Tag: Twitter

Twitter -> X

Twitter was a really strong brand, so Elon’s instance to change it to X seemed like a baffling choice, and it seems one based on his fascination with the letter X rather than any business reason.

As a…
– user
I want…
– a strategically-timed, comprehensive rebrand
so that…
– negative discourse regarding company practices can be briefly veiled with commentary regarding new name, logo, and brand assets, alongside excessively-shared parodies of the brand in meme format
here’s why everyone is WRONG about twitter changing its name to x being “a baffling choice” and “not a smart thing to do”: a thread

1/ x is an awesome letter, one of the coolest letters in fact! I just turned 8 years old and I think the letter x is the most coolest thing there is. anyway, my dad made me chicken nuggets so I can’t finish the thread right now

All jokes aside, I did find a serious thread that was actually useful in detail the reason for X:

The X era has begun at Twitter Elon Musk says the bird logo will be replaced by an X. For Musk, it’s the continuation of a story that began 25 years ago. Here’s a brief history on that...

Let’s go back to 1999. After selling his first company… …Musk set out to disrupt banking. And the X identity was born. But its time as a standalone brand would be short-lived. Instead, X became part of another brand.

X became part of PayPal. And PayPal was acquired by eBay. Musk walked away with $165 million. He then started building again… …and the letter X would reappear.

Musk would launch Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. It would become known as SpaceX.

Worth noting… SpaceX’s logo has a hidden message. The X symbolizes a rocket’s trajectory.

Musk also used “X” at Tesla. It’s the name of Tesla’s third model. Musk envisioned a car lineup with models that spelled out “sexy.” There’s a Model S. An X. And a Y. Ford had the rights to the Model E. So Musk instead opted for 3, which is basically a backwards E.

X is even the name of Musk’s young son.

Meanwhile, you likely saw all of the headlines leading up to this development… …from rebranding Twitter as X Corp… …to the recent launch of xAI. In other words, wheels were already in motion for the new era.

Elon and Twitter

The recent Elon Musk $44 billion takeover with Twitter is causing quite a drama isn’t it? One of those classic takeovers where somehow you are allowed to essentially purchase with money you don’t have and slap the debt on the company you just bought. It really sounds like Twitter was managing their finances in a fairly reasonable fashion, and now their situation seems perilous.

One of the first things was to cut the staff dramatically (~50%). That struck me as an odd thing to do. I understand companies can slowly expand over time, and if they actually thought about it – they could probably trim a few staff positions here and there. But mass-scale redundancies? it’s not gonna work is it? At any company, surely 90% of the people there are required for the business to function.

The problem that many managers don’t think about when making redundancies is that:

  • You are taking away the culture that got the company where it is today.
  • You are removing people’s friends.
  • You are taking away job security as current staff feel that they may be next to go.

The thing is, he also said that remote staff now need to come into the office, so the remaining staff are going to be very disgruntled. This means more people will leave voluntarily. Now he will have paid loads of people to leave, and now need to pay money to start hiring again. It doesn’t really save money, and if it does; it is small figures really; Elon needs to recover billions – not a million.

According to games journalist Jason Schreier, redundancies were made in mistake, and others were made before managers realised their roles were necessary for the business to function.

After cost-cutting, the next thing on Elon’s list was to try to increase monetisation. He decided that the blue verified checkmark was worth $8 a month.

One of my colleagues did mention it, and said he didn’t realise why people were so obsessed with a tiny image, but I explained it helps prevent impersonation. It’s easy to spread misinformation, make slanderous claims, or run scams when you can just change your picture and name and pretend to be another person or another company.

It was no surprise when it happened, you had plenty of people demonstrating this as soon as possible. You had Nintendo of America showing Mario “flipping the bird”, people impersonating Elon Musk, former presidents reminiscing about killing innocents… you name it.

Loads of examples if you view the thread on Twitter

and therefore, it was no surprise to see the feature currently suspended…

Twitter has suspended the launch of Twitter Blue and is actively trying to stop people from subscribing “to help address impersonation issues,” per an internal note.

Zoë Schiffer

Corey House recently tweeted about “Chesterton’s Fence”, and I was keeping my eye out for an excuse to put it in a blog. So here goes.

“Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. How applies to software: Before deleting code, figure out why it was added.

Other examples:

– Don’t delete a test before you know why it was added.

– Don’t delete a file until you’ve proven it’s unnecessary.

– Don’t make fun of a developer’s old code unless you understand the context in which it was written.”

Corey House
My own Twitter examples:
  • don’t takeover a company without having a solid plan of what to do with it.
  • don’t sack staff without knowing what role they do
  • don’t change the verification feature when you haven’t understood why it was added