Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what sense is he "off the rails" then?
My eleventh wife just gave birth to my 58th child. Musk seems perfectly normal to me /s
So you mean that he is weird?
Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there. The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember tha…
I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…
Can confirm the frontend piece - there is previously available functionality that was removed from the ui that you can still access via the web api
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's worth less than half of what he paid for it, lost 30 million users and went from being the default microblog to facing real competition in daily active users from ~~bluesky~~threads ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... ). Building what X is today from nothing would be an incredible accomplishment but building what X is today out of what Twitter was in 2022 is still a pretty miserable…
> it's worth less than half of what he paid for it But it was always worth less that half of the purchase price. The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk. Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots and actual users.
Did he argue in that case that it was worth less than half the purchase price? I do recall he argued it was a material misrepresentation by twitter, but that the terms of the contract ran against him there. I do not recall it having been valued to that extent. It did seem like a facially bullshit excuse at the time. I'm curious as to why you're credulously repeating it now, after it's already been disposed of.
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades. Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).
Higher value AI company? Not for long if "mechahitler" keeps popping up.
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chronological feed by default with a setting that actually sticks, private favorites, new media gallery, "E2E" messages. (side note: Birdwatch was a way better name than Community Notes)
> Chronological feed by default with a setting that actually sticks… Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already. > private favorites To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-boosted-elon-musk-tw... > new media gallery We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we? > "E2E" messages Anything using Twitter fo…
>Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already.
Irrelevant for the point but yes, API changes and killing TweetDeck was a shit move.
>To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner
I don't care about your opinion on that, for me it's great and made me like more posts. I don't engage in politics on Twitter.
>We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?
We are listing changes. Seems like you are just biased against Musk instead of engaging in a discussion.
>Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.
Agreed but it's a new feature.
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a stretch to say this would have made a major impact. Biden won fairly comfortably. COVID was Trump's bad luck.
Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.
Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.
In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.
In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk. I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it. I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away. I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p
I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there. The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember tha…
As a business it's a failure. As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable. For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the price.
I mean it didn't really influence public opinion that much, just enough to push election over the edge, and that was not just due to Twitter, but mostly due to non-voters.
Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#649Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and…
> pretty successful What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very far-right, success. I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal, his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!
> I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this
I mean he sued in order to not to have to buy it. To describe this as the _goal_ rather than just him making what he considers to be the best of a bad situation feels like a reach.