Posted on 2023-07-24
I make no secret of my disdain for Elon Musk (nor indeed for any m/billionaire). The man is certifiable and incredibly immature, which combined with his immense wealth and incurious nature makes for a pretty dangerous person. I guess we're lucky he seems to be focusing all his efforts on destroying the brand of his new expensive toy. It could be worse.
When I was a kid, I used to play a Sega Genesis game called "Road Rash" a lot. I loved that game. The motorbikes, the violence, the incredible soundtrack. It had it all. One thing I remember really liking was the character names. Names like "Axle" and "Teflon Mike" just sounded so cool to my 8 year old ears, to the point that I started trying to create similarly cool names for stories I wrote. My sister mocked me relentlessly, but she just didn't get it.
I get the feeling that Elon feels the same way about "X" as I did about those character names. A overwhelming sense of childish "that's cool!" that everyone else thinks is foolish.
I used to really like Twitter back in the day. Being able to publish short thoughts and quickly browse through digestible snippets from others was neat and all that. But the web has moved on. It's more saturated, it's slower, it's more laden with the absolute shittiest takes from the most racist of uncles and aunts. Twitter went from being a kind of neat place to share thoughts to a veritable firehouse of moronic bile. I won't miss it.
But Elon's plan to replace a simple microblogging site with an "everything app" à la WeChat is... misguided, to say the least. Yes, he has something of a baked-in userbase due to Twitter's not-insignificant cohort. But were those users looking for an "everything app"? No, they were looking for a microblogging site to be shitty on. Are they going to stick around and use "X" as their communications platform, blog, job search engine, video player, ecommerce site etc. etc.? Of course not. They have other sites for that.
Famously, Musk tried this "X" nonsense a while ago at PayPal, at the time pitching it as an online bank. "X" is, to his mind, just that cool. Something about it just tugs at his emotionally damaged mind.
Anyhow. I don't really have a point here other than to say what a lot of other people have already said: X is a terrible idea, and throwing away a globally recognizable brand like Twitter is a monumentally stupid idea for someone who really, really wants us to think he's a business genius. That people continue to buy products from this man's companies is astonishing to me. He clearly has brain worms.