Musk can seem to do no right atm, I see a lot of hate out there with this name change and planned product expansion but I can’t quite understand why.
He’s taking an underperforming social network and trying to make it work. It might prove fatal, but it would have died a slow boring death in its old form. Perhaps its just that people don’t like his personality, which shouldn’t come into it.
Fwiw even prior to his defunding moderation it felt like one of the meanest places on the internet, I don’t see much of a change.
> He’s taking an underperforming social network and trying to make it work.
Few would argue that it works better now than before
> Perhaps its just that people don’t like his personality,
I suppose it's more complicated:
- he promised "freedom of speech" and Twitter has rather become "freedom of hate"
- he is taking constantly controversial political positions, usually favoring dictators, and this doesn't resonate very well in the western world
Maybe people just wish he would have stayed the way he was: a sort of fascinating "Doc Brown" rather than yet another average billionaire pushing political ideas through his wealth and popularity.
> Few would argue that it works better now than before
Maybe in the social circles you stick to, but there are plenty of /other/ people (i.e. more than a "few") that are quite happy that the 80% of employees doing their jobs were let go. [1]
Is Matt Taibbi implied to be one of those happy people?
'Matt Taibbi, a journalist who worked on the “Twitter Files” series of articles about old business decisions at Twitter, has said he’ll no longer use the social media platform. Taibbi is apparently frustrated by Twitter’s recent decision to heavily restrict all links and tweets about Substack following that company’s announcement it would be launching Substack Notes, a short form social network and potential competitor to Twitter. Any Twitter user who even tries to retweet a post from Substack is met with a notification, “some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter,” a move that has angered many users, including Taibbi.
It is better for favoring free speech over censorship. Dictators don't favor free speech whatsoever. You've been gaslight into believing the opposite. Tyrants censor people with any justification they can get their hands on, including "hate speech".
We accept speech we don't like to avoid this very trap.
Oh, bosh. Don’t be absurd. Elon demonstrably isn’t “favoring free speech over censorship.” He’s just choosing different speech to favor and to censor.
Oddly enough, he tends to favor hate groups and dictators: “Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen [during Musk’s tenure] to over 80%, from around 50%.”
Because he keeps having these late-night binges of bizarre, brand-destroying decision making. Twitter is underperforming as a result of his previous rounds of bizarre, brand- and product-destroying decision making. Twitter wasn't dying until he came along to "fix" it.
Yeah, his personality is plenty objectionable too, but it's mostly the way he's seemingly intentionally running the company into the ground that I object to.
It's very hard not to take his personality into it since he chooses to force it in there. However, trying to be a bit dispassionate for a second, I'd say the haphazard nature of the changes are what really gets to people. Especially those who depend on Twitter as a tool, not knowing what it will be called tomorrow, how it will function, which parts will work and which wont, etc. is quite a deal-breaker.
1) He's going to lose a TON of brand recognition overnight.
2) He seems to have gone from "I'm thinking about doing this" to "We're going live" over the course of a weekend. This is both rushed and more based on reaction than actual thought and research. I don't see any of his customers wanting this.
3) Morale for employees there already seems to be terrible. Having them implement a rebrand over a weekend on a whim makes him seem like a dictator.
4) From a practical perspective the name X is foolish. The word "tweeted" is a verb used every day on the news. Companies would kill to have that level of their product within the culture. Now they will say what? "exed"? No one will say that because the audience won't know what it means and it has the negative connotation of something you've moved away from (ex-husband, ex-girlfriend, etc.).
Twitter was doing fine. By taking it private, he saddled it with massive debt its current revenue couldn’t service. And every decision thereafter has been half baked and poorly executed. So by trying to “save” it, he’s killing it much quicker than if it had just been left alone.
That is not at all what looking at their financials say. Twitter was a very profitable company which over hired like crazy in 2021. This could have been solved without gong crazy like Musk did. Just do responsible layoffs.
There are no articles to confirm that it was losing $4m a day prior to the acquisition. This is a number that Elon put out (post acquisition) to justify layoffs.
There are no articles to confirm that it wasn't, either.
As for justifying layoffs, Twitter (or X, or whatever it is) seems to be working just fine, despite the dire predictions that the whole thing was going to die within days.
He's taken an okay performing social network, laden it with debt, absolutely obliterated its reputation and value by screwing around with it like a coke-addled toddler (with some kind of fascination for fascist-adjacent politics), and now he's destroying a globally-recognised brand to play out a decades-old fantasy that he should've grown out of the first time it blew up in his face.
Out of curiosity, why shouldn’t his personality come into it?
There’s no moral or ethical basis to not consider his personality when evaluating Twitter, and even if you have one I’m not obligated to share it.
You don’t have to understand things for them to still be valid! To me, he’s an offputting guy doing a bad job, and those two things are valid to consider when thinking of his company according to my moral values. That’s subjective, but it’s clearly a view that many share with me.
You answered your own questions really with "Musk can seem to do no right atm" - for some of us, it's just incredibly funny to watch the hubris of a self-proclaimed genius cause them to fail so often in such a short space of time. A seemingly endless string of stupid decisions because he's surrounded by boot lickers and sycophants with not one of them willing to put their hand up and tell him he's not a genius.
Which is a natural state when the one in charge is insecure about their own actual weaknesses.
They’ll attack anyone who tells them the actual truth, and end up surrounded by those who either can’t see the truth (due to
incompetence or delusion), or are willing to actively lie about it (manipulators). By process of elimination, if not by active choice.
For me it's not funny so much as shocking, and sad. He had a hand, of some sort, in at least a few great things, and it's upsetting to watch it falling apart. I often think of the quote:
"You either die a hero, or live to see yourself become a villain."
Far too many icons outlive their hero phase, and it's kind of depressing.
Edit: Or rather, the hero phase fails to live long enough to outlive the person.
He’s produced a lot of value for a lot of people over the years, and many things some of us see every day (like Teslas) are only the way they are/have been successful the way they are because of his influence.
It’s always been more as a promoter and image seller, but he has also been willing to make big calls and take risks others won’t which has allowed them to grow. That is valuable. And he has been hands on in some areas sometimes in ways that have been instrumental in shaping things. For better or worse.
He’s far from perfect. But no one is, and honesty is important.
I suspect the big issue here is something typical of narcissists - he’s gotten older, and he can’t keep up his game convincingly enough anymore to fool a large enough percentage of the public, so he’s downward spiraling. And internally he can feel it, which makes it worse.
It would explain a lot, especially the often bizarre and destructive attacks on anyone who says anything he doesn’t like. The over the top edgy/controversial behavior to get reactions, etc.
Fwiw even prior to his defunding moderation it felt like one of the meanest places on the internet, I don’t see much of a change.