Elon Musk buys Twitter

Bet that doesn’t include tax. It comes out to $83.25 US; $88.25 after MI’s 6 percent sales tax.

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And who puts a teabag in a cup of coffee!?!??!

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Here, I solved it:


That’s approximately $0.10 per bag. That’s $1.28 less than their fancy tea coffee, and $0.18 less than Twitter Blue.

#winning

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Instead, Musk said, the company “is now changing the auto reply to “a ‘We will get back to you soon’ infinite loop.”

So… same shitty handling of questions, just slightly more polite.

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Throwing out the name recognition of “Twitter” in favor of one of the least-used letters of the alphabet is GENIUS.

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Also, apparently the Twitter bird was named Larry. Who knew?

Also also…
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:nauseated_face:
That “logo” looks like something for a sterile corporate app that employees are forced to use but openly hate. And he’s wanting to convince everyone to use it for everything?
And then you notice that the icon’s changed everywhere, but it’s still “twitter.com” (for now, at least)…

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“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

:rofl:

There’s this thing that already does all of that, called the internet. How out-of-touch are these people?

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Twitter has replaced its longtime bird logo with an X in order to fit owner Elon Musk’s preferred aesthetic.

I think this is both an overly verbose way of saying “Not Invented Here” and also a remarkably concise way of describing the entire thought process that went into this.

Musk wrote that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” and invited users to come up with a new logo.

It is definitely the sign of a mature and stable company to ask its users to create a new logo for free, rather than paying a professional to do so.

He also wrote that a tweet will now be called an “X,”

The X logo was suggested yesterday by Sawyer Merritt, who initially said it had been used for a now-discontinued podcast about Musk.

I both want to know and also don’t want to know why the podcast was discontinued.

The logo rushed out by Musk doesn’t seem to be very original.

Setting aside the possibility of creating a unique logo out any one of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, it’s not as though uniqueness has exactly been his forte in the past.

recently hired Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote yesterday that “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

:face_vomiting: :face_vomiting:

I would like to propose a different Unicode character to be the logo for TwitterX:
:poop:

I would further propose we rebrand tweets as turds, as in “Look at that steaming hot turd that Elon just dropped!”

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The first thing I thought of when I saw that logo was Xerox.

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This is what I saw:

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Oh, it’s gonna get worse. Meta owns a very similar implementation of “X” as a trademark for social media purposes. I’m sure they’re just waiting for Elmo to get the conversion done before they start suing. And Microsoft owns a fairly nebulous version of “X” as a trademark though it’s not in use at the moment. And they didn’t even bother to arrange to get the “@x” Twitter handle that is already assigned and in use. Elmo’s middle-of-the-night brain fart is going to come back and bite him in the ass.

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Since we are saying “goodbye” to the bird, I want to point out this page I ran into a couple of years ago. Scroll to the bottom and see their antique social media icons. I believe this is the original version of the bird from 2006.

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Oh, the amazing thing is that this isn’t a middle-of-the-night thing. He’s been wanting to do this for 20 years. The implementation of the logo change may be spur-of-the-moment, but he dreamed up “x.com” as being the perfect name for an all-in-one app back in 1999.

And then someone with more sense decided that “paypal.com” sounded better and didn’t sound like a porn site. :sweat_smile:

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So that’s how he plans to make some money!

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It was actually a legit url for an online financial services company that became Paypal, around 2000? I was an early adopter, and it was the first time (of three, so far) that I ditched Paypal and its ilk for being assholes. Suffice it to say that I will never own a Tesla nor make plans to emigrate to Mars, nor use the Twitter successor until someone else runs it again.

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I had remembered PayPal as being first, with x.com coming along later. I seem to be at least partially right:

From PayPal:

What would later become PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity,[9] a company that developed security software for hand-held devices. Having had no success with that business model, however, it switched its focus to a digital wallet.[10] The first version of the PayPal electronic payments system was launched in 1999.[11]
In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho.[12] Musk was optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business Confinity was developing.[13] Musk and Bill Harris, then-president and CEO of X.com, disagreed about the potential future success of the money transfer business and Harris left the company in May 2000.[14] In October of that year, Musk decided that X.com would terminate its other internet banking operations and focus on payments.[15] That same month, Elon Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of X.com,[16] which was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and went public in 2002.

From Confinity:

Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal, in late 1999.[1] Confinity merged with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, in March 2000.[5] The merged company became known as X.com because this was thought to be a name with broader long-term potential than Confinity or PayPal. However, surveys showed that a majority of consumers considered the name X.com vague and potentially pornographic and preferred that the company simply be called PayPal. After a corporate restructuring, which involved the removal of Elon Musk from the company, the company adopted the name PayPal Inc.[citation needed]

I had remembered the original PayPal being an app for PalmOS that allowed you to beam money between devices to pay someone back for lunch or something similar. Sure enough, citation 1 above references the Wired article that I very likely read about it in:

From Wired July 1999:

The bill for lunch arrives, but you’ve left your wallet in the car. Your lunchmate doesn’t want to pick up the tab. So she pulls out her Palm III, beams you a little program called PayPal, and suggests you beam back your share of the bill. Later that day, the cash comes out of your account and drops into hers.

That scenario should be a reality by September, when Confinity, a Palo Alto, California software start-up, launches PayPal, an application that will allow individuals to “beam” sums of money between handheld devices such as mobile phones, Palm Pilots, and pagers.

From X.Com:

On July 5, 2017, Musk repurchased the domain name X.com from PayPal.[21][22] He explained later that he bought the website because “it has great sentimental value”.[23]

I had wondered how he got it back, since it’s unlikely he was just allowed to walk away with it back in 2000.

On July 14, 2017, X.com was launched again, consisting of a blank white page with one “x” in the top left corner,[24] and a custom error page displaying a “y”.[25][26] The site displayed this way due to having nothing in its source code except the single letter “x”. In December 2017, X.com redirected visitors to The Boring Company’s website, which Musk also owns. This was done in order to advertise a hat sale.[26]

On October 4, 2022, Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”, linked to X.com.[27][28] In conversation with Ron Baron a month later, Musk said that he would execute the X product plan “with some improvements” which would make Twitter “the most valuable financial institution in the world.”[29]

On July 22, 2023, Musk revealed the rebranding of the widely recognized social networking service Twitter as X and the introduction of a social media platform called X.com, subsequently making X.com redirect to Twitter.com. The blue bird has been rebranded with a double-struck X logo site-wide. Elon Musk’s Twitter account, as well as the official @Twitter account’s profile picture among other official Twitter-owned accounts were updated to the new X logo.[30] Specific details about the rebranding remain undisclosed.[31][32]

It is supposed to be the everything app, after all.

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And then he tried to force the resulting company to use it.

https://archive.md/hl7te

When Thiel left, the employees that were loyal to him thought it was “insanity” after hearing that Musk wanted to eliminate the PayPal name during a time when sellers on eBay had turned the company’s name into a verb, Chafkin reported in “The Contrarian.” That kind of name branding was “a landmark achievement for any start-up,” Chafkin wrote, but Musk wasn’t having it.

“Musk kept championing X.com, while most everyone else favored PayPal,” Vance wrote.

“If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” Musk said, according to Isaacson. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”

What happened next in 2000 was described by Vance as “one of the nastiest coups in Silicon Valley’s long, illustrious history of nasty coups.” At a bar in Palo Alto, Calif., a small group of employees led by Thiel, Levchin and PayPal COO David O. Sacks gathered to discuss how they could push out Musk, reported Fortune and the 2015 book.

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