What's the answer to the question "why"? The article just says Elon Musk is trying to make an "everything app" and has "long been fascinated by the X identity."
That's not enough of an answer to the question why he'd throw out the very well known brand he paid so much for. I'm thinking that in his struggles with the thing — his albatross, his ex-parrot — he got fixated on the damned bird. He's delusional that the bird is the problem. No bird, no problem.
Posts
34 comments:
Elon Musk is the most Howard Hughes-like of our current crop of billionaires.
“Whether or not you agree with using someone's preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.” - Musk
You can call it whatever you want Elon, but it will always be Twitter to me.
Absurd Burd
Did he cut off his wiener
And claim he changed sex
No he simply bought Twitter
And renamed it X
Gotta love all the average Joes and Janes, who’ve never built anything in their lives, spouting off about how stupid Musk is for this decision or that decision.
Yeah just like Meta went belly up because people expected the FaceBook name to last forever.
Washington Commanders anyone?
I liked the bird.
AlbertAnonymous said, "Gotta love all the average Joes and Janes, who’ve never built anything in their lives, spouting off about how stupid Musk is for this decision or that decision."
Elon Musk's billionaire father owned an emerald mine in Zambia. He's made some good decisions with some of his companies, and terrible decisions with many many others. Furthermore, men like Musk pass off a lot of good ideas as well as resources they've acquired from others as their own.
Let's be careful about throwing the "never built anything in their lives" phrase around when we're talking about a man who purchased the thing he's renaming for $40 billion.
@Althouse, considering how seldom the New York Times gets anything right about Elon Musk and his handling of his company (as in “never”), coupled with your own track record of being wrong about every single one of your complaints about how Musk is managing Twitter, would a little humility be remiss? Perhaps neither you nor they know very much about managing a technology company in the 21st century? Just sayin’.
Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC to disassociate itself from the "fried" word. Most people here seem to still call it just "Kentucky" as in "I'm going to Kentucky, you want me to bring you some chicken?"
United Parcel Service became UPS when they branched out into a lot of other business that did not involve delivering parcels.
Federal Express became Fedex when fedex were in danger of becoming a generic word for overnight "Take this package to UPS and fedex it"
I don't think people Google (search) on the internet so much as "google" using whatever search engine they choose.
(Friends don't let friends Google. They recommend Duck Duck Go or other search engines)
If his goal is to transform Twitter into WeChat, changing the name to deemphasize the messaging aspect makes perfect sense.
As for what he bought, he bought users. He bought you and me. Pretty much the same way Cable companies are valued not on how much revenue they bring in but on how many homes they pass and how much potential revenue they CAN bring in.
John Henry
He was probably high at the time he made the decision. Just a guess.
The answer is dead simple. He explicitly said from the start he would transform Twitter into the everything app, streaming, payments, messaging etc. building on the existing platform, which is widely used. X stands for anything. You wanna do X then you can do it on X.
[Elon Musk has] made some good decisions with some of his companies, and terrible decisions with many many others.
@Blastfax, care to give some examples of his terrible decisions?
Elon Musk founded PayPal and made a ton, built Tesla, which is worth a ton, and SpaceX and Starlink. If he wants to waste $44bn, it's down to him, but I wouldn't bet against him. How's Mastodon doing? How's Threads?
Blastfax Kudos said:
“Let's be careful about throwing the "never built anything in their lives" phrase around when we're talking about a man who purchased the thing he's renaming for $40 billion.”
Nope. My comment was about the commenters judging the billionaire’s decisions and shouting “stupid”. They’ve probably never built anything in their lives.
You want to criticize Musk as entitled, inheriting daddy’s money, making bad decisions, knock yourself out. But he has done a hell of a lot more than the commenters. Learned a whole lot of ways how “not” to make a lightbulb (as Edison might way).
Besides, both things can be true at the same time.
TeXla is neXt. Then name change to MuXk.
He needs to stop thinking inside the X-box. Oh wait.
Darlisland said: "If his goal is to transform Twitter into WeChat"
It is, reading the thread posted by his CEO Linda Yaccarino, that looks exactly to be the intention
Big Mike said, "care to give some examples of his terrible decisions?"
His decision to start The Boring Company. Zip2 was a colossal failure. He made some terrible decisions regarding early C Suite hires when founding Tesla the he self-acknowledged put them behind years. Musk was in fact ousted from Paypal, his own company, once it started becoming profitable. Under his executive leadership it wasn't, but it became so after he left.
There are others, but success is just like flying - as long as lift exceeds drag something can fly. As long as the lift of your successes outperform the drag of your failures, you will still be successful, even wildly so.
It is amusing to watch journalists second guessing Musk.
Blastfax Kudos said...
Big Mike said, "care to give some examples of his terrible decisions?"
His decision to start The Boring Company
Well the Las Vegas Convention Center project is at least ONE project more than Threads has successfully finished, or perhaps you'd like to compare it to the MetaVerse for profitability?
found this on twitter, eh, X.
In 2000, Elon Musk tried to rebrand PayPal as http://X.com, but was forced out by the board and replaced as CEO by Peter Thiel.
Now he’s doing the same to Twitter, but is surrounded by sycophants who can’t tell him it’s a bad idea.
Hey blastfax, who else can you point to whose $6.5M stake in a company (Tesla, founded in 2003 the year before Musk invested in it) has grown to over $800B in 20 years?
That's an increase by a factor of over 121,000 to get from $6,500,000 to $824,130,000,000.
65-75 percent of all new products fail to break even.
15-18 percent of all new companies fail.
Musk with an 80-90% success rate looks pretty good. Especially so given the 2 areas he is most successful in: mass market cars and commercial space.
Has the boring failed? I think it is still in business. And what has it failed at?
If one believes its purpose is to build underground transport tunnels, yeah, never seemed like that great an idea.
If the purpose is to develop underground mining and construction technologies to build moon and Mars colonies or to mine asteroids, it might be a really great idea.
We won't know if it is a failure for some years yet.
Donald Trump also beats the odds. 80-90 successful companies out of 100 or so started.
John Henry
The Boring company is an absolute necessity to Musk’s Mars ambition. Like Tesla for improving batteries and SpaceX for improving space launch; The Boring company is about designing the machinery that will make Mark habitable. Machinery that can also make Earth more habitable. Its apparent lack of success is equal to judging SpaceX as a failure when it was still developing the Merlin engine. That was in 2006. Five years later, Bezos Blue Origin began work on the BE-4 engine, which you can point to as a bad decision.
Elon Musk’s contribution to Zip2 was reportedly $28,000 (he denies this and it was his father that gave most of the founding capital).and while that is 1995 money, it is hardly a poor investment decision. The Zip2 company was acquired by Compaq in 1999 for $305 million with a market share of 160 newspapers as customers. Musk walked away with a net $22 million. That’s a heck of a bad decision.
The NYT are a direct competitor to X in the news business. I would take the NYT opinion with a grain of salt.
Ships taken as a prize on the high seas were often re-named.
A risky move. Upending a brand identity isn't done without a lot of forethought. I think, probably, Musk wants to Twitter to become much more than it presently is, much like Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become much more than it started out as. What is interesting about Twitter is that is essentially the same as it was at its launch. I am guessing Musk is wanting people to think of Twitter as something more than what is today- he wants it to be a suite of social media apps.
I'd hesitate to assume that I know what motivates Musk, about anything.
15-18 percent of all new companies fail
That should have been 15-18 out of 20 new companies fail.
75-90% failure rate
John Henry
"That's not enough of an answer to the question why he'd throw out the very well known brand he paid so much for."
He doesn't owe anyone an answer. No more than why my truck is white.
"He's delusional that the bird is the problem. No bird, no problem."
And you pulled this conclusion from where?
Blastfax Kudos said...
Big Mike said, "care to give some examples of his terrible decisions?"
His decision to start The Boring Company.
Is Boring a failure? Or is it something that hasn’t succeeded yet? Edison’s search for a light bulb was an abject failure before he tried tungsten for a filament.
It turns out Microsoft has a trademark on X.
Who Musk is suing over AI related scraping, so I am sure they'll be so very accommodating here.
The Bird is the company that rolled over for the FBI and Tony Fauci to censor its users.
The Bird is the company that put its users out of business by censoring them without telling them that they were being censored.
The Bird is the company that willingly censored anything that they deemed contrary to their "woke" principles.
Musk wants to get rid of The Bird. Fine by me.
The new logo looks like the old Xerox logo.
Post a Comment