Cont: Musk buys Twitter II

Puppycow said:
I just tried that and lo and behold the movie is the top result for just 'it'. I thought maybe I would need to add the word 'movie' to the search prompt, but it wasn't necessary. Fwiw.
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Well, to be fair, ignoring Google news stories and skipping straight to the search results, when I Google "x" the first four hits are the IMDB, Google, Rotten Tomatoes and web page for the production company for the film X (2022). The fifth hit is a Spotify link to Ed Sheeran's album "X".

So there you are. Using X as your search is quite effective unless you are looking for a social media company.

The first hit that is related to the company formerly known as Twitter was at number 14 and it is this story from the BBC.

There is no other mention of X (the company) on page 1. There is no direct mention of X on page 2 although both the Tesla model X and SpaceX are there. There is, however, a link to twitter.com - it's Elon Musk's profile on that site.
 
jeremyp said:
Well, to be fair, ignoring Google news stories and skipping straight to the search results, when I Google "x" the first four hits are the IMDB, Google, Rotten Tomatoes and web page for the production company for the film X (2022). The fifth hit is a Spotify link to Ed Sheeran's album "X".

So there you are. Using X as your search is quite effective unless you are looking for a social media company.

The first hit that is related to the company formerly known as Twitter was at number 14 and it is this story from the BBC.

There is no other mention of X (the company) on page 1. There is no direct mention of X on page 2 although both the Tesla model X and SpaceX are there. There is, however, a link to twitter.com - it's Elon Musk's profile on that site.
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Going to x.com on my phones browser gets me something with a bar at the bottom suggesting i install Twitter from twitter.com The blue button to tweet (or "xeet" or whatever?!?) still has the feather symbol with a +... the bird motif. This is just so half assed.
 
lobosrul5 said:
Going to x.com on my phones browser gets me something with a bar at the bottom suggesting i install Twitter from twitter.com The blue button to tweet (or "xeet" or whatever?!?) still has the feather symbol with a +... the bird motif. This is just so half assed.
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IOW SOP for Xitter since the Musk takeover.

For all his "brain the size of a planet" claims, he hasn't a clue what it takes to run a technology company.
 
Puppycow said:
Ironic racism, or ignorance or whatever that is, still sounds kinda racist.
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Gotta agree, especially considering Musk's terrible attitude is not exactly uncommon among tech bros who won the lottery during the dot com boom and thinks that means every idea they have is genius.

Being rich has rotted these people's brains, if they every had them, and has lead them to act like they can do no wrong. Elite silicon valley culture is also chock full of these right wing freaks (the tech-bro libertarian is a cliched trope, after all), I see no reason to attribute Musk's attitudes to his foreign roots.
 
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So I had a quick scan from the time this happened and didn't see it mentioned in the thread but Twitter unbanned an account that posted child abuse after deleting the images. Musk even commented saying that since only a few people in the Child Sexual Exploitation department saw them it wasn't a big deal.

Obviously this wasn't true.

Linky

“Only people on our CSE team have seen those pictures,” Musk tweeted, referring to the company’s child sexual exploitation staff. “For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account.”
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Oh and it's a right-wing influencer account, naturally.
 
Musk is now in the position of trying to explain to Dom Lucre, the account that he personally resurrected after getting banned for sharing still shots from a notorious child porn/torture video (tastefully watermarked with his personal brand), why he's not getting as much ad revenue as other blue check accounts. Apparently explaining that being a conspiracy theorist crank best known for posting child porn is advertiser poison is not going over well.

Musk said:
If you can find advertisers that want to advertise alongside your content, then you get revenue share. We cannot make them do this.
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https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1688955195726913536

Musk in an unenviable position, because all his right wing fans thought his takeover would mean the end of wokeness at Twitter, but he's finding out first hand that most of these "woke" policies were really just motivated by good business principles, namely keeping Twitter an attractive place for ad spending. Now he's taking **** from conspiracy cranks because they feel they aren't getting appropriately monetized and won't hear any other explanations for why this might be the case.

Musk bent over backwards to appease these freaks and they are rewarding him by trashing Twitter's value while simultaneously blaming Musk for the decline. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
 
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And upon clicking the link and glancing up at the address bar, the stupidity of the rebranding occurred to me all over again.

It's still twitter.com

Not sure what x.com is, and while the geek in me wants to think it's a community of 90s game enthusiasts, the realist in me thinks I shouldn't check that domain unless I'm incognito...

But in either case, by making the brand change before acquisition, the market value of the domain automatically goes up a few zeroes.

I suppose they could get thewebsiteformerlyknownastwitter.com?
 
Delphic Oracle said:
And upon clicking the link and glancing up at the address bar, the stupidity of the rebranding occurred to me all over again.

It's still twitter.com

Not sure what x.com is, and while the geek in me wants to think it's a community of 90s game enthusiasts, the realist in me thinks I shouldn't check that domain unless I'm incognito...

But in either case, by making the brand change before acquisition, the market value of the domain automatically goes up a few zeroes.

I suppose they could get thewebsiteformerlyknownastwitter.com?
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Musk has owned X.com domain for years now, having bought it from Paypal. This dumb idea has been a dream of his seemingly for decades now, including when trying to force the X brand on Paypal resulted in him being fired as CEO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)#Reuse_of_domain_name
 
Delphic Oracle said:
And upon clicking the link and glancing up at the address bar, the stupidity of the rebranding occurred to me all over again.

It's still twitter.com

Not sure what x.com is, and while the geek in me wants to think it's a community of 90s game enthusiasts, the realist in me thinks I shouldn't check that domain unless I'm incognito...

But in either case, by making the brand change before acquisition, the market value of the domain automatically goes up a few zeroes.

I suppose they could get thewebsiteformerlyknownastwitter.com?
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Twitter links aren't working for me any more. Any link like the one above or even just twitter.com just gives me a blank page with the X logo in the middle. If I use x.com, I first get redirected to twitter.com and then the same page appears.
 
Twittx is now confiscating people's handles if they want to.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...at-musk-ordered-takeover-of-his-music-account

About a week after X commandeered the popular @X account from longtime Twitter user Gene X Hwang, another user has reported that X has taken over his popular account, @music.
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Almost unbelievably

Vaught is mostly a Musk fan, as he's interested in Musk's electric cars and space developments. He said that this experience with X hasn't tainted his opinion of Musk or his relationship too much with X as a platform. He's holding out hope that Musk has a long-term plan for where Musk is taking X, but like many users, he's struggling to adjust to the rebranding. Vaught still refers to the platform by its original name.

"Twitter's not dead to me at this point," Vaught told Ars, even if "it's a super huge bummer" to lose the @music account. "Sixteen years is a long time to invest in something and then just have it ripped out from underneath you," Vaught said.
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He hasn't realised that his account has been ripped out from under him solely because of Elon Musk.
 
I admit, I used to think Musk was a genius, albeit a flawed one. I never bought into the ridiculous hype surrounding him but I thought you know, he's a good businessman and his scientific projects are great.

But the mask has been slipping for a long long time, from the SpaceX revelations about how they ignore him, to the regular hissy fits. I realised that he's like the character in Glass Onion. He's a moron!

But since the Twitter debacle I've learned he's not just a pretentious moron, he's also a nasty, bitter neo-fascist and supporter of grotesque opinions.

I don't get why people still like the guy.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
I admit, I used to think Musk was a genius, albeit a flawed one. I never bought into the ridiculous hype surrounding him but I thought you know, he's a good businessman and his scientific projects are great.

But the mask has been slipping for a long long time, from the SpaceX revelations about how they ignore him, to the regular hissy fits. I realised that he's like the character in Glass Onion. He's a moron!

But since the Twitter debacle I've learned he's not just a pretentious moron, he's also a nasty, bitter neo-fascist and supporter of grotesque opinions.

I don't get why people still like the guy.
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My bold. He's Xtremely flawed. He's bought into his own hype, which is never wise.
But SpaceX and Tesla have been Xtremely successful. SpaceX reuses a rocket booster about every other day. You know who else has done that even once? Nobody.
Tesla has made electric cars mainstream. It was going to happen eventually, but Tesla led the way.
I learned a great many years ago that very many intelligent and educated people believe in really stupid stuff. Partly due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm sure.
I don't like him. But I like some of the stuff he's done.
 
Trebuchet said:
My bold. He's Xtremely flawed. He's bought into his own hype, which is never wise.
But SpaceX and Tesla have been Xtremely successful. SpaceX reuses a rocket booster about every other day. You know who else has done that even once? Nobody.
Tesla has made electric cars mainstream. It was going to happen eventually, but Tesla led the way.
I learned a great many years ago that very many intelligent and educated people believe in really stupid stuff. Partly due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm sure.
I don't like him. But I like some of the stuff he's done.
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It's more a problem on how the public likes to flatten large, organizational efforts into single individuals. Tesla and SpaceX have some very talented, smart people working there, and I'm not talking about Musk. Musk's technical input at these companies was minimal. Lots of very smart people worked very hard to make these things work, and Musk had very little to do with that other than being the money man. He's always liked to cultivate the image of himself as some real life Tony Stark, a techno genius polymath, but all the first hand reporting indicates that his technical skills were limited and his forays into these areas more of a burden to the real experts than an asset.

Previously I would have said he had a real talent for self-promotion, and that's not trivial if you're trying to fund some moon-shot technology company that needs lots of investment money and a long time to turn out a working product and a longer time to turn a profit, but he seems to have lost a step or ten, and now his self-promoting is more deleterious to his companies than helpful. His very public takeover and failure at Twitter is really putting a dent into a public image that he had carefully crafted as the head of Tesla and Space-X, and people are now seeing his ridiculous claims at Twitter and wondering how much previous bold claims at other ventures were also total BS.

he strikes me as more of a Elizabeth Holmes type personality. Very good at playing the Steve Jobs type techno-wizard that is great at attracting Silicon Valley investments, not so great at actually understanding the technical parts of his company and keeping his promises in the realm of possibility.
 
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Trebuchet said:
My bold. He's Xtremely flawed. He's bought into his own hype, which is never wise.
But SpaceX and Tesla have been Xtremely successful. SpaceX reuses a rocket booster about every other day. You know who else has done that even once? Nobody.
Tesla has made electric cars mainstream. It was going to happen eventually, but Tesla led the way.
I learned a great many years ago that very many intelligent and educated people believe in really stupid stuff. Partly due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm sure.
I don't like him. But I like some of the stuff he's done.
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SpaceX is a welfare guzzing pork barrell and Tesla is only ever even marginally viable because Musk has spent the last 18 months ignoring the company. Plus it only survived because of governments pumping many billions into it through pork barrel white elephants, simply because they were too stupid to realise that tech-bro bs is bs.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
SpaceX is a welfare guzzing pork barrell and Tesla is only ever even marginally viable because Musk has spent the last 18 months ignoring the company. Plus it only survived because of governments pumping many billions into it through pork barrel white elephants, simply because they were too stupid to realise that tech-bro bs is bs.
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Locating and latching onto the government teat is a non-trivial business skill, so in that way Musk is a very talented businessman.
 
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