• TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        They had a brand that was so powerful it was used as a verb, and he gave it up for the letter that is used as a generic placeholder, just because he’s obssessed with it for whatever reason.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Saw a theory a few weeks ago that he’s obsessed with “X,” because that’s how most of the native Africans signed away their sovereignty, and their land, to the European invaders.

          No proof, but given where he grew up, it seems plausible.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        It’s so they can salvage the original brand once the business dies - not because of Musk’s mismanagement, but because it has $13bn of debt out of the $44bn purchase.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Its a good use of brevity. Otherwise it would look like this:

      “twitter (which is currently named x and will be renamed back to Twitter after the eventual decline and subsequent fire sale of the smoldering remains of the company)”

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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      9 months ago

      While funny, it wasn’t intended as a burn. They are reporting on events that happened at Twitter, because it was named Twitter when these things happened, and is now called X.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’m hoping for something like:

        • 2024: Elon is found guilty of failing to uphold the obligations imposed on Twitter back in their 2011 lawsuit around misuse of information; Former Twitter staff are found to have heroically attempted to follow the law but were fired for doing so; Elon is ordered to sell X
        • 2025: Mastodon buys it for five million dollars; Elon is forced to sell all his shares in Tesla/SpaceX to pay a $200b fine to the FTC (his net worth is $201b, so he’d still be filthy rich - important to make the fine actually payable so he can’t declare bankruptcy);
        • late 2025: Mastodon rebrands X to Twitter which becomes just another Fediverse instance. One that is popular among high profile celebrities who can pay a fee to have their identity verified. One where posting discriminatory content gets you banned, permanently. Anyone who retweets your post is also banned for a month.
        • 2026: FTC sets gets to use all $200 billion on their own budget in order to hire more staff and do their job properly going forward
        • 2027 into the foreseeable future: every company in America suddenly starts pro-actively obeying FTC regulations instead of waiting for enforcement actions that almost never happen due to a lack of funding.