![]() military-industrial complex have thus far ensured that he will only fail upward, unshaken by his own repeated incompetence. His power and wealth as the son of a South African emerald tycoon who is now ensconced in the U.S. There is no evidence that Musk takes any of this seriously, because he simply doesn’t need to. This not only destroyed the company’s value, which has plummeted to a fraction of the $44 billion Musk paid for it, but also single-handedly cratered a site that many people relied on for their livelihoods and forced them to seek greener pastures on competing platforms like Bluesky and Threads.īut going so far as to claim this is part of a large, coherent plan-whether benevolent or sinister-remains an enormous stretch. In the months since Musk took over, he has axed the platform’s moderation staff, scared away advertisers, and reshaped its algorithms to explicitly amplify anyone who pays $8 for a verified checkmark, including white supremacists and transphobes. This is not to understate the impact that Musk’s reactionary bent has had on Twitter users. Throughout all of this, many Musk fans and journalists were more willing to believe Musk was playing 4-D business chess than to see him simply as a bumbling fool who is rich enough to do whatever he wants and never face consequences. Many of the changes made to the site have been simply based on Musk’s own mercurial whims, or-worse yet-the ideas of the sewer-dwelling sycophants in his replies. This is evident from the origin story of the platform’s purchase by Musk, who originally proposed the $44 billion deal in a Tweet, then repeatedly tried to get out of it when things went south. If he was anyone else, we might think he chose the name X after his child, whom he calls "X," but since it's Elon Musk we can safely assume that he just really thinks it's cool and finally there is nobody to stop him. ![]() Musk reportedly purchased the domain name X.com in his PayPal days in a hefty deal that included stock in the company, and tried to change the payment platform's name to X despite being told it was a terrible idea. His coddling of right-wing reactionaries, racists, and transphobes doesn’t seem to be based in a strong commitment to any coherent ideology or cause, but an insatiable need to play to his audience in exchange for temporary ego boosts.Īnd speaking of ego boosts, that appears to be exactly what "X" is. ![]() If anything, Musk’s actions have consistently shown that he has little interest in anything beyond griefing whoever or whatever he is obsessed with at the moment-especially if doing so grants him external validation from his cult-army of online weirdos. But even this idea-which suggests that Musk’s platform is part of some larger right-wing political project-seems to give him too much credit. It makes sense that such a purge would inevitably end with erasing Twitter’s name. In a recent interview, he wildly claimed-seemingly based on no actual information-that the new app could incorporate banking and encompass “half of the global financial system” and act as "the most efficient database for the thing that is money." The idea that Twitter and its 17 year-old codebase could be modified to run the global economy, of course, has exactly zero basis in reality. Musk has long alluded to creating an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, using the press to voice his usual litany of half-baked, nonsense ideas while seeming to have no clue how to execute them. Naturally, this was followed by sterile “Here’s what it means” articles appearing across multiple mainstream outlets. ![]() "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity-centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking-creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” Yaccarino wrote in a Tweet (Xeet?) on Monday. Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino described a pie-in-the-sky “everything” app that will supposedly take the platform beyond its text-posting roots. Musk loves his portrayal in the media as a Big Ideas Guy, but one idea he doesn't seem to have is what an app called X will actually do.
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