicated when you consider that laws vary internationally.
Isn't it even weaker for elon, since he lost the domain around same time that xbox was introduced and only got it back 2017 and even then he said that he had no plans for it.
There is a german saying: "Satz mit X, war wohl nix." that comes to mind. Anti-Search Engine Optimisation. The world has really passed google by, if this is a valid option.
I'm German. Here's a better translation: "A sentence with X: That evidently didn't work." The "sentence with X" part hinges on the alternative spelling of "nichts" (nothing) as "nix".
If you ever want to understand what living in a tech bubble is like, reading the comments here should be sufficient. People feeding off each others conspiracies and hate for Musk. Hilarious to watch
Probably just human nature, right? The normal person version of this is getting excited about a Raspberry Pi, buying one, failing to do your project on the first try, and then shoving the thing into a drawer you never open. If you're the richest person in the world, you have the unique ability to tack on 9 zeroes for your "it could be good" speculative projects.
500 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadThe new Twitter logo immediately brought to mind the X-Window system one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-model-e-elon-musk-tesla...
Between that and the requirement that they be defended, honestly, I think trademarks are one of the forms of IP that I like the most.
While you and I might think it's obviously legal to start Apple Airlines or Apple Faucets or Apple Fans, apparently this is not obvious to Apple's trademark lawyers.
I'm not sure intellectual property law operates according to any rational rules that can be understood by us mere mortals.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-vs-apples-trademark-ba... [2] https://archive.is/MKQpW
but park tool's trademark is only in the context of bicycle repair tools, and kubota's is only for tractors. the law just isn't that dumb, it's interpreted by courts and real people, who are capable of saying "no, that's dumb" if something is dumb. kubota can keep their trademark, and everybody else can keep making orange things as long as those things aren't tractors or tractor-like things that are going to get confused with kubota products.
similarly, any somewhat reasonable person will be able to see that twitter's rebrand to "X" isn't really going to confuse anybody into thinking they're using a microsoft product, so depite it being a very bad name it's probably not actually going to run afoul of anybody's trademarks.
I feel that reasonable people and the people who suffer from Musk Derangement Syndrome (seemingly a lot of the people here...) are two very different groups.
What else? Is taste trademarkable? Or some kind of smells? Or maybe a tone/frequency?
I mean "Twitter Videos" are now "X Videos". "The Twitter Files", this series of "investigative" threads... are now "The X Files" (lol).
"Direct Messages" will now be referred to as DirectX I guess, or I don't know.
X is a letter.
It's Roman number ten.
It's in millions of brands around the world.
It also stands for "X Rated", as in containing excessive violence and nudity. It stands for pornography in some context.
It's unsearchable, and barely speakable, as in it's unclear already when you say "X" if you mean Twitter or Elon's son or whatever.
What is he doing? We can ask but I doubt he knows himself.
Which also happens to already be a porn site…
As far as I can tell the actual extremist right-wingers are on Gab rather than Twitter.
And I'm speaking from a US politics perspective, where Hillary Clinton is considered center-left. If we were to take a more international view, then Joe Biden is somewhere on the center-right, and Trump and Tucker are so far on the right that you can barely see the spaces between them and the nazis. For context, far-right Marine Le Pen of France is to the left of Tucker on most issues, except that she's a bit more openly racist.
Not saying all right winger are Nazis, but the "jews will not replace us" crowd definitely is. And the rest is at least authoritarian bordering facist. Same goes for some European parties: the AfD in Germamy, whateber LePen calls her outfit now in France, the current government party in Italy, the current politics of Nethanyahu (arguably not a Nazinof course, but a straight up authoritarian with religious tendencies and disdain for democratic seperation of powers), Hungary, the FPÖ in Austria... The list way too long.
Don’t underestimate the nationalist bloodlust.
Haven't some of them been clamouring for an attack on Mexico recently?
Anyway, there are worse figures than Tucker Carlson on Twitter. Some are outright nazis. Others can name them if they wish, but I won't amplify them here.
There's no payout. There's no conspiracy. Just a man and his arrogance and mental issues.
Even if it's just PR (and it is just PR, evidently), it's an additional burden to have your PR and your actions be consistently at 180 degrees.
Also, $20 billion aren't the "price tag". That money didn't go to Elon. They went to Twitter's shareholders. Elon only ended up with losses and loans, so far, to the tune of another 20-30 billion at the very least.
So where's the "payout"? If you "hired" Elon to do this for you, as a Saudi, and you spend $20 billion as a co-investor, and need to cover Elon's $20-30 billion loss, "the price tag" is now up to $50 billion, but we're still only at break even in the short term, and only when we don't consider opportunity cost of Tesla stock dropping last year and future losses to Elon's company brands and so on, because he's coming off as a lunatic and wasting his time on Twitter, instead of being at Tesla and SpaceX.
So what's the price tag now? $80 billion? $100 billion? $150 billion?
Reminder, the entire Saudi family, all of them, together, have about $1.4 trillion, and that's not cash in the bank, but assets, oil, real estate, all of it.
Which means any such "price tag" would imply them giving up all their liquid assets and maybe liquidating more assets, in order to afford this "price tag" so quickly.
It's just nonsense.
By now I am very much aware that there are lots of people who believe conspiracy theories, yet I am still surprised when those people are from the tech scene. A developer who believes in the dumbest conspiracies is such an odd thing to me. It is so odd to me that someone who supposedly things about problems in a systematic way and has to break them down into their parts, can fall for something as dumb as the richest man in the world taking some sort of payoff to kill twitter.
I should know better by now, but it still takes me by surprise sometimes
Shrug.
The original guy didn't even say he 100% believed it as fact. It's just a thought experiment
It's also not at all a burden for your PR to be diametrically opposed to your actions, especially if your actions are seen as bad. Absolutist regimes love portraying themselves as the victims because it gives them a moral justification (no matter how flimsy). And "free speech absolutists" are a great example given how many people publicly adopt that stance but then use it to justify shutting down their opposition for being "against free speech".
The reason people are creating nonsensical conspiracy theories about the Twitter buyout is that they want to believe there's a rhyme and reason to the madness, the same way they created nonsensical conspiracy theories following 9/11 because it meant that the US was in control after all and not actually (figuratively) brought to its knees by a handful of foreigners with box cutters.
The truth is that Elon Musk shitposted his way into being forced to follow through on an acquisition he never really wanted, used his business connections to coordinate a hamfisted leveraged buyout and got too high on his own supply after being the dog that caught the car. Now he's stuck in a midlife crisis trying to relive the failure that was his involvement in X.com but without Peter Thiel being able to stop him.
Exactly. People want to believe that the richest man in the world somehow deserves to be so, mainly through their effort. They want to think "if only I put a bit more work in, I could have it all!" The thought of somebody becoming the world's richest man AND being as unstable and erratic as Musk appears to be is disconcerting for those who want to live in a world with some kind of order in it.
Yup. The real reason behind all of this is not the market or the Saudis nor anything else. It’s because Musk wanted to be on the board, and he was rejected. He suffered a huge narcissistic injury, and then said “Fine, if I can’t be on the board, I’ll be the board and just buy the whole thing outright”
That’s why he waived due diligence and offered so much money. He was high off his narcissistic rage and flexing. He was on the warpath and forcing a hostile takeover. But then he cooled down, of course, and realized what he did was a fucking mess for himself. So he threw a tantrum in court.
This is all explained very easily by his personality disorder.
Meanwhile, you've offered Elon the opportunity to justify liquidating billions of TSLA stock at its height without triggering a massive crash right before the entire market sank. And his reputation outside running a social network doesn't seem to have suffered much at all. Do you need to offer him a premium or does he offer one to you?
(And on financing, the Saudis' credit is fine)
Now, it's nonsense because controlling Twitter and using it to silent dissent algorithmically is better than blowing it up. But the math could easily work.
Twitter is extremely popular in Saudi, more so than the US/Europe, so some level of influence is extremely valuable.
How would destroying it prevent that again, people would just go elsewhere. You’d prevent it by Twitter thriving then clever use of algorithm suppression and shadow bans.
Conspiracy doesn’t add up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558581
At this point, this seems intentional on his part.
It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.
And that indeed sums up so much of the mentality of Elon's supporters. The more stupid things it does, the grander the delusion becomes.
The biggest early factor to Elon Musk's wealth was lucking into Peter Thiel merging X.com into Confinity/PayPal. Thiel likely anticipated that Musk would have tanked X.com eventually but it would have been much worse for Confinity if it had done so given its market share and the rippling affect that could have caused in the market and user trust. X.com largely operated on hot air, riding the Dot Com bubble. The massive jumps after that directly stem from his Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued.
Basically he bought an EV company right when greenwashing and solar/electric was the new hotness and founded SpaceX mid-way to the tail end of a space optimism/tourism and "nerd-cool" (i.e. rise of super hero movies in mainstream media, widespread enthusiasm for "tech gadgets", etc) trend. He used SpaceX to make grandiose claims about technological developments which in turn fed into a hype cycle of vaporware projects like the Hyperloop, eventually allowing him to position himself as "real-life Tony Stark" further boosting his credibility with no actual qualifications.
I'm not saying his success isn't real, but his success doesn't come down to him being a clever business person but more to being a meme. He turned himself into a brand and that brand carried Tesla stock to absurd heights but with Twitter's failure that brand is becoming increasingly toxic and he's stuck turning dials and checking if people are still cheering while also trying to relive his young adulthood high of X.com, except we're no longer in the Dot-Com bubble and he doesn't understand PayPal did him a favor by kicking him out.
It was so easy everyone else also did it
Elon Musk is listed as the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla. Do you genuinely think Elon Musk is so good at being a CEO that he can run three vastly different companies (4 including X Corp which he formally ceded his position as CEO) at the same time? Or do you think that his primary function was founding/buying the companies? Most of his interference in his companies (especially Tesla) seems to have been detrimental: from an atrocious workplace accident rate in Tesla factories because he "doesn't like yellow" to laying off most of Twitter before establishing any persistence/transfer of knowledge.
If you listen to him talk about any subject you're professionally familiar with, it's evident he knows how to mix in buzzwords but doesn't understand the underlying technology or how any of it actually works. His Twitter Spaces interview was a perfect example for software developers, his recent interview about Twitter/X as an "everything app" was an example for anyone working in (or remotely informed about) fintech.
His wealth is almost entirely tied to Tesla's share price and Tesla's share price is tied to his public perception as "real-life Tony Stark". SpaceX mostly runs on government contracts - incidentally most of Tesla's actual revenue also stems from public funds in the form of emissions trading.
But if it's so easy, why hasn't anyone else bothered?
All space programs run on government contracts, what's new? He's providing the only reusable rocket, and 10 years later no one else has done that, why?
Because to most other automakers, EVs are a side business that competes with their core business, not their core business, and the rest of it because its not true, e.g., Tesla doesn't offer the best self-driving, they just spend more effort trying to sell the idea of self-driving to individual buyers.
You can't buy another car that can do even 10% of what FSD beta does
Right, because Tesla is the only company that sees individual car owners as the target market for self-driving, everyone else in the business sees institutionally-owned robotaxi fleets as the target market. Actually, so does Tesla, fairly overtly—though they are behind at actually having auch a thing—they just see individual vehicle owners as a way to defray costs, especially development costs.
They aren't ahead at self-driving, they are just more creative at how they are financing it.
That's an odd statement, as "the first self-driving system to be approved for European public roads" and "the first automaker to receive government approval in the US for a Level 3 driving feature" is from Mercedes-Benz.
Tested and approved >> beta hype.
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/mercedes-opens-sales-...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-p...
It's just worse cruise control, can't even go at highway speeds, there's about 1% chance you could use it.
Meanwhile FSD Beta is driving around cities the same as Waymo/Cruise are, except every city in North America.
We know a few things about AI, it needs lots of data, and lots of CPU. Tesla has 2 million cars with 8 cameras gathering data, and a top 10 in the world supercomputer.
Beta.
We know a few things about Musk: it needs hype, smoke-and-mirrors overpromising. Get back to us when it's out of beta.`
Tested and approved >> beta hype.
"During the second quarter of 2022, SpaceX delivered 158.7 metric tons to low Earth orbit which is four times more than second palace China’s space corporation CASC at 38.8 tons.
Roscosmos at 17.2 tons was third, United Launch Alliance 4th at 13.0 tons, and Arianespace at 9.8 tons was fifth."
Telsa has the best selling car in the world, while Ford loses 200% on each EV they sell (according to Ford)
With Tesla, I think that this very much remains to be seen, and signs are not good (1)
M-B is at least making verifiable progress
1)
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tesla-elon-musk-self-driv...
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...
Doesn't seem that bad really, 2 FSD reports, first one FSD braked suddenly, maybe, no results from investigation it seems so far. And people driving incorrectly behind them were too close and couldn't brake on time. If only all the cars had FSD and not humans.
And the other FSD report was about driving into a junction where the car they thought was going to hit them had already stopped to let them go, and beeping to warn it was getting close to a cyclist. That's why it's still beta and warns you every time to be aware and it will do stupid things. So far in 300 million miles driven, it's apparently hit 0 people. So that's way better than humans, who kill someone every 100 million miles.
You're welcome to dwell in the weeds of specific cases. There are others (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-... )
I note that you switch from "not proven yet" to "zero" which is not honest. Like a Tesla, you need to pick a lane.
Fundamentally, "just a beta" is not as far along as an approved shipping product. The shipping product is harder to fake, and we cannot rule out deception here.
Meanwhile I've found 0 evidence of any member of the public who owns a Mercedes using Drive Pilot 2 years after it was announced.
I'm sure if FSD ever kills anyone it will be headline news. It is weird there's no NHTSA webpage about the results of their investigations though.
I honestly don't know why that's supposed to be relevant. I see plenty of videos of it on YouTube after a 5-second search. No, it's not the HN crowd who have it and post here, but so what, that proves nothing at all. It's actually a bit of a weird outlier to have your ego tied up with promoting someone else's product for free online. "I've never seen it, therefor it doesn't happen" is not really true.
> FSD works on highways.
Legally though, "Statements about the "FSD works" should not be taken to imply that this is out of beta and therefor works unambiguously, or is technically actually "full self driving".
You keep trying to blur the line between "experimental feature" and the finished thing, marketing and certified, and then extrapolating to false claims about "hit 0 people" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-a...
being "just a beta" gives them wiggle room to make claims that they don't have to back up properly. It is a key point that you do not engage with. I know that you want to believe, but I refer you to my comments above on the topic. Legal lines do make a difference, and not being able to meet them, while claiming otherwise, is a red flag.
That article says it's about Autopilot, not FSD. My claim that FSD has hit 0 people still hasn't been refuted by anyone. Meanwhile humans have killed 3000 people while driving today.
All these graphs from NHTSA data ignore the warning on NHTSA's page that the data is not useful for statistical analysis. When they actually publish the cause of the crashes, and what software was being used at the time, we will have actual knowledge. If it turns out that FSD was killing 1000s of people they'd probably have said something by now
I agree with all the rest of your points, but I think the problem with this is that Elon really is smart. It is just that you can see that he was mostly a really good salesperson of his personal brand. He also had his finger on the pulse of what was "cool" (internet, space, electric cars) for awhile (a lot of that is probably luck, but there has to be a certain amount of talent there I think--but that talent for fashion always wears off).
He's also smart enough to be able to regurgitate what SpaceX engineers tell him and to manage to sound like he's got a PhD. He must actually study that pretty well and be at least decent enough at physics/engineering that he's clearly above-average intelligent. But it is other people making the breakthroughs in the mathematics of how to hoverslam rockets, he's a bit more like a CEO version of a science communicator.
The thing is that people are largely just ignorant about where all the technology comes from (Lars Blackmore worked at NASA JPL when he published the first articles on successive convexification of the landing problem -- so the US Government really invented hoverslamming rockets), and they are horrible at judging what kind of intelligence a public personality actually has. They also think that smart people are smart at literally everything.
And as much as I hate to admit it, Donald Trump was also smart, but his talents are almost purely sociopathic. And one of those talents is being able to actually lean-in to a shitstorm of stupid that he creates around him, and make his sycophants write it all off as 4D chess. That is actually a talent. A genuinely stupid person wouldn't be able to pull that off.
That doesn't feel quite as fair as having earned success, so 4D chess it is.
Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money.
> It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.
The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter:
- Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only.
- Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public.
- Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates.
- Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view.
The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.
It’s not.
So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing.
We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-ara...
[2] https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dol...
[3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-...
This commenter's analysis seems more credible to me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36858613
It's also possible that they got approached by Musk and saw a good timing to exploit a rich Western idiot to further their interests. I mean, Musk being deranged enough to call a rescue diver a pedo, smoking weed in Joe Rogan's podcast or give names to his children that are completely bonkers even for celebrities?
The signs that he's not completely well mentally were there for years. Loaning him 20 billion or whatever dollars was an extremely high risk move alone for that factor, so either the Saudis have gone off the rails as well or they see some hidden aspect that makes the deal worth their while even if the risk event materializes.
That was revenue (?) when oil prices were much higher.
> particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the
But yeah, I guess arguing about monetary amounts is a but pointless since I think the whole premise is just absurd..
Organizing the WC or buying European fotball clubs is a much better investment (if there only reason they invested in Twitter is what you’re suggesting, which of course makes no sense).
The price he paid is for the human traffic. Redirected to his world of interests
Quite. It's pretty big corp 101 to sort this shit out as a rebrand.
So now we have this insane situation where he's going to throw away a strong brand that has an outsized influence in global media by converting it to become the do-everything app, and rename it to his favourite, cool letter. I don't think there's a secret plan beyond that.
I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).
This is textbook Management by Logo. When you're out of ideas you change the name/logo and now suddenly you're dynamic forward-looking innovative etc.
Except not really. Management by Logo is like respraying a car engine because you don't know how to fix it. There's a fair-to-good chance you'll make things more broken rather than less.
Musk bought Twitter (RIP...) because he wanted to use it as a propaganda outlet for his own crazy Randian/Trumpish ideals. It was never meant to continue as a free and open discussion site for humans.
Musk appears to have plans to spray AI and other magic dead chickens all over everything to create a new automated kind of propaganda outlet.
I suspect that won't work. Outside of his circle of immediate fans, people don't like being talked down to - especially not by bots.
My theory is that he is desperate. He was forced to buy it. The interest from his loans to buy Twitter are estimated at a billion a year - and now interest rates are high so he can’t swap them for cheaper loans. That’s not an insignificant amount of money even for someone like him.
Thus his cutting cost to the bone, even refusing to play bills/rent for as long as possible, and all the harebrained ideas about what to do with Twitter - clearly staying the course is not acceptable since Twitter turned a profit I think only twice in its entire existence; both times where during the pandemic.
But the changes in the market were not entirely against him. It's not that interest rates are high so that he cannot refinance. He had semi-floating rate (floats up to a maximum), so refinancing would never be necessary. It is currently pegged to the highest level. But it is still locked in at a much lower rate than the market rate.
And a billion is less of an estimate than a rounding. The amount of the loan, the interest rate, etc. are all public knowledge because he had to file the terms and contracts with the SEC.
Meanwhile, I'm not convinced it's "not an insignificant amount of money" is the appropriate phrasing. It's a lot of money to him, but certainly something he can afford. Jeff Bezos famously put that much each quarter (so 4x the rate) into Blue Origin.
Still the billion a year is paid out to the banks and not used to run Twitter.
I wonder how much Twitter is making/losing now. Sure they cut a lot of staff but income must be in the toilet with ad revenues down due to advertisers getting cold feet and now rate limits further reducing the number of eyeballs.
Yeah, and now people are deriding him for that, which makes no sense. As far as I know, he made an offer, had to publicly announce it beforehand (due to law), then the stock market tanked, making the Twitter purchase nearly unaffordable for him. Then Twitter was loaded with massive debt. Very bad luck. But people hate him so they are satisfied with any misfortune he may have.
People have been mocking him for the price, the no-due-diligence clause, and other aspects of the contract since they became public. While later movement of the stock market may have made it even worse for him, it was a ridiculous deal, on its face, at the time negotiated (and even worse for Musk as a buyer given his public comments about Twitter.)
https://images.app.goo.gl/see6HtsjsuSZMioP9
He purchased a huge amount of twitter stock, and simultaneously made the public offer at like 4x twitters current stock value. Twitter pumped on the news, which was exactly Musks plan.
The stock market crash did not all of a sudden make twitter worth next to nothing on the offer. Musk was attempting to pump and dump the stock, and it backfired on him.
Even at the “rainbows and unicorns” drug induced tech stock valuations we’ve been seeing lately, twitter wasn’t worth 1/3 what musk offered to buy it at.
The stock market tanking has literally nothing to do with why this was a bad deal.
When you’re a public company and some coked off his ass idiot billionaire offers you 3x your companies current already highly inflated value, you are essentially forced by the shareholders to sell.
That's a lie. See
https://images.app.goo.gl/see6HtsjsuSZMioP9
He's really gone out of his way since to polarise the public, for limited benefit.
No, my point was that all the derision was undeserved and you didn't provide evidence to the contrary. Journalists just hate him.
Long before X was the holding company he used to buy Twitter, which he is now trying to turn into a do everything (including finance) app, X(.com) was the online financt company Musk openly wanted to turn ibto a do everything app, and was dump as CEO from multiple times, the last time just before it was renamed after a product it had acquired with another company, and which (unlike the products Musk tried to launch internally) was its only meaningful success, PayPal.
> I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).
Because he overburdened it with debt, meaning the turnaround has to be quick to work at all, and his do-everything plan is premised on a change in revenue model from traditional big ads to free/low-paying users to a more regular-user fee-for-service model.
Muxk likex X and xe doexn't gixe a fux.
But seriously, Musk likes X. When you have the kind of Fuck You Money(tm) that he does, you don't need a reason to like something or use something you like.
Seems that he wanted to put the domain to use
https://web.archive.org/web/20000619201415/http://www.x.com/...
Musk did not own x.com between 2001 and 2017.
Now then, of course Musk can challenge it, and given his domain ownership, possibly successfully even.
But given the scads of lawyers who Musk owes money to, yet is not paying, who will take the fight on?
It's about 'Extant Use', not existence.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixer_(service)
There are two main types: a "standard character mark" (which is text) and the rest, which are visual logo designs.
This one is the latter. That is, they're not trademarking the text "X", just that particular visual representation — the colors involved, etc.
You can tell in the TEAS system by looking in the "Mark Information" section, and the "Standard Character Claim: No" line.
But could you even get a trademark for X, a single character?
Yes. In fact there are at least a few registrations in the TESS database of X for various goods and services. They don’t conflict with each other unless the goods and services are the same.
> Providing on-line chat rooms for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games; providing on-line electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users concerning video and computer games
> Entertainment services, namely, providing interactive multiplayer game services for games played over computer networks and global communications networks; providing computer games and video games downloadable over computer global communications networks; providing information on the video game and computer game industries via the Internet; and providing information on computer games, video games, video game consoles and accessories therefor via the Internet
So for _those narrow usecases_, Microsoft can (in theory) enforce a trademark over the character "X". Any attempt to use that trademark here would be tossed immediately IMO.
Where the specific design of the logo is critical is for shirts etc. If you’re selling clothing with other people’s logos that’s a problem, but a distinctive X design is going to be fine.
The X trademark in question appears to be a Service Mark[0], meaning it is a name to represent a service (in this case some kind of social media chat service). My understanding is that the trademark applies to competing services regardless of the artwork or logo, so the social media chat service formerly known as Twitter may have trouble avoiding a collision with it if they want to rename themselves X.
[0] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=76041368&caseSearchType=U...
Similarly the Honda and Hyundai logos use very different frames rather than the common circle which makes them far easier to distinguish than different fonts inside a circle. Namely a box with rounded corners vs an oval. Honda’s H also floats in the frame where Hyundai connects to the oval etc. The point of a logo is to be distinctive and they are.
This is extra-confusing on the USPTO site[1] because it says "Standard Character Claim: No" (which usually means not text), but it also says "Mark Drawing Type: 1 - TYPESET WORD(S) /LETTER(S) /NUMBER(S)".
And that last part is merely the old way of saying it is Standard Character Claim (that's the newer terminology). See their documentation[2] (page 7); the terminology changed in 2003.
Some more info here: https://trademarkgarden.com/2018/03/09/amazon-and-you/
So my understanding (not a lawyer) is that Microsoft's "X" is indeed generic text, though still limited to the specific goods/services listed in the application.
[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=2693757&caseSearchType=US...
[2] https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/products/applicati...
You never know but I think this would be too far of a stretch to pose a real risk.
You don't generally need to sue every infringer in order to keep your trademark. My understanding is it can vary by court and it gets a bit legally complex, and the final decision will depend on various factors (eg: [2]).
[1] for reference: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
[2] https://www.dbllawyers.com/can-i-lose-my-trademark-rights/
However, the 'X' they chose is "just" a single UTF8 character, which would then make it classed as a _standard character mark_.
Hmmm.
The Meta trademark is for this design: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/img/87980831/large?1690302463976
It's true that they use the text "X" in the (textual) description of the trademark, but that is not what's being trademarked. See the "Mark Information" drop-down on the page[1], for more detail.
[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
I see lawsuits ahead.
Apple owns X with OS X and the iPhone X.
Microsoft own Xbox's logo, with the console, store, game pass
It's that Twitter is using a generic Monotype font letter for their brand.
Which would mean that their brand will not be able to be trademarked and thus anyone could use it to associate their dodgy product with the main site. So I wouldn't worry about Meta, Microsoft etc but about the insane number of X ripoffs we are going to see in the future e.g. X crypto coin, X bots.
The original purpose of trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. That's it. It's not to protect the profits of a company.
The original purpose of patents is to encourage disclosing new innovative ideas in order that others can build on top of the invention after having read the patent text (and in exchange for revealing how the innovation works, the inventor gets exclusive rights for a set time, but this is an instrument in achieving the former main purpose). Similarly, copyright incentivizes creative output. (But it only protects the actual expression, not the underlying general ideas etc.)
Musk can't trademark the letter X and he can't trademark an existing font letter.
Microsoft applied for, and obtained, a trademark for "x". Companies do this all the time. Companies also trademark numbers all the time. Dale Earnhardt trademarked the number "1": https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_...
Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures.
It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.
[1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mea...
[2] Although it is a pretty generic "1".
In general, nothing stops you trademarking numbers. 501 is a trademark of Levi's, for example, and 747 a trademark of Boeing.
I'm not sure similar cases exist but it's similar as using an old public domain logo as your own. Would that be enforceable?
(And now I know: designed by Ron Wayne, so not public domain at all; and I'd forgotten about the ribbons with the text)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Apple_Inc.#/media...
3M, Scotch, Crate & Barrel, Lufthansa and Jeep all have legitimate trademarked word marks that consist of nothing more than their name written in Helvetica.
The typographical and design treatment of the word can have separate trademark protection.
That can be true whether or not a design mark is registered.
If you started a car company called ‘Beep’ and write its name in olive green Helvetica Black, Jeep might struggle to make a case about your name’s similarity to their word mark (beep is a different word and rhyming is not a crime), but they for sure could take you to court for stealing their trade dress.
‘Word mark’ is also just a term of art in graphic design referring to a logo consisting of just text - another word for logotype. Should I have said logotype instead?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3M_wordmark.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scotch-logo.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crate_and_barrel_log...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lufthansa_Logo_2018....
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeep_logo.svg
For more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordmark
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Threshold_of_orig...
Why can’t Elon?
I’m not aware of any existing font letter exception.
These days, the one I find shocking is Monday.com and Slack. Both have names in lowercase black Circular, their logos use pill-shaped elements in similar shades of primary colors, and they're both in the business productivity space. The branding is so close you'd swear they're sibling products like IntelliJ and CLion.
Firing everyone to improve operating margins, I understand that.
Iterating on features rapidly, even if they're not quite ready for prime time? That makes a lot of sense if you're trying to beat out the competition.
Rebranding your website and conference rooms? This sounds like a stupid waste of time and effort. If you wanted to create X the next twitter, just do a start up. Everyone would have signed up just because Elon Musk was using it. You didn't need to buy twitter for that.
Just stupid.
You do need to buy Twitter to avoid running afoul of the SEC.
You do need to buy (something) to dump lots of Tesla stock without cratering it.
Huh?
Now, I would say that was maybe a month of a long process when that was true.
turned out not to be the case!
I'm not a Twitter user, how has the user experience changed since Elon's taking over?
Since 'verification' is now just a paid service, it's also much harder to separate bad actors from good actors. There are other minor changes that have degraded the service, but it's difficult to tell if they're permanent or just another live experiment.
Doesn't the fact that a payment method has been setup _help_ and not _hinder_ the process of separating bad actors from good? I'm not a huge Twitter user by any means but I would think that verification step would cut down on automated spam.
But I suspect what will happen is people will continue to call it Twitter and the X name will not stick.
Me too, the problem is that you cannot convert X to a verb. "They x'ed this and that" sounds much dumber than "They tweeted this and that".
Maybe he should trademark this unicode character instead of letter "X".
https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=X
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991114130555/http://x.com/mana...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230401142845/http://x.com/
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854166
https://onlineornot.com/guidelines-to-help-avoid-losing-your...
In the case of this particular trademark claim, it's likely to be fairly weak for MS. There are countless legitimate uses of the letter X. They've not been going after a lot of companies over this. And there's also the notion that MS launched the x-box after the x.com domain was registered by Elon Musk. So, any dispute over this could end up being quite hairy for MS. I doubt MS lawyers are going to even bother with a cease and desist letter.
Not a laywer of course; this is just my understanding of trademark law. It gets even more complicated when you consider that laws vary internationally.
Google translate: “Sentence with X was probably nothing.“
"How to destroy a international brand and company properly and fast"
I can't believe it was intentional, but i can't imagine any reasons for this, i could only add my speculation.