As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project. The end. The oxymoron here of this story: The winners of the 44 billion Musk payed for it probably don’t care that their creation is being run into the ground while the users of the platform are obviously in an uproar. In the end, the creators and founders, etc. did it for the money, not the cultural impact they would have on the world. Twitter’s former CEO has allowed himself to be interviewed from time to time to say what he thinks Musk is doing wrong, but he doesn’t seem to have any hurt feelings or express any kind of extreme regrets for the company being sold. From what I’ve seen in the news, he’s pretty dry. The drama comes from the user end. This tells me something about how, in the end, it’s just rich people doing business and doing as they please with what they please. It’s kind of sad. Like, let’s say I made something really cool with my own two hands and my creation got turned into something monstrous. I’d be upset. The people who made twitter are happy with their riches. In the end, the outrage and scandal is kind of pointless because it’s just a thing that makes more money for big business rich tech people and it always was just that.
That’s a good point, and one that had not occurred to me. For all we know, he’s already mentally written off the $44 billion as a loss and is just having fun with it, with no expectation of success.
That would explain a lot.
The fact that he did not want to buy it for the price he had to buy it for is enough for me to conclude that he doesn’t give two shits about it. The ones he bought it from don’t give two shits, either. It’s just money. For Musk, money lost. For the former owners of Twitter, money gained. The rest is just blah blah blah to them. This is not so for the users of Twitter. It means much more to them socially than it does to the people who bought it and sold it. This, for me, is fascinating as a social phenomenon. Fascinatingly sad in a lot of ways.
Just to add in, X.com was something Elon wanted to do all the way back in PayPal days, basically a line/wechat with PayPal abilities.
It’s not his $44 billion, though.
The people who ACTUALLY paid for it are going to have a few words with him, probably, at some point.