• potpie@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Pay billions for a userbase, then drive away the ones that aren’t Nazis or bots.

      • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Been saying it for a while, but his plan was to run it into the ground all along. Who is he buddy-buddy with in public? The Saudi’s and the Russians, who both have an interest in seeing Twitter burn to the ground. He started by laying off people, not paying their bills, and making stupid brand decisions. This has been the plan all along and there’s really no other logical explanation. 44 billion is nothing to the Saudis and Russian oligarchs if it takes away a key tool for organized dissent and the spread of western ideals.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Pay 54 billion dollars to utterly destroy a platform which gave normal people the ability to effectively spread information about the wrongdoing of the upper class, and which often promoted that very information.

      That’s why he did this, he knows it’s killing g Twitter and wants it dead.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Lessons for whom? I have several things I would like to kill but lack the requisite trillions to execute my vision.

        • z3n0x@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          “Tired of running your massively popular online service? Call Brand wreckers™, your one-stop shop for dismantling user loyalty and brand reputation. Call now and lose your first 10k users for free!”

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
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          You know I wonder if we could create a non profit that exists only to buy things and then donate them (IP, closed source, whatever) to the public domain. If you had a savvy board, such an organization could do a lot of good.

          Something like this must already exist, right?

            • MagicShel@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              I mean they would need to be paid, but idk about a percentage. Mostly just to fairly compensate them for the time spent vetting deals.

              • jarfil@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                What’s savvy about getting paid just for your time? You need to get paid for expertise, opportunities, networking… that’s at least 10%, since a non-profit wouldn’t have preference shares.

                • MagicShel@programming.dev
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m leery about a percentage just because I perceive a conflict of interest. Overall compensation of 10% might be about right, but tying actual compensation to the cost of stuff that is bought creates a perverse incentive to overspend on things. That’s money donated for the betterment of humanity, not so I can have a 3 acre swimming pool.

                  But IDK maybe I’m looking at it wrong.

    • Leafeytea@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      You can throw Warner Brothers Discovery in there while you are at it (HBO now stupidly referred to as “Max”)

        • Lemmington Bunnie@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          They’re literally a household name.

          I grew up poor in Australia, and no one really had pay TV around me - least of all the people I hung with. Over the years, you’d still learn through other TV shows and movies that HBO was the channel with the good stuff.

          Why change that? Why lose such branding? Have they become associated with something that they don’t want to be? If not, leave great enough alone.

      • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        I just saw a trailer for an adventure time spin off on a youtube channel called “Max” and though it was a random channel that post trailer lol. Granted i rarely watch anything and while i know about HBO i don’t ever remember watching anything from them.

        • WashedOver@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          I watched a South Park movie for the first time in years. In this one they traveled into the future. Everything had Max or Plus added to the name. It seemed pretty spot on with where we are going

      • shiveyarbles@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I get the feeling that these execs need a plan to increase profits every quarter, and this is one of the gotos.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    When they start focusing on the brand, it’s over.

    I was part of a “startup” that was all volunteers. We called ourselves Citizens Market, and the idea was to produce an app that let you scan a barcode to get ethical info on the company who made the product.

    Like GoodGuide, but they got to market faster.

    After a few years of effort, a marketing person joined our all-volunteer team and convinced the head to change the name to Fosfo. Why Fosfo? Because matches have phosphorous in them, and so it referenced illumination, and the illumination had to do with our mission of … you guessed it: providing information.

    The thing failed. I mean, we were already failing because we didn’t have the profit motive cutting our decisions down to what worked. But the name “Fosfo” was when I knew the project was dead.

    “Citizens Market” was the perfect name for what our app would do. But no, had to have some web 2.0 jackass giving us a facelift. That was our path to salvation: a rebrand.

    • Andy@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      That’s a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Out critical blunder was hoping to crowdsource the generation of the dataset we’d use to provide scores.

        What we should have done was find existing data about company ethics and just build the feature of scanning a UPC barcode to get the data.

        We tried to be the app and the data source, and we had a huge two sided marketplace problem, and no incentive for the volunteers who would spend hours and hours doing research.

        Another reason why I won’t do a startup under volunteer conditions again. We unconsciously modeled everyone else as like us: willing to donate copious time.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Definitely. It was during that project that I switched from subversion to git for the first time. I remember my coworker James showing me how files just changed when he checked out a branch. I started using git at his insistence (which I hated because I wanted to own the project and he was a more impressive dev than me), and I started to like it. Switched all my other projects to git as well.

    • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Of course he did; he hated Twitter because of it’s ability for marginalized people to organized as well as give people the ability to share videos about his unsafe products.

        • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          I mean, it makes perfect sense. He’s a PR guy who wanted to own a platform so he could spin his own facts; the fact that people could post videos of his own products catching fire was bad for him.

          • gapbetweenus@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            He is destroying his platform. While simultaneously helping competitors. While been forced to pay way to much and even pay for the layers his opponents hired. Genius moves all around.

          • fades@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Buying Twitter doesn’t save him from circulating videos of teslas on fire

            • jarfil@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              It does on Twitter. I mean, on X.

              The problem is likely that his view of the Internet is highly warped. Between managing so many companies, meeting IRL people, and traveling around, he may have barely any time to learn about what’s out there outside of the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and whatever someone spins to him during that one party or two.

              So he looked into the one thing he knew about that was irking him, saw it had a silly low price, and jumped on the chance of taking control… without realizing it was like jumping onto a water balloon in a swimming pool: even if you manage to catch it, even if you pop it, there is still a pool of water surrounding you.

      • ConsciousCode@beehaw.org
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        This gives him way too much credit lol. He isn’t playing 5D chess, he impulse-bought a $44B company and is too much of a narcissistic control freak to stop touching it. Harming marginalized people is a natural consequence of essentially any action a billionaire takes by virtue of their existence.

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Yep. And he saw “blue checks” as some kind of Liberal Elite^TM that was manipulating the media and public consciousness. He set out specifically to try to destroy that, but in the process is attempting to create his own version of that imagined cabal.

        He’s also petulant child with a meme-poisoned brain that’s stuck somewhere in the body of an edgy 14 year old in 2002.

    • Rentlar@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      “After some backlash from users, Musk comes to a compromise: the new twitter logo is a blue bird with a giant Red X over it.”

    • Banzai51@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just shut it down once he had it? He’s burning a lot of operational money to do this slowly. It doesn’t make any sense unless he really is that stupid.

      • AngularAloe@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Early on, he was selling some of his Tesla stock, thus depressing its value, in order to fund twitter. So I don’t believe the theory that he bought it specifically to tank it. Though he may eventually claim “I meant to do that”.

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        1 year ago

        I honestly do think he is really really dumb. People love to tell me that he actually does know stuff about rockets or whatever, but c’mon…

    • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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      He’s a stunted 8 year old who associates X with edginess. X factor. X Men. X Ray. X rated films. XXX. All super fucking cool

      • Chahk@beehaw.org
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        He originally wanted “Model 3” to be called “Model E” so that the three (at the time) Tesla models could spell out “SEX”. Fortunately that name was already taken. He’s a petulant child.

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          I’ll admit, BACK THEN, I thought it was funny and was sad E was taken. But yeah perspective changes when you realize how much worse he is/was/will be.

      • Uniquitous@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Also, he’s an unoriginal dipshit. All he’s good at is buying things and slapping his name on 'em, he’s never had an idea of his own.

    • Briongloid@aussie.zone
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      X.com is his product he owned, that is loosely associated with PayPal’s success despite it having nothing to do with the tech that it was merged for.

      By “absorbing” twitter with his original X company that is older than twitter, he can pretend to be the founder of the parent company X, like he pretends to be the founder of Tesla.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    I’m sure all the brands who are unsure about continuing their advertising on the platform are going to love having to derail their UI teams to go change dozens of different social media icons implementation.

    McDonalds Web Team on Friday: “I think we’ve planned a great sprint for Monday everyone. It’ll be tight but we should be ready in time to promote the anniversary of Grimace’s bris!”

    McDonalds Web Team on Monday: “Shit”

    • Zapp@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’m getting sidetracked here, but I want to give my support of McD’s turning every possible life event Grimace can have into to a new marketing event, so long as each comes with a new Gameboy color game.

  • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    What was that about him doing twitter’s technology policing and leaving running the company to the new CEO?

  • Snapz@beehaw.org
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    Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

    Twitter existed as a relatively free and open public space to communicate, organize and assemble to take actions for and against things at scale before musk (e.g. The Arab Spring, a terrifying moment for the Saudis especially - the second largest shareholder behind musk).

    When people collectively laughed at elon and his cringe, inbred, emerald boy antics or his humiliating divorce and other routine failures, Twitter was the bullhorn.

    Now elon and his desperate far right Toadies will work to try to rewrite reality so they can eventually have this conversation:

    "Twitter? What’s a Twitter? Wait, are you talking about blork? A bird? No, blork’s logo is a dinosaur with chainsaw arms… and everyone wants to be his best friend… and it’s against the law to divorce him… and he’s cool… and…"

    What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon. If they remember you at all, it will be to laugh at you - you’ll never outrun that.

    • Saganaki@lemmy.one
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      Don’t attribute to malice what is absolutely just idiocy. Musk is not some genius. He is quite literally a man-child who made money because he came from money (and maybe a little luck).

      His hubris led to this disaster with twitter—nothing else.

      • money_loo@1337lemmy.com
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        This would make sense if he didn’t constantly amplify right-wing rhetoric and antics. You’d just be ignoring the evidence to think anything else at this point.

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          I’m not ignoring evidence, I just see an alternative you don’t: He wants attention and he always has. He’s “losing” and the easiest way to get validation is to get it from those that are right-wing. He wants so badly to be treated as “a genius”.

          Nobody other than staunch right-wingers believe his non-sense. He only gets headlines because controversy sells.

          • CleoTheWizard@beehaw.org
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            This is not correct I don’t think. He’s always been right wing, it’s not a new thing. The more important thing is to look at his intentions right before being forced to buy the company.

            And those intentions were clearly to use a large amount of cash to bully the company into following his orders. He didn’t like them censoring things. He didn’t like they’re politics. And it was where he spent most of his social media time.

            People seem to underestimate the absolute power of elites. He bought an entire company to kill it because he can do that. How many lives will this impact? A ton. All due to the ego of one awful man.

      • the_itsb (she/her)@midwest.social
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        I don’t dispute for a second that Elon’s an idiot, but his ex-wife did ask him to buy and kill Twitter:

        “Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please!? xx” Riley allegedly texted Musk on March 24. “America is going INSANE.”

        Maybe it’s not 3D chess but just transparent - yet effective! - stupidity. Buying Twitter was fiscally foolish, but it does seem like he’s gonna kill it, so 🤷

  • patchymoose@lemmy.ml
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    It must be incredibly frustrating to be the new CEO that he just appointed, only to have him continuing to run his mouth and make ruinous decisions that tie your hands.

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      If she didn’t know what she was signing up for then she deserves no pity. If she’s smart she’s using this as a stepping stone.

      • unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        I mean, I’d love to get paid that amount of money for a few months, do barely nothing, blame my inferiors and retire with investments and a small restaurant in a friendly town.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Get paid enough to start your own company.

          Alternatively, spin it as “drove the dumpster in a controlled burn, preventing it from exploding into everyone’s face”.

  • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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    All I can think of when he talks about how “X will be an app for everything” is:

    Welcome to Zombocom, you can do anything at Zombocom, Welcome to you. Anything is possible at Zombocom. The infinite is possible at Zombocom. The unobtainable is unknown at Zombocom. Welcome to Zombocom.