Looks absolutely well-planned and not rushed at all, perfect alignment of the logo, proper copy. Definitely not just a hasty implementation of a fever dream.
I'm amazed at how many people think Twitter has copied the X Windows logo
when youโre trying to make a point itโs always worth being right and not wrong
Tom Warren is amazed that many people notice a new logo having almost exactly the same shape as a well-known, decades-old one. Tom Warren would like everyone to know that he is much more clever than they are, for noticing that it also resembles an obscure font's glyph for an obscure unicode character that has existed for roughly half as long. Good for you, Tom Warren. We all admire you and the glorious blue-framed check mark next to your name.
obscure font's glyph for an obscure unicode character that has existed for roughly half as long
Standard monotype font
๐ - "mathematical double-struck capital X"
Added to Unicode in 2001, used a very similar character for X11 in 1984, added to math in... who was the first mathematician in history to ever use it?
Yes, yes... it's fine to acknowledge the existence of math notation that most people will never use.
Tom Warren chose to fixate on a specific typeface (not math) and use that as an excuse to criticize people for their valid comparison to something that predates it. He followed up by declaring that he was "right" and others were "wrong". Is he a four-year-old?
I can't think of a more snide, self-aggrandizing way to participate in the conversation. It was unnecessary, rude, and not even technically correct*, which is why he has earned my mocking comment in response.
*(We can see in the replies that the glyph he shows to support his position is in fact not the same as the logo being discussed.)
OK, so maybe Tom Warren is not the most likable guy, or not one to defuse a controversy that can lead more people to his website.
But I think it is technically correct:
There is both ๐ and ๐ฉ, not sure which one looks closer to the "formerly-called-Twitter" one, but they do look really close
They do follow a way of writing that predates the X11 logo, I wouldn't be surprised if the X11 logo itself was inspired by that too
The glyphs appear just like that as part of the default Unicode typeface I'm using on my phone right now
I think the part we should take from this, is "Elon just wrote an x in a '1337 way', and called it a logo".
It's right of the center. So aligned with Elon's politics...
Ha! Good one
Somehow, this is the bit that offends me most
I'm guessing that skill with Cascading Style Sheets is considered wasted time and effort at X, much like media relations, accessibility, and microservices.
I enjoy reading about this change because everytime someone writes something like. Look what x did. My first thought isn't of Twitter or any social media, it's: "who's x?" (As in replacement variable)
So stupid to rebrand like that. Oh well, never used Twitter anyways
I thought this was a joke.
They did a great job replacing a highly marketable icon with character, with something that feels like cliche 80's dial-up geocities days that doesn't make sense at all, given the terminology of everything...
In other news, you need to log in to use twitter now? lol. Wow, genius
Kinda like the names of his kids.
๐
saw this earlier from an old twitter tab, thought my browser had been hijacked with some extension. what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo because they have to, definitely not what i'd expect from one of the biggest social media sites in the world. elon has been fixated on the whole x thing for literal decades now & that's the best logo he came up with?
Supposedly this is a temporary logo until they can create a more permanent one. It literally came from some random that tweeted at him (X'd at him? Lol). He asked for submissions and just chose one, maybe he accidentally laid off all the graphic designers.
Rebranding was so urgent that he didn't wait for a finished logo? I have to admit, I'm baffled. With his other changes I can at least imagine a thought process behind it, this one seems to be something he just woke up and decided to do all of a sudden.
It becomes a lot easier to understand when you remember that he might just be kinda stupid :)
He's not, though. He's had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he's become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.
I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn't going so well for him.
He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn't build anything he didn't run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don't get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it's the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon's involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.
If Elon's an idiot who doesn't do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How's Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?
I think there's a very clear theme of "I don't like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever" going on here.
Because he's a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn't wreck them?
He didn't build any of it.
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn't until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn't build its first car until after Musk's acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
I am in no way saying that Elon Musk is a good person or that he's doing well with Twitter (though we don't know the company's internal cash flows so it could actually be that it's becoming more profitable - we'll see in the long run). I'm just saying that this Reddit hivemind stuff is getting tedious and silly. He was not a "rich fuck" when he started out, I have more money right now than Musk did back then. He is not a moron. He's an asshole, an egotist, and not good at many things. But he's definitely good at some things and has done quite well by it.
While he obviously has some intelligence, he's still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he's not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.
People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!
I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There's no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Uh the just world fallacy it's strong in you.
Hardly. There are plenty of people who are as smart or smarter than Elon Musk who haven't struck it big. Given his net worth there are huge numbers of people like that who haven't struck it big.
I'm just pointing out that accomplishing what he's accomplished probably means he isn't dumb. Not in certain fields of expertise, at any rate. I'm only arguing that the "ha ha, he's a moron!" reactions here are not particularly plausible.
Thank god someone is here to stand up for the richest asshole on earth.
Musk is an asshole. I'm standing up for accuracy.
Offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion
Try to back out when Twitter says "ok lol"
Get forced to complete the purchase
Saddle Twitter with the debt you now have as a result of buying Twitter
Invite all the previously-banned bigots and hatemongers back on the site
Make your staff's lives hell, including bullshit 'performance' stuff like checking how many lines-of-code they write, so most of them are either fired or leave on their own
Raise API prices sky-high, get ridiculed
Lock everything behind user log-in, logged-out users can't see anything
Rate-limit how many things logged-in users can do
Break widgets
Was once the public square of the internet, now weather services are moving to Mastodon
"why are we still losing money >:("
Initiate a half-assed rebrand to "X" but the logo, ๐, is literally just a mathematical symbol. Who needs copyright on your billion dollar company's brand identity, eh?
Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!
It's entirely possible that he was smart, I'm sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk's direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he's succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.
I literally said in the comment that you're responding to that Musk isn't good at running Twitter.
It's a little worse than 'not going well', is my point.
That's not my point. I said that Musk had done well with his other non-Twitter companies and you responded "but look at how terrible he is at running Twitter!"
Donโt forget this bit:
โIt's entirely possible that he was smart, I'm sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk's direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he's succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.โ
It's far easier to be successful if you're already rich.
He didn't start off particularly wealthy.
Exactly! Who's parents don't have apartheid emerald mine money?!
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
i mean, that's still way more wealthy than most people. i don't think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child's business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk's dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is... still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.
It's not easy to become a billionaire from 28,000 USD. Definitely not based on luck alone if you grow several businesses.
its not easy to become a billionaire. but i think that its disingenuous to suggest that 28,000 bucks of dad's money for your startup isn't in and of itself a privilege of the wealthy. starting a business is completely out of scope for most people. it can't make you a billionaire, but you can't be a billionaire unless you can start a business, and you can't do that without money to spend on that business in the vast majority of cases.
and the skill of running a business is just not impressive to me. there is no way to cultivate skill at entrepreneurship without doing entrepreneurial things, and that's just way easier to do if you can afford to fail, and have a way of making yourself the boss of other people. most people can't afford to fail, so they can't take risks with quantities of money they'll probably never accumulate in their lifetime.
Most people don't get seed money from their parents, but the median American will inherit $70K from their parents.
Regardless, most people who start a business can take out a loan. And to put things in perspective, even opening a fast food restaurant will require over $200K.
In other words, the advantage that $28K gave Musk was nowhere near enough to open a small restaurant, much less automatically turn him into a billionaire.
i really want to know where you got that figure, because a quick google search does not verify a median inheritance of 70k. there are some figures which report a mean inheritance of around that, but most are significantly lower, and this document suggests both that the median inheritance is around 8k across income groups, and that less that 7% of people are will receive any inheritance at all when averaged across all income groups. (the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to receive an inheritance).
and sure, most people who start a business can take out a loan, but there are a vast quantity of people who can't take out a loan, because they have bad credit, or do not want to take out a loan they know they will never be able to repay if they fail to get their business off the ground. rich people can afford to take more risks, can afford to not spend excess money that they have on making sure they get to eat next month, and thus are conferred specific structural advantages when starting, maintaining, and growing businesses.
i'm not saying that 28k can automatically turn him into a billionaire. i'm simply pointing out the truth, that Elon Musk did, in fact, benefit from structural advantages which cleared barriers to entry that the vast majority of people do not have the resources to bypass.
i get that people would really like it if he was some rags to riches story about a poor kid ascending up the ladder, but no. it isn't true about musk, and it isn't true about most billionaires. their wealth is unprecedented, sure, and they have leveraged their resources beyond what most people can conceive, but it bears repeating. statistically, most of the monstrously wealthy started out wealthy, had access to resources that the average person will never have from the start, and were only in a position to grow their wealth because they had money to burn on things other than food, shelter, and physical health.
What other changes has a thought process behind them? Virtually everything heโs done at twitter has seemed like something that occurred to him while shitting and then he forced his team to implement by the end of the day.
Twitter was apparently losing a lot of money before he bought it, so laying off a bunch of staff is one reasonable way to deal with that. Same with charging for the API, getting rid of data centers and offices, and even login requirements to reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
These were all things done as an attempt at solving problems. They may not have been good solutions, but as I said, you can understand the thought process behind them. "We're spending more than we take in. So do things to reduce spending and boost income."
I have no idea what problem this rebranding is supposed to solve, though. When Facebook changed to Meta, or Google changed to Alphabet, I could understand those because their name had become associated with only a very specific subset of what the company wanted to do. Twitter is still just being Twitter, though. Unless perhaps he's got some big new project he's planning for them to start doing that's distinct from microblogging.
The decision probably involved a big line of cocaine
Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!
Wow get this genius some venture capital funding
man, the whole elon musk/twitter situation seems less & less real the more it plays out
what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo
To me it looks legitimately confusingly like the xorg logo, which ironically you usually see on a Linux system only when the config to display the correct logo for something is missing or invalid.
In my case this translates to "Twitter is now deleted".
I deleted Twitter years ago.
I wonder how many (e)X-twitter users there will be after this change.
Even Mastodon's old lingo "toot"ing sounds more trendy than "x"ing a comment.
"x"ing a comment.
Excreting.
If you remember back to your birthday cards as a kid when your loved ones put XOXO in the card... X is kisses.
So Xing is pronounced Kissing!
Don't tweet it, just exit.
The X isn't kisses. The X stand for closes eyes and the O is an open mouth, hence XO = kiss emote and XOXO is the plural
Doesn't "XOXO" mean "hugs and kisses"? The X represents a kiss and the O represents a hug.
That was always my understanding of it.
Yeah, you are right. Guess we used it wrong in school.
You're interpreting a much older shorthand with online emoticon rules. XO is a closed-eye open-mouth emoticon, but XOXO has been "hugs and kisses" for long enough to have been used when people wrote letters by hand.
That never made sense to me. X is the shape of two people hugging and O is the shape of pursed lips.
Yeah I don't get it either, but it's been that way for so long that we as a society probably stopped questioning it.
Yeah that's what I grew up learning and my mom taught me that x is kisses o is hugs. Til that it's seen and way!
Wait...it's not tooting anymore?
I mean I do that daily. Only not on the internets
What's next, Elon? Try to trademark the letter x?
Space X will rebrand to S
Tesla To E
Just so he gets his S E X "joke" on the second try.
AI he wanted to become the CEO of SEX al along. . .
Why didn't he just buy CEX?
Rebrand to XXX
Elon can ask his ex-president mate to hook him up with some porn stars for twitter
Elon on his way to sue X-ray manufacturers.
Microsoft might have an issue with that.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may also take issue.
Apparently Elon has a thing for the letter X. SpaceX, naming his son "X ร A-12", and now renaming Twitter.
X.com was the startup Musk (and others) launched in 1999. It merged with another startup to create PayPal in 2000. Musk bought the X.com domain back a few years ago.
So yea, he's been obsessed with the letter X for a while. Other than SpaceX, there's also Tesla Model X.
Model X is called that because he wanted the models to spell SEXY - but Ford still owns "Model E" so he had to go with S3XY instead.
What a tool.
Who could blame the greatest minds from being entranced by a mysterious "X"?
Can he legally change his son's name to use the new x?
๐ ร A-๐ii
Apparently according to Elon his wife came up with most of the name
Rename Twitter Blue to X Pass
Rename the Post Tweet textbox to the X Box
Uploaded videos are now X videos.
what
yeah, well, even the @twitter account now has the X logo.
x.com redirects to twitter.com as well.
Wonder if Businesses will replace the twitter logo in their windows as well.
At this time, many businesses are indeed probably replacing their twitter logo, with either Mastodon, threads, or nothing as a replacement
Wonder if Businesses will replace the twitter logo in their windows as well.
I doubt they will for a while at least. This change was so sudden that a lot of people will just not know what X is. It doesn't look like a social media icon and a lot of people will just not be familiar with it.
It's also horribly forgettable, even if I did use X regularly, I might just forget what the icon looked like out of context.
He believes they're above regulation, if anyone tries to CTL X it just gets cut from the web.
Looks absolutely well-planned and not rushed at all, perfect alignment of the logo, proper copy. Definitely not just a hasty implementation of a fever dream.
Uh, Elon, did you just copy the X Window System logo?
He googled "X logo" and picked the first option he didn't recognize
No. It's from Special Alphabets 4. https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1683428660915625989?t=61yiSztLYwYk44zLQ1HVrw&s=19
Tom Warren is amazed that many people notice a new logo having almost exactly the same shape as a well-known, decades-old one. Tom Warren would like everyone to know that he is much more clever than they are, for noticing that it also resembles an obscure font's glyph for an obscure unicode character that has existed for roughly half as long. Good for you, Tom Warren. We all admire you and the glorious blue-framed check mark next to your name.
Standard monotype font
๐ - "mathematical double-struck capital X"
Added to Unicode in 2001, used a very similar character for X11 in 1984, added to math in... who was the first mathematician in history to ever use it?
Blackboard Bold - popularized in the 1960s.
Yes, yes... it's fine to acknowledge the existence of math notation that most people will never use.
Tom Warren chose to fixate on a specific typeface (not math) and use that as an excuse to criticize people for their valid comparison to something that predates it. He followed up by declaring that he was "right" and others were "wrong". Is he a four-year-old?
I can't think of a more snide, self-aggrandizing way to participate in the conversation. It was unnecessary, rude, and not even technically correct*, which is why he has earned my mocking comment in response.
*(We can see in the replies that the glyph he shows to support his position is in fact not the same as the logo being discussed.)
OK, so maybe Tom Warren is not the most likable guy, or not one to defuse a controversy that can lead more people to his website.
But I think it is technically correct:
I think the part we should take from this, is "Elon just wrote an x in a '1337 way', and called it a logo".
Shouldn't that link... go to x.com now? ๐คฃ
https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1683428660915625989?t=61yiSztLYwYk44zLQ1HVrw&s=19
Bonus one: https://๐ฉ.com/tomwarren/status/1683428660915625989?t=61yiSztLYwYk44zLQ1HVrw&s=19
What a special time to be alive.
No, they copied Elon. Law suit coming soon. /s
You might not need the sโฆ
It's not even centered?
It's right of the center. So aligned with Elon's politics...
Ha! Good one
Somehow, this is the bit that offends me most
I'm guessing that skill with Cascading Style Sheets is considered wasted time and effort at X, much like media relations, accessibility, and microservices.
I enjoy reading about this change because everytime someone writes something like. Look what x did. My first thought isn't of Twitter or any social media, it's: "who's x?" (As in replacement variable)
So stupid to rebrand like that. Oh well, never used Twitter anyways
I thought this was a joke.
They did a great job replacing a highly marketable icon with character, with something that feels like cliche 80's dial-up geocities days that doesn't make sense at all, given the terminology of everything...
In other news, you need to log in to use twitter now? lol. Wow, genius
Kinda like the names of his kids.
๐
saw this earlier from an old twitter tab, thought my browser had been hijacked with some extension. what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo because they have to, definitely not what i'd expect from one of the biggest social media sites in the world. elon has been fixated on the whole x thing for literal decades now & that's the best logo he came up with?
Supposedly this is a temporary logo until they can create a more permanent one. It literally came from some random that tweeted at him (X'd at him? Lol). He asked for submissions and just chose one, maybe he accidentally laid off all the graphic designers.
Rebranding was so urgent that he didn't wait for a finished logo? I have to admit, I'm baffled. With his other changes I can at least imagine a thought process behind it, this one seems to be something he just woke up and decided to do all of a sudden.
It becomes a lot easier to understand when you remember that he might just be kinda stupid :)
He's not, though. He's had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he's become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.
I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn't going so well for him.
He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn't build anything he didn't run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don't get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it's the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon's involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.
If Elon's an idiot who doesn't do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How's Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?
I think there's a very clear theme of "I don't like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever" going on here.
Because he's a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn't wreck them?
He didn't build any of it.
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn't until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn't build its first car until after Musk's acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
I am in no way saying that Elon Musk is a good person or that he's doing well with Twitter (though we don't know the company's internal cash flows so it could actually be that it's becoming more profitable - we'll see in the long run). I'm just saying that this Reddit hivemind stuff is getting tedious and silly. He was not a "rich fuck" when he started out, I have more money right now than Musk did back then. He is not a moron. He's an asshole, an egotist, and not good at many things. But he's definitely good at some things and has done quite well by it.
While he obviously has some intelligence, he's still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he's not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.
People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!
I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There's no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Uh the just world fallacy it's strong in you.
Hardly. There are plenty of people who are as smart or smarter than Elon Musk who haven't struck it big. Given his net worth there are huge numbers of people like that who haven't struck it big.
I'm just pointing out that accomplishing what he's accomplished probably means he isn't dumb. Not in certain fields of expertise, at any rate. I'm only arguing that the "ha ha, he's a moron!" reactions here are not particularly plausible.
Thank god someone is here to stand up for the richest asshole on earth.
Musk is an asshole. I'm standing up for accuracy.
Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!
It's entirely possible that he was smart, I'm sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk's direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he's succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.
I literally said in the comment that you're responding to that Musk isn't good at running Twitter.
It's a little worse than 'not going well', is my point.
That's not my point. I said that Musk had done well with his other non-Twitter companies and you responded "but look at how terrible he is at running Twitter!"
Donโt forget this bit:
โIt's entirely possible that he was smart, I'm sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk's direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he's succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.โ
It's far easier to be successful if you're already rich.
He didn't start off particularly wealthy.
Exactly! Who's parents don't have apartheid emerald mine money?!
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father.
i mean, that's still way more wealthy than most people. i don't think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child's business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk's dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is... still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.
It's not easy to become a billionaire from 28,000 USD. Definitely not based on luck alone if you grow several businesses.
its not easy to become a billionaire. but i think that its disingenuous to suggest that 28,000 bucks of dad's money for your startup isn't in and of itself a privilege of the wealthy. starting a business is completely out of scope for most people. it can't make you a billionaire, but you can't be a billionaire unless you can start a business, and you can't do that without money to spend on that business in the vast majority of cases.
and the skill of running a business is just not impressive to me. there is no way to cultivate skill at entrepreneurship without doing entrepreneurial things, and that's just way easier to do if you can afford to fail, and have a way of making yourself the boss of other people. most people can't afford to fail, so they can't take risks with quantities of money they'll probably never accumulate in their lifetime.
Most people don't get seed money from their parents, but the median American will inherit $70K from their parents.
Regardless, most people who start a business can take out a loan. And to put things in perspective, even opening a fast food restaurant will require over $200K.
In other words, the advantage that $28K gave Musk was nowhere near enough to open a small restaurant, much less automatically turn him into a billionaire.
i really want to know where you got that figure, because a quick google search does not verify a median inheritance of 70k. there are some figures which report a mean inheritance of around that, but most are significantly lower, and this document suggests both that the median inheritance is around 8k across income groups, and that less that 7% of people are will receive any inheritance at all when averaged across all income groups. (the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to receive an inheritance).
and sure, most people who start a business can take out a loan, but there are a vast quantity of people who can't take out a loan, because they have bad credit, or do not want to take out a loan they know they will never be able to repay if they fail to get their business off the ground. rich people can afford to take more risks, can afford to not spend excess money that they have on making sure they get to eat next month, and thus are conferred specific structural advantages when starting, maintaining, and growing businesses.
i'm not saying that 28k can automatically turn him into a billionaire. i'm simply pointing out the truth, that Elon Musk did, in fact, benefit from structural advantages which cleared barriers to entry that the vast majority of people do not have the resources to bypass.
i get that people would really like it if he was some rags to riches story about a poor kid ascending up the ladder, but no. it isn't true about musk, and it isn't true about most billionaires. their wealth is unprecedented, sure, and they have leveraged their resources beyond what most people can conceive, but it bears repeating. statistically, most of the monstrously wealthy started out wealthy, had access to resources that the average person will never have from the start, and were only in a position to grow their wealth because they had money to burn on things other than food, shelter, and physical health.
What other changes has a thought process behind them? Virtually everything heโs done at twitter has seemed like something that occurred to him while shitting and then he forced his team to implement by the end of the day.
Twitter was apparently losing a lot of money before he bought it, so laying off a bunch of staff is one reasonable way to deal with that. Same with charging for the API, getting rid of data centers and offices, and even login requirements to reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
These were all things done as an attempt at solving problems. They may not have been good solutions, but as I said, you can understand the thought process behind them. "We're spending more than we take in. So do things to reduce spending and boost income."
I have no idea what problem this rebranding is supposed to solve, though. When Facebook changed to Meta, or Google changed to Alphabet, I could understand those because their name had become associated with only a very specific subset of what the company wanted to do. Twitter is still just being Twitter, though. Unless perhaps he's got some big new project he's planning for them to start doing that's distinct from microblogging.
The decision probably involved a big line of cocaine
Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!
Wow get this genius some venture capital funding
man, the whole elon musk/twitter situation seems less & less real the more it plays out
To me it looks legitimately confusingly like the xorg logo, which ironically you usually see on a Linux system only when the config to display the correct logo for something is missing or invalid.
In my case this translates to "Twitter is now deleted".
I deleted Twitter years ago.
I wonder how many (e)X-twitter users there will be after this change.
Even Mastodon's old lingo "toot"ing sounds more trendy than "x"ing a comment.
Excreting.
If you remember back to your birthday cards as a kid when your loved ones put XOXO in the card... X is kisses.
So Xing is pronounced Kissing!
Don't tweet it, just exit.
The X isn't kisses. The X stand for closes eyes and the O is an open mouth, hence XO = kiss emote and XOXO is the plural
Doesn't "XOXO" mean "hugs and kisses"? The X represents a kiss and the O represents a hug.
That was always my understanding of it.
Yeah, you are right. Guess we used it wrong in school.
You're interpreting a much older shorthand with online emoticon rules. XO is a closed-eye open-mouth emoticon, but XOXO has been "hugs and kisses" for long enough to have been used when people wrote letters by hand.
That never made sense to me. X is the shape of two people hugging and O is the shape of pursed lips.
Yeah I don't get it either, but it's been that way for so long that we as a society probably stopped questioning it.
Yeah that's what I grew up learning and my mom taught me that x is kisses o is hugs. Til that it's seen and way!
Wait...it's not tooting anymore?
I mean I do that daily. Only not on the internets
What's next, Elon? Try to trademark the letter x?
Space X will rebrand to S
Tesla To E
Just so he gets his S E X "joke" on the second try.
AI he wanted to become the CEO of SEX al along. . .
Why didn't he just buy CEX?
Rebrand to XXX
Elon can ask his ex-president mate to hook him up with some porn stars for twitter
Elon on his way to sue X-ray manufacturers.
Microsoft might have an issue with that.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may also take issue.
Apparently Elon has a thing for the letter X. SpaceX, naming his son "X ร A-12", and now renaming Twitter.
X.com was the startup Musk (and others) launched in 1999. It merged with another startup to create PayPal in 2000. Musk bought the X.com domain back a few years ago.
So yea, he's been obsessed with the letter X for a while. Other than SpaceX, there's also Tesla Model X.
Model X is called that because he wanted the models to spell SEXY - but Ford still owns "Model E" so he had to go with S3XY instead.
What a tool.
Who could blame the greatest minds from being entranced by a mysterious "X"?
My personal favorite X
Not risking that click ๐
PS. Is Rick-Rolling allowed here, or was that just on R?
It's X from the Mega Man X video game series.
But SpaceX at least is only short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation
Yeah, nothing to do with a man-child giggling that it sounds like space-sex a bit.
But they don't do exploration? They just do orbit stuff
Yet
Spac Explorathun.
"Schadenfreude ist die beste Freude" :p
Facebook/Meta owns the trademark for "X" for use in social networking.
Microsoft owns the trademark for "X" for use in finance/e-commerce.
https://themessenger.com/tech/twitters-rebrand-to-x-could-be-a-trademark-nightmare-thanks-to-microsoft
Can he legally change his son's name to use the new x?
๐ ร A-๐ii
Apparently according to Elon his wife came up with most of the name
Rename Twitter Blue to X Pass
Rename the Post Tweet textbox to the X Box
Uploaded videos are now X videos.
what
yeah, well, even the @twitter account now has the X logo.
x.com redirects to twitter.com as well.
Wonder if Businesses will replace the twitter logo in their windows as well.
At this time, many businesses are indeed probably replacing their twitter logo, with either Mastodon, threads, or nothing as a replacement
I doubt they will for a while at least. This change was so sudden that a lot of people will just not know what X is. It doesn't look like a social media icon and a lot of people will just not be familiar with it.
It's also horribly forgettable, even if I did use X regularly, I might just forget what the icon looked like out of context.
He believes they're above regulation, if anyone tries to CTL X it just gets cut from the web.
KILL IT
KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!
RIP AND TEAR
Isn't that the jagex logo?
I think it looks different enough from the Jagex logo. Though I think the jury is still out on the X Windows System logo
This shit makes Elon look even more like a Bond villain than he already is.
That's giving him way too much credit. More like an Austin Powers villain, and even that is questionable.
Off brand Scooby-Doo villain.
I wonder who's under the mask...
*Under the Musk
AKA Twitter is now Fucked?
Was there a time it wasn't?
There was a time they let people send Tweets through SMS. It almost made sense back then.
Except that Meta (Facebook) has already trademarked X as pertains to social media.
Der erste Schritt zu West-WeeChat.
haben die auch ein hรคssliches logo?
No it isn't.
No... No it's not... But you can imagine what'd be like if it was, right?
Brilliant.