Twitter Turning Into X Is Set to Kill Billions in Brand Value
It’s rare for corporate brands to become so intertwined with everyday conversation that they become verbs. It’s rarer still for the owner of such a brand to announce plans to intentionally destroy it.
An estimated $4 to $20 billion in value, what is he thinking?
Honestly, after this, and hearing some of his recent interviews: I am genuinely convinced that not only is Elon Musk not a genius, but he possess subpar intelligence. You can’t convince me otherwise, I am 100% convinced that the dude is just a clinical moron.
There has been a meme comparing Elon Musk to Wheatley from Portal 2 being put in charge of the whole Aperture Science center and it immediately going to shit, because this robot was literally purposely designed to be a moron… It keeps on getting truer.
To me, he is like Trump, people thinking the dude is a genius, and he’s constantly playing 4D chess, but over time, everything ends up proving that the simplest theory is the correct one, the dude is just a fucking idiot. A man so profoundly stupid at their core that people had to convince themselves, he actually was a secret genius for their nonsense to make sense, like believing that Jar Jar Binks was secretly a mastermind Sith Lord.
If there ever was a perfect demonstration of wealth not equating intelligence, or even merit, the absolute inexistence of meritocracy, this might be it.
It's even worse than that.
Musk is practically stuck in a 13yo's mindset. The golden spoon has been sticking out of his arse since birth, but of course momma and poppa will make little Elmo believe he's a genius because he has... gasp... ideas.
So they push a shitton of money into his education and ideas, and of course he gets stuck in the typical preteen daydreaming phase of being a genius billionaire who can never be wrong. The money allows him to surround himself with people who actually KNOW how to deal with stuff - including making sure he can't screw things up. And that's how the whole Musk Management department of SpaceX was practically born.
But now Twitter is a different story, all his safety nets are gone, and it's all on him. Of course he fumbles it big time.
Simply said, yes, he's an absolute moron. With more money than common sense or logic or talent or knowledge or... Okay this list could go on for a while, I think it's best to stop here.
The biggest irony is that with Emerald Boy 100% preoccupied with Twitter, his other companies are flourishing.
I really liked the Some More News episode on this! It explains pretty well how regardless of a rich person's intelligence they probably get corrupted by mental distortions due to being rich. That is, Elon haa probably been powertripping for too long and lost all basis on how to take good decisions because he lives in his own rich fantasy world thinking he accomplished everything because of his own superior genius...
I worked for a guy, many years ago, small scale version of Musk. Guys like that hate to be contradicted. He had gone into partnership with my old company - which was a digital election company (back in the 90s and early 00s). We prided ourselves on our security and anonymity measures. Under this new company, this guy because CEO, and the first thing he did was tell everyone we could make “millions” by selling user data. I pointed out that violated out privacy and anonymity standards, and not even the next day I was reprimanded for speaking out.
You don’t need to be a billionaire to be stupid. Affluent is enough of a threshold. These are all grifters, granted many being successful. The grifters in this company were big fish/little pond. But they ruined a lovely little company that could have been stable and steady, recession-proof income for decades. Instead, they grifted the angel investors, ran the company into the ground and ended up spawning dozens of competitors in the field whereas before there were only 2 or 3.
These guys go from start-up grift to start-up grift, maintaining their affluence on the investor’s dime. I would say they, and the vulture capitalists they dance with deserve each other, but unfortunately, regular folks are always the collateral damage.
Musk was likely always an idiot, but was propped up by money, and earlier on either knew his place (as the “faceman”) or was adroitly distracted from direct involvement with the actual running of the company he bought.
Love Cody's Showdy.
I think he used to be at least business smart earlier in his life. I keep parroting it, but he might have covid fog, or destroyed his brain with drugs or something..
The most convincing argument that elon does a lot of cocaine is just listening to him speak in a less formal interview.
BUT! I don't think he used to be actually smart, just lucky. Too many people assume "succesful" people had to have done something exceptional to earn it, but 99% of extremely wealthy people acquired that extreme wealth through a simple combination of luck and startup capital (which of course they have because they are lucky).
Didn't get essentially buy established companies and then pretend he invented them.
Tesla and spacex for sure. PayPal was created by merging with another company that did a lot of the work.
He does indeed have a history of paying his way into looking like a visionary and/or an engineer. He bought into Tesla in early 2004, it was founded in mid 2003.
His comfort zone was convincing people to give him money for one really ambitious thing, and then using that money to achieve some other thing (that no one would have given him money for) that is sort of on the way, but which has commercial value to him.
For example, he has repeatedly said his companies will deliver full self-driving cars by dates that have passed - and convinced investors to get him in a position to compete with companies like Toyota, promised a 'hyperloop' and got funding to compete with other horizontal drilling companies, promised to send people to mars and got to compete with other satellite technology companies.
So making big promises paid off for him. For the investors, in terms of long term value, they might have been better off investing in existing companies he ended up competing with.
But I suspect he is now outside his comfort zone, and might not even realise how far out of his depth he is.
I've never thought Musk was a genius playing 4D chess, I just think he's a clown dancing around and bonking himself in the fact to distract us from the damage that's being done.
Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.
It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn't going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.
It's a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you're doing the marketing for them. Don't sell their brands - suffocate them!
I enjoyed reading this tweet
Not gonna lie, that still felt a little dirty. But I already posted it to the internet and there's no going backsies.
As someone who prefers threaded interaction, it’s gonna be hard to stop calling them posts. Maybe that’s what my grandkids will think is old fashioned about me.
“They’s been posts since BBS and they’ll stay posts!”
I think personal micro-blogging (mastodon) and posting forum-style topics (reddit) can have different words?
The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there's an argument to be made that "posts" applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I'd call them posts here on Lemmy for that.
Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone's head or ass. When someone says, "Kanye West 'tweeted'
<INSERT OPINION HERE>
" you've already determined about how seriously you're going to take it.this appeals to me on such a visceral level.
Nice tweet bro
As a corollary, should tweeting on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter be tested to exclusively as X-ing? Just to rub it in?
I remember when twitter first came out and people were talking about "tweets" and it sounded just as stupid as xing sounds today. But the word has made it into mainstream lexicon and been normalized. Just like "googling" something just means to search. Tweet will mean to message something. I think part of the reason he is abandoning twitter is because it is becoming increasingly hard to legally fight other people using the terms for his platform for other platforms. For instance Mastadon is using "toot" which started from "twoot" which started from tweet.
I also still think he is an idiot for abandoning a brand name that is literally in every house and on every storefront. Even if they cant defend the vocabulary to abandon it all is the dumbest business decision I've ever heard of.
p.s. for xing I like "kissing" since XOXO is hugs and kisses with the X being the kiss. Considering how homophobic Elon is having his platform being a bunch of people kissing would just be to perfect!
@Master @audaxdreik that's a good point. There are all sorts of trade names now in common use, but those products still kept their names.
You make an interesting point, but I'm most comfortable calling them posts. Because that's what they are. The term "post" applies to any and all blogging services, regardless of their branding.
As long as nobody is using the term "toot" unironically, I'm OK with that
"Our logo is our most recognizable asset. That’s why we’re so protective of it." -Twitter's (Currently Outdated) Brand Toolkit Page
The best part is that because now it's just Unicode 𝕏, the logo is public domain and it can be used by anyone in that exact shape in any context.
No matter how good are their patent lawyers, I don't think they will succeed to trademark prior art designed by someone else
It's even worse than that. X is used so widely in trademarks that it's guaranteed to attract lawsuits. Facebook had to settle several claims over the change to Meta, and the use of X is a much bigger problem than that. And Musk is so dumb that he'll probably try to fight them and end up paying a fortune in legal fees anyway.
Edit: Relevant article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/problem-with-x-meta-microsoft-hundreds-more-own-trademarks-new-twitter-name-2023-07-25/
I don’t think twitter has $30B in valuation left. Musk bought it for $44B (which was beyond its value at the time, but okay). Since his takeover, it’s lost between 50-60% of its value. That was as of several months ago, so I have to imagine it’s even less now.
With the loss of brand equity, they might be sliding towards the single digit billions very quickly.
He’s just setting money on fire at this point.
What I don't understand is how he can still be in charge, at all? Do shareholders not have any legal mechanism to get him removed?
He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.
Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.
I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.
I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.
Musk bought it, he's the sole shareholder now. It's not a public company anymore.
Prior to Musk, IIRC, the valuation was around $11B.
TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.
I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.
So you’re saying it’s worth at least 20 billion? Still seems too high to me.
It’s probably between $15-20B right now.
I think it comes with a salvage title though.
He bought Twitter back when cash was cheap. That alone could be a couple billion in valuation at least.
On purpose.
Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.
Twitter existed as a relatively free and open public space to communicate, organize and assemble to take actions for and against things at scale before musk (e.g. The Arab Spring, a terrifying moment for the Saudis especially - the second largest shareholder behind musk).
When people collectively laughed at elon and his cringe, inbred, emerald boy antics or his humiliating divorce and other routine failures, Twitter was the bullhorn.
Now elon and his desperate far right Toadies will work to try to rewrite reality so they can eventually have this conversation:
"Twitter? What's a Twitter? Wait, are you talking about blork? A bird? No, blork's logo is a dinosaur with chainsaw arms... and everyone wants to be his best friend... and it's against the law to divorce him... and he's cool... and..."
What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon. If they remember you at all, it will be to laugh at you - you'll never outrun that.
I'm inclined to agree with others here in the thread. I honestly don't think this was an intentional action designed to tank Twitter. It may well be doing just that, but frankly, Elon has proven time and again that he's a world-class idiot.
Musk did not pay $44 billion to buy Twitter. He paid $26 billion, underwritten by stock in Tesla, which subsequently lost significant value. $5 billion was from other investors including the Saudi Prince.
The remaining $13 billion was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf. Even before Musk started tanking the revenue, Twitter could not afford that debt - the interest alone was comparible to its revenue. That debt is probably about what Twitter is worth right now after the name change, making it pretty much unviable as a business.
You don't have to look at Musk's antics to conclude that the intention was to kill the company. You only have to look at the financials.
Leveraged buyouts almost always lead to the business closing. It's how Toys R Us, and many other staple brands, were brought down.
Stop giving Musk so much credit, he's shown historically that he's just massive narcissistic fuck up who got lucky in the dot com bubble. There's no reason to think there's some far right conspiracy here, he only bought the website because he got in a pissing match and couldn't get out when he tried.
If anything, what this has really shown is he’s exceptionally bad at software-first companies and people. His successes have been in high risk manufacturing markets blended with software methodology, ie reusable rockets, electric vehicles, and storage.
I honestly think he’s just a guy clearly on the spectrum with grand visions that works in certain markets and completely fails in others. Regardless of his poor character, ascribing everything to luck seems a little emotional to me.
Twitter isn't and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it's restless energy without changing anything.
Of course there are degrees of usefulness and different types of organizing, but generally, your wrong here in your first point. Some merit in your second claim, but overall, it's something they likely feared to a degree as a point of connection and amplification of information.
What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.
Biggest tool in the history of tools.
Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.
When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he's buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that's absolutely what's going on.
I believe he's killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don't think there's some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy's ego extends past Planet 9.
He needs daddy's approval and the other billionaires are surrogate daddy. That would be the social agenda influence you're referencing. Look at how desperate and odd he was on stage with dave chapelle, that was a core view into his base self, he needs to be praised. He's also a eugenics/natalism cult member and sees the wealthy as his equal, superior "race" of people - so he would 100% sacrifice a lot for even their passing approval.
On purpose.
Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.
I truly thought it was just tone deafness and overconfidence on the part of Musk for a good potion of this. But the last few events, along with various comments he has made along the way, have me concluding that this must be true.
This fucking dude could have spent $1M hiring a small team to spin up a heavily customized X-branded Mastodon server, but instead he spent $44 BILLION dollars buying and ruining Twitter.
How fucking crazy is that? That's fucking crazy... right?
It seems to me that recently, Big Tech CEOs have been searching for interesting and creative ways to utterly destroy their company with no chance to rebuild it. Maybe he is trying to do that? At this point, it seems to me like Elon is doing his best diligence to set money on fire and run Twitter into the ground.
It honestly seems like some sort of virus going around. It has affected people I know, strangers I see on the street, CEOs, celebrities, comedians, etc.
People have just lost their common sense and are more likely to believe the impossible than the improbably. More likely to act out of spite than the interests of society as a whole, or even their own self interest.
Not sure if it was COVID, the internet, media, or idk what else, but people like Elon are popping up left and right. It's crazy and I don't even have the words to describe it.
VCs fucked up the tech industry when capital was cheap by investing in companies that showed potential for massive growth without caring for the viability of the business. Now capital is expensive and these same companies are now trying desperately to make a profit to become a sustainable business because the VCs aren't blindly giving them money anymore. This is exposing a lot of company's leadership teams incompetence.
Could be a bias and/or coincidence. Due to all the shit in the world (partially due to COVID as well), the financial markets are quite troubled and much more unsteady than before. This also increased the pressure on a lot of previously growing companies who then suddenly had to change course and shrink again. Increasing prices and decreasing revenue while investors become more cautious means that a lot of these "startup"-kind-of-companies are suddenly in big trouble and enter survival mode.
People who were able to sell ideas to investors suddenly need to actually manage and become profitable. Stuff that worked without a real strategy (aside from shining for the investors) suddenly needs to stand on its own feet.
These are all very real possibilities.
Here's another: The big shot billionaire's agreed over drinks one night that their handlers - the staff that used to make them look smart - were overpaid.
WR lose $900 billion any% speedrun
Pretty sure its been losing brand value since musk bought it
That's why Jack Dorsey jumped on it. Why spend all your time and energy maintaining a completed project when you can take $44 billion and explore other, new projects..