[3cats-in-a-coat]

It's full of X brands. "Thanks to Microsoft" is kinda arbitrary of the article.

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.

[prawn]

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).

[worrycue]

> keep it strong

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.

[HWR_14]

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.

[worrycue]

> 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.

[cubefox]

> 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.

[wredue]

Uh no.

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.

[cubefox]

> He purchased a huge amount of twitter stock, and simultaneously made the public offer at like 4x twitters current stock value.

That's a lie. See

https://images.app.goo.gl/see6HtsjsuSZMioP9

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah, and now people are deriding him for that

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.)

[cubefox]

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.

https://images.app.goo.gl/see6HtsjsuSZMioP9

[prawn]

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.

[cubefox]

> I think he's cultivated that negative reaction himself;

No, my point was that all the derision was undeserved and you didn't provide evidence to the contrary. Journalists just hate him.

[soerxpso]

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).

[prawn]

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.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Free press - most of it negative.

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.

[nprateem]

Classic Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkELicRkq1I

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[sco1]

> I mean "Twitter Videos" are now "X Videos"

Which also happens to already be a porn site…

[Kamq]

That's part of the joke. "The X Files" is also a thing. So is DirectX.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I wonder what the most successful joke rebranding in history has been up until now.

[simonklitj]

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that he is tanking Twitter to then get a payout from the Saudis.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

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.

[KingMob]

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.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

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.

It's just nonsense.

[mosselman]

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

[3cats-in-a-coat]

I don't want to insult anyone, and I see your logic about systematic thought. But being a programmer doesn't mean you're good at it.

Shrug.

[LexiMax]

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.

[code_duck]

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.

[mikrotikker]

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

[HWR_14]

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.

[hnbad]

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.

[oneeyedpigeon]

> 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.

[notahacker]

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.

[ModernMech]

> 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.

[andrekandre]

  > he's a "free speech absolutist" and is "defending the future of democracy of the world".

thats what he says....... his actions say otherwise

[jimbob45]

There's no way this is true but this is going to live on forever in my headcanon. I fucking love it when /pol/ gets this creative.

[spacebanana7]

I don’t think they intend to destroy Twitter, but rather influence content and moderation policies towards more favourable outcome.

Twitter is extremely popular in Saudi, more so than the US/Europe, so some level of influence is extremely valuable.

[cjrp]

The equivalent of sportswashing.

[whywhywhywhy]

>would be the price tag to destroy Twitter,

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.

[simonklitj]

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.

[joshish]

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?

[nashashmi]

Right on. He wants to make it more than just a tweet message platform. He wants to make it his own personal portal. That will do X.

The price he paid is for the human traffic. Redirected to his world of interests

[hef19898]

So, his pitch is: It is like X for X? For some reason, I like that.

[HWR_14]

It would be far better for the Saudis to use Twitter to shadowban dissent and astroturf support than just shutting it down.

[solumunus]

This is completely silly and nonsensical.

[simonklitj]

Indeed!

[darkwraithcov]

He just did autocrats a huge solid.

[kadoban]

Less of a solid than he was already doing by turning it into a haven for extremist right-wingers.

[spinach]

As it was a haven for extremist left-wingers, perhaps now it's balanced out.

[darkwraithcov]

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).

[User23]

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.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[bluescrn]

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)

[Sai_]

You and me both!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36558581

At this point, this seems intentional on his part.

[gochi]

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.

[lamontcg]

People can't accept that Elon could do something this stupid, so they assert that he has to be playing some kind of 4D chess.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

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.

[lamontcg]

Common falsehood that people believe is that smart people simply can't do stupid shit.

[ljm]

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.

[wkat4242]

That's a good point. Chopping them into little pieces is bound to be a lot cheaper.

[devnullbrain]

Yesterday they valued a football player playing 34 games for them at 1 billion.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[ffhhttt]

> it's pocket money

It’s not.

[mschuster91]

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.

[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-...

[loopdoend]

Musk has been obsessed with this domain he owns for decades now. PayPal started as x.com, he's reliving his glory days.

[sumedh]

x.com was a seperate company which merged with Paypal

https://web.archive.org/web/20000619201415/http://www.x.com/...

[codetrotter]

And indeed if you open https://x.com you now get sent to Twitter

Seems that he wanted to put the domain to use

[bryanrasmussen]

I would wonder how much did Twitter - the company - pay the owner of X.com (Musk) for permission to use the name?

[simondotau]

> this domain he owns for decades now

Musk did not own x.com between 2001 and 2017.

[threeseed]

X also means ecstasy making the phrase "I am on X" problematic.

[KingMob]

Twenty years ago, maybe, but "Molly" supplanted it. Not even sure what the preferred term is now.

[s3p]

DirectX. That gave me a laugh. I realized their branding was poor but didn't think about all the practical implications.

[dehrmann]

Imagine if they ever wanted to make a DirectX box.

[rodgerd]

> It's full of X brands. "Thanks to Microsoft" is kinda arbitrary of the article.

Quite. It's pretty big corp 101 to sort this shit out as a rebrand.

[Dalewyn]

>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.

[mypastself]

There’s also “Brand X”, which is always worse than whatever is being advertised.

[Euphorbium]

He is implementing security through obscurity.

[eastbound]

X also stands for ex-, as in, something which belongs to the past.

[a_nop]

Getting press and attention, as seen here, for better or worse.

[nextlevelwizard]

I head they named entire operating system after the letter X