This was after he took over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
This was before.
Trivial, yes, but does show how it can be an annoyance even through simple things.
This has happened. Impression count has been decimated for anyone without a check. Bonus points if you've ever blocked Elon or posted with a sentiment he disagrees with.
I’m not convinced, this is a bit complex, conspiratorial and nonsensical for me. When the simpler explanation is that Elon has just mismanaged the company.
This is qanon-level stuff man, come on.
Twitter also allows for the real-time dissemination of information unfavorable to corporations, like during outages and accidents, and the widespread dissemination of less time-sensitive information by journalists who aren't beholden to corporate media gatekeepers.
Elon Musk's various ventures rely heavily on buy-in from the government - SpaceX relies on NASA's resources, Tesla has only been profitable because of generous renewable energy grants, and even Paypal benefited from lax oversight from financial regulators. That there is likely a relationship is less "Pizzagate" and more "Trump and Russian interference." And if you're going to pretend that that's not a damning analogy, all that does is expose how unserious you are about the matter.
All of that aside, there is also the matter of Musk 1) having had a checkered history with Twitter as it was, including its users, and 2) not having actually wanted to buy Twitter after his initial due diligence. Considering that his actions after completing the deal included firing most of the workforce, stripping users of multiple privileges, and stripping the company itself of its branding, it's not at all farfetched to conclude that he has no intention of simply renovating Twitter, but instead means to strip it down to studs or foundation and build a gaudy temple to his own warped sense of entrepreneurship. This is, after all, the man who insisted that the model names of his cars spell out "S3XY".
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-govern...
Again, I am certain this is incompetence rather than conspiracy
In any case, they would rather have a tool they can control (just get Twitter to shadowban tweets about democracy) that their population uses seems better than a void.
It would be like Google changing the Google name to Alphabet, or to "A.com" or something. Imagine throwing away "to Google something" in an effort to popularize a big, story-less, meaningless name.
I think that describes nearly all of his public behavior over the last few years.
tweet -> excrete
Honestly, not a bad idea. If you are the world's richest person you might as well have a company that can actually make money.
(I also don't think that hypothesis makes a lick of sense -- Apple+Google, not any particular app, is the "WeChat of the west".)
That being said, Wechat payments are also rife with every form of scam, irreversibility, and fake QR code issues that people in the West warn about. That (and the AML stuff) is why it seems to be getting more scrutiny by the Chinese govt.
For p2b, Apply Pay lets me tap my power button twice and hold it next to the payment terminal. Hard to get lower friction than that.
For p2p, the space is already saturated (Zelle, Venmo, etc.) It's unclear why I would want to use Twitter -- sorry, x -- for this in particular. Also, with the launch of FedNow, the days of new entrant intermediaries in the USA are coming to a close.
Finally, as Goldman Sachs just learned, consumer banking is a brutal business. I think the closest they got to building anything like breaking into consumer credit/banking was becoming the bank that supported the Apple-branded credit card.
There is a massive distance between an idea and its successful execution. Most of the success comes from execution, not the original idea.
But who would want those qualities in a bank? Banks should be boring.
It’s more like hours or days under Elon. Maybe weeks but certainly not years.
People in this thread are all saying this is part of his master plan to get Twitter/X to be worth hundreds of billions and then to sell it and walk away. I don't see any reason why he would sell and walk away if he manages to pull it off.
This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frustrating to watch people continuously buy into his complete lack of vision or execution.
"Hey, look over there! I'll make the 6 Million Dollar Man!"
I'm pretty sure he just watches 80s TV for vaporware announcement ideas to use when there's bad press to suppress.
Tesla and SpaceX and StarLink are really impressive from a "had a vision for something on a broadly positive world-changing scale, successfully executed it" perspective.
With Twitter, I'm not sure he actually has a vision.
The best realistic pro-Musk argument you can make is that he can be a real ass, but he's an ass whose companies tend to do amazing things. With Twitter, the best I can come up with is that he had a personal grudge against the platform, and the means to take pattiness to unheard of scales.
I would hazard a guess that pre-Musk Twitter, for whatever reason, had fears around bringing payments onto the service, particularly in the case of sexual content and resolving that, but this led to a situation where other services spring up to fill that void.
However, Twitter Blue was a case of having your cake-and-eating-it-too where I think Musk wanted a story on cash flow not dependent on ads ASAP. In truth, Twitter Blue should've exclusively been a service tier for creators who want to monetize content on Twitter; a case naturally requiring verificaiton. That would've given an incentive and a rationale to the extant pre-Musk creator class that bemoaned its introduction, but Musk really fucked that up by trying to exploit Right wing allegations of Twitter being biased towards the Left (which it never was, rather, the reverse was true[0]) to make up for freaking out advertisers.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
I'm not sure what you mean by its niche. There are way more Instagram users than Twitter ones, and they are way more exposed to products. It sounds like a much better fit for Instagram than Twitter.
Look, everyone makes mistakes, but the whole Twitter thing, from the beginning, has been the equivalent of hiring a fry cook and then he sticks his fucking hand in the fryer, on purpose, on day 1. Then he sticks the other hand in.
You wouldn't say that dude's a genius chef—or, if he ever was, he's either gone nuts or is on way too many drugs to trust with anything. Or both.
Musk is cramming the social media app with all of those useless buzzwords that Wall Street loves. When he IPOs it, you can bet it will have AI, Finance, and depending on its standing then, Crypto in the prospectus. It will be hot trash but the markets will lap it up as they always do.
You are literally not the audience for these shenanigans.
As for looking like a fool, I think we can all agree that Musk is past that.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...
That doesn’t mean this twitter thing is going to succeed, but your always “dumb move” comment is not very well founded based on musks history.
The entire tone of voice of this thread is exactly what people said about Tesla 5 years ago and why so many were shorting it. Turns out - that was a bad move.
But EVs and private space flight are useful things with demand and large government subsidies. There's little demand to whatever he wants to do with Twitter
A reminder that Elon had to be sued into buying this company.
In the normal world, this is called being really stupid and bad at business
The stock was absurd -- cars with QA issues and lots of recalls outperforming stocks like Ford or Toyota, companies with decades of making reliable vehicles.
Everyone knew it was overvalued by a long shot, and if Musk sold it would crater. So create a headline grabbing buy that would justify shedding tons of shares, then back out and keep the $$$. When TSLA later has a correction he can just ignore it -- got his money already -- and launch some buybacks on the cheap.
Except he couldn't back out.
Seems easier to do that without buying Twitter. He has enough reach that anything he talks about gets fanboy traction, there's no value into Twitter's infrastructure for this, and converting tweeters into everything app users is possible, but a stretch.
Plus the ship has sailed for an everything app outside China.
He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings and hailing a taxi.
I do agree though, it doesn't feel like renaming it to X is the right approach if this is the longer term vision. Personally I would have thought about Twitter X with these additional services and a much slower migration to X to align with the Everything App vision.