I never used Twitter much and was kind of annoyed years ago when I had to use it for Nike tech support. For the most part, it was always just there, popular among journalists and some celebrities, and used as a quick ‘n easy way for people to make announcements, because on a microblog, you don’t have room for much else. People defeated this by posting tweets with images that would contain 2,000 words, but still, it stayed pretty much a place to link and post blurbs/memes.
In 2022 Elon “Galaxy Brain” Musk decided he wanted to be on Twitter’s board, then no, he wanted the whole thing! He waived due diligence, offered an outrageously good offer to buy the company ($$4 billion, vastly more than it was worth) and, following their fiduciary responsibility, the company’s executives presented it to the board, which promptly voted to accept and cash out.
Someone or something got through to Musk, and he realized he’d overpaid on a colossal scale, then tried to back out of the deal. Twitter sued and just before the case went to court–which Musk was all but guaranteed to lose–he agreed to have the deal go through and became owner/CEO of Twitter in October.
To say it has been all downhill since then is to insult hills that go down.
I’m not sure what exactly is going on in his mind, but whatever it is has seemingly steered him to make about the worst possible decision at every turn, chipping away at every positive aspect of Twitter. As a result, users are leaving, advertisers are fleeing, hate speech is on the rise, actual Nazis post their actual Nazi thoughts, the site is glitchy and breaks down occasionally, thanks in part to its gutted workforce unable to keep things running smoothly as most institutional knowledge has left (quit or been fired). Attempts to gain subscription revenue have generated peanuts. Basically, nothing has improved and a lot of things have gotten much worse.
The Twitter brand has been permanently tarnished in the eyes of many.
But wait! That brings us to the title of this post. A few days ago, Musk decided it was time to rebrand Twitter itself as X, his most favourite letter. Tweets would become X’s. And so on. To a 15-year-old boy this would be very cool, perhaps even rad, and since that’s where Musk’s apparent mental age seems to have stopped, it has come to pass.
There are too many articles, opinions and hot takes to link even a tiny percent of them here. Let me just say that I think it’s a dumb idea to spend $44 billion on a company whose value is in its user community and brand identity, then actively drive away the former and completely abandon the latter. It actually goes beyond dumb, but there is no word in English I can think of to adequately describe it.
However, changing Twitter to X frees Musk (at least in his own mind) from having the site/company “be” Twitter anymore. He can literally do whatever he wants with it–it’s X now!
This isn’t the first time a social media site has stumbled and (probably) died. Let’s not forget Friendster! But it is probably the biggest and, culturally, the most significant. This is all a good illustration of why allowing individuals to have access to absurd amounts of power and money is a bad thing. Musk is an idiot, and he has destroyed Twitter because our system gives him the power to do it.
(As a side note, the rebranding has been as chaotic, dumb and ill-planned as literally everything else Musk has done at Twitter.)
Here’s one link on the rebranding and the whole thing that I found worth reading, where author John Scalzi explains why he is (mostly) leaving Twitter after its turn to X: Preparing my X-it
