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Elon Musk is still saying they'll "debate" who killed Twitter and god, he hasn't realized that this is his legacy, huh?
Like, spoiler alert, Elon Musk isn't taking us to Mars no matter what Captain Lorca said. He's not going to go down in the history books as a new Edison. His most enduring legacy will probably be a cautionary tale. I can't stress how enduring the story of Twitter's failure will be, even long after Twitter itself is forgotten: a man bought a platform so ubiquitous in society that it had every celebrity, reporter and world leader posting on it for FREE, and in a fit of petty ego, obsession, and conspiracy theories, turned it into a barely-functioning mess that alienated all of its userbase but his yes men. It's going to be a infamous business failure story, taught to people and dissected for ages. "The world's richest man blew up a platform everyone used to make someone named catturd2 like him" is just. A tale for the ages
I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:
Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.
This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.
Edit to add further developments:
Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.
A few ground rules for twitter refugees.
friendly reminder for the new twitter refugees:
change your icon/pfp and put something coherent in your blog description or you're going to get blocked bcs people think you're a bot
this site is built around reblogs, so please actually reblog posts(especially art and fics!!)
you can set your likes and follows to private
checkmarks here are a meme and mean nothing
follower counts are private and we like it that way, so get used to not judging people by that metric
drama and discourse is boring, use your blacklist and block button liberally
DON'T CENSOR YOURSELF!! we can swear and say kill and make fun of corporations all we want, and if you tiktok-ify your tags people who have things blacklisted for whatever reason will still see them, and people who want to see that content won't be able to find it!! spell words out normally, you won't get in trouble!!
tumblr live is sketchy as hell and full of fake accounts, if you decide to use it anyway may god have mercy on your soul o7
be nice to the reddit refugees, they're our friends <3