You’re interpreting a much older shorthand with online emoticon rules. XO is a closed-eye open-mouth emoticon, but XOXO has been “hugs and kisses” for long enough to have been used when people wrote letters by hand.
saw this earlier from an old twitter tab, thought my browser had been hijacked with some extension. what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo because they have to, definitely not what i’d expect from one of the biggest social media sites in the world. elon has been fixated on the whole x thing for literal decades now & that’s the best logo he came up with?
Supposedly this is a temporary logo until they can create a more permanent one. It literally came from some random that tweeted at him (X’d at him? Lol). He asked for submissions and just chose one, maybe he accidentally laid off all the graphic designers.
Rebranding was so urgent that he didn't wait for a finished logo? I have to admit, I'm baffled. With his other changes I can at least imagine a thought process behind it, this one seems to be something he just woke up and decided to do all of a sudden.
What other changes has a thought process behind them? Virtually everything he’s done at twitter has seemed like something that occurred to him while shitting and then he forced his team to implement by the end of the day.
Twitter was apparently losing a lot of money before he bought it, so laying off a bunch of staff is one reasonable way to deal with that. Same with charging for the API, getting rid of data centers and offices, and even login requirements to reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
These were all things done as an attempt at solving problems. They may not have been good solutions, but as I said, you can understand the thought process behind them. "We're spending more than we take in. So do things to reduce spending and boost income."
I have no idea what problem this rebranding is supposed to solve, though. When Facebook changed to Meta, or Google changed to Alphabet, I could understand those because their name had become associated with only a very specific subset of what the company wanted to do. Twitter is still just being Twitter, though. Unless perhaps he's got some big new project he's planning for them to start doing that's distinct from microblogging.
He's not, though. He's had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he's become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.
I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn't going so well for him.
He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn’t build anything he didn’t run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don’t get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it’s the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon’s involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.
If Elon's an idiot who doesn't do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How's Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?
I think there's a very clear theme of "I don't like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever" going on here.
Because he’s a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn’t wreck them?
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn't until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn't build its first car until after Musk's acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
I am in no way saying that Elon Musk is a good person or that he's doing well with Twitter (though we don't know the company's internal cash flows so it could actually be that it's becoming more profitable - we'll see in the long run). I'm just saying that this Reddit hivemind stuff is getting tedious and silly. He was not a "rich fuck" when he started out, I have more money right now than Musk did back then. He is not a moron. He's an asshole, an egotist, and not good at many things. But he's definitely good at some things and has done quite well by it.
Hardly. There are plenty of people who are as smart or smarter than Elon Musk who haven't struck it big. Given his net worth there are huge numbers of people like that who haven't struck it big.
I'm just pointing out that accomplishing what he's accomplished probably means he isn't dumb. Not in certain fields of expertise, at any rate. I'm only arguing that the "ha ha, he's a moron!" reactions here are not particularly plausible.
While he obviously has some intelligence, he’s still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he’s not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.
People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!
I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
i mean, that’s still way more wealthy than most people. i don’t think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child’s business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk’s dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is… still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.
Most people don’t get seed money from their parents, but the median American will inherit $70K from their parents.
Regardless, most people who start a business can take out a loan. And to put things in perspective, even opening a fast food restaurant will require over $200K.
In other words, the advantage that $28K gave Musk was nowhere near enough to open a small restaurant, much less automatically turn him into a billionaire.
i really want to know where you got that figure, because a quick google search does not verify a median inheritance of 70k. there are some figures which report a mean inheritance of around that, but most are significantly lower, and this document suggests both that the median inheritance is around 8k across income groups, and that less that 7% of people are will receive any inheritance at all when averaged across all income groups. (the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to receive an inheritance).
and sure, most people who start a business can take out a loan, but there are a vast quantity of people who can’t take out a loan, because they have bad credit, or do not want to take out a loan they know they will never be able to repay if they fail to get their business off the ground. rich people can afford to take more risks, can afford to not spend excess money that they have on making sure they get to eat next month, and thus are conferred specific structural advantages when starting, maintaining, and growing businesses.
i’m not saying that 28k can automatically turn him into a billionaire. i’m simply pointing out the truth, that Elon Musk did, in fact, benefit from structural advantages which cleared barriers to entry that the vast majority of people do not have the resources to bypass.
i get that people would really like it if he was some rags to riches story about a poor kid ascending up the ladder, but no. it isn’t true about musk, and it isn’t true about most billionaires. their wealth is unprecedented, sure, and they have leveraged their resources beyond what most people can conceive, but it bears repeating. statistically, most of the monstrously wealthy started out wealthy, had access to resources that the average person will never have from the start, and were only in a position to grow their wealth because they had money to burn on things other than food, shelter, and physical health.
its not easy to become a billionaire. but i think that its disingenuous to suggest that 28,000 bucks of dad’s money for your startup isn’t in and of itself a privilege of the wealthy. starting a business is completely out of scope for most people. it can’t make you a billionaire, but you can’t be a billionaire unless you can start a business, and you can’t do that without money to spend on that business in the vast majority of cases.
and the skill of running a business is just not impressive to me. there is no way to cultivate skill at entrepreneurship without doing entrepreneurial things, and that’s just way easier to do if you can afford to fail, and have a way of making yourself the boss of other people. most people can’t afford to fail, so they can’t take risks with quantities of money they’ll probably never accumulate in their lifetime.
Saddle Twitter with the debt you now have as a result of buying Twitter
Invite all the previously-banned bigots and hatemongers back on the site
Make your staff’s lives hell, including bullshit ‘performance’ stuff like checking how many lines-of-code they write, so most of them are either fired or leave on their own
Raise API prices sky-high, get ridiculed
Lock everything behind user log-in, logged-out users can’t see anything
Rate-limit how many things logged-in users can do
Break widgets
Was once the public square of the internet, now weather services are moving to Mastodon
"why are we still losing money >:("
Initiate a half-assed rebrand to “X” but the logo, 𝕏, is literally just a mathematical symbol. Who needs copyright on your billion dollar company’s brand identity, eh?
Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!
It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.
That's not my point. I said that Musk had done well with his other non-Twitter companies and you responded "but look at how terrible he is at running Twitter!"
“It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.”
what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo
To me it looks legitimately confusingly like the xorg logo, which ironically you usually see on a Linux system only when the config to display the correct logo for something is missing or invalid.
They did a great job replacing a highly marketable icon with character, with something that feels like cliche 80’s dial-up geocities days that doesn’t make sense at all, given the terminology of everything…
In other news, you need to log in to use twitter now? lol. Wow, genius
X.com was the startup Musk (and others) launched in 1999. It merged with another startup to create PayPal in 2000. Musk bought the X.com domain back a few years ago.
So yea, he’s been obsessed with the letter X for a while. Other than SpaceX, there’s also Tesla Model X.
Wonder if Businesses will replace the twitter logo in their windows as well.
I doubt they will for a while at least. This change was so sudden that a lot of people will just not know what X is. It doesn’t look like a social media icon and a lot of people will just not be familiar with it.
It’s also horribly forgettable, even if I did use X regularly, I might just forget what the icon looked like out of context.
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