X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
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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 that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
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 struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
I can't see any positive outcome from it.
It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.
I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms.
X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.
Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
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
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l...
But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles.
And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.
I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed.
As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.
And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.
The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well
You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering.
Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
Is this where the bar is set now? Not tanking a $40B corporation within a year now passes off as success? Really?
You people are desperately grasping at straws.
I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting.
See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew.
Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.
I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.
Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
On the other side people were already asking why Twitter didn't do more moderation and better filtering (= more people).
And we expected that breaking rules would have serious repercussions, which was a foolish assumption as we've seen.
He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...
I don't think it's realistic to pretend that abandoning X is seriously restricting anyone. If anything, sticking with it is brand endangerment and by leaving it you're making the smart move, with or without animus.
Most don't even know Musk bought Twitter.
To complete this thought, most users of X are siloed too. There is no "capture" of the platform, whatever thst means, for them.
I agree that in some circles there may be brand damage,
"Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.
They are really ready to castrate their models to the point of complete uncompetitiveness, but without any mean words in 0.01% of use cases. WTF? Is it because all people are complete idiots? Or because they think that all people are complete idiots? Or do they think that the jews running media is hypocritical scumbags who are ready to destroy them for the sake of activism and, most importantly, have enough power to do it, as soon as they see something unpleasant in their chatbot?
Why doesn't anyone come out and say openly "this is a language model, a computer program that, like any other language model, is not designed to speak on behalf of the company or describe the real world. And if you are afraid of stumbling upon a mean word, please contact any of our competitors with their weak castrated soyjak models, thank you very much"
What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.
I can speak for myself. I think Enron Musk is a despicable person, and at the same time I don't understand why a shitty app needs so many people.
This take is, quite bluntly, stupid and clueless. Do you think each commit reflects the volume of institutional knowledge of any individual? Unbelievable.
He's a member of a loose collection of white nationalist and "neo-Nazi" belief circles, and has promoted the modern counterpart to the Nazi ideology, the AFD, "urging them to move beyond guilt about their past".
Notably, he's not as fully committed to nativism or racial purity as some of his counterparts; He unilaterally caused a bit of a split in the GOP due to his need to rely on H1B labor, and we have hours-long recordings of his discussions & arguments with other people in this ideological cluster on Twitter Live.
Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
You can and should criticise Musk for his actions and views, especially his populist dogma, but calling him a nazi in hyperbole is a disrespect to the actual victims of Nazis, especially as anti semitism is alive and kicking again.
I personally believe Musk knows next to nothing about European politics, and his random support for people is more about rocking the boat and "trolling" the establishment than any meaningful support as he once did to Trump.
If we're going by objectively terrible things to be, even though the definition of nazi is very loose to now mean anyone to the right of far left because of it's overuse.
The Nazi bar argument does not do itself any favours and is in ways self-defeating. The majority do not care what someone else's political views are and arguments that shame people for doing so will just lead to increases in populism.
The Statue PFP, incorrect assumptions about the path, and extreme dunning kruger.
The term "cis" will still get you a warning while my for-you page has been consistently filling up with more and more far right content. I regularly see blue checks espousing actual jewish-conspiracy antisemitism.
Every time something happens to anyone, blue check comments asking if any of the parties were black, sometimes not even asking just assuming and blaming it on black people.
Elon has truly created a cesspit Nazi bar of that site.
Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.
If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
If that guy is a regular known for being a vocal supporter and often engages in discussions in said bar with attendees over how right he is and how reasonable his opinions are, and you still decide to stay and engage in those discussions still without thinking there is anything wrong with that... yeah, you are.
I think all Nazis should be socially shunned. I think all those willing to knowingly socialize with Nazis should also be socially shunned.
Yes; if I find out that someone has the firmly held belief that me or my friends should be dead (I have several trans friends for example), then I would absolutely not sit with them. And if I found out that a friend of mine sat with people who had the "political opinion" that I should be "dealt with decisively", then I would be pretty upset with them and wonder if they feel the same way about me.
You cannot just treat "being a Nazi" as some normal difference of political opinion. There is a reason that being a Nazi is verboten. Their political ideology is that some people should be removed from society, by violence if necessary. I shouldn't have to say this, but murdering people you don't like should be off the table in civilized political discourse. And if you break bread with such people, then I believe you have something to answer for. What is so valuable about their friendship that you're willing to break bread with people who want to use the power of the state to murder people?
This is all happening in the context of, just yesterday, Grok literally praising Hitler, by name, for dealing with jews decisively - which it claims strong leaders need to do "every damn time"
(https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...)
One needs to ask why Grok continues to have these nazi outbursts while other modern chatbots don't.
Yes, he endorses Yarvin. And that could be real. He could really believe it, and really want to follow it.
But it seems to me that Vance has been, shall we say, rather mobile on his positions. I wonder if we have ever seen what he really thinks. (You decide whether that would make him less dangerous, or more.)
I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.
Sure there had so be some frequent but low impact committers. But implying that people with lowest amount of code contribution must have more impact is ridiculous.
I mean, a staff engineer who stopped committing couple years ago? Yeah could be burnout, or could be some major contribution that's not in the stats. OTOH an IC on their second year in position who hadn't pushed a single line? Nah the institutional knowledge is safe without.
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong since many company do this for a long time and still do well
Call it trolling all you like, but we just funded our immigration enforcement agency at a level consistent with being one the larger militaries in the world.
Adolph Hitler's partisan ideology, to the extent that it different from general German ideology at the time, was a phenomenon from 1919 to 1945. The Holocaust death camps range from 1942 to 1945.
If you're examining "Ideology" from a behavioral lens, you don't get to look at behavior analogous to the Nazis in the 1930's and excuse it as "Not Nazi Enough".
If you're examining "Ideology" as explicit/implicit endorsement by reference, that's happening too, regardless of whether you want to wrap it in layers of irony. Elon Musk just set his large AI company's flagship up as a 4chan/pol/ member that calls itself "Mecha-Hitler" and offers explicit, detailed antisemitic critiques; This is not even the first time (see the South African Genocide).
If you want to see the character of these people, prove it in the breach - listen to him argue with his collection of ethnonationalist sycophants on Twitter about whether he should be allowed to hire Indian slave labor to run his tech.
Your motte appears to be that the use of the word "Nazi" must refer to a direct continuation of the political party of Adolph Hitler as passed down through partisan rules of succession, for the usage of "literally", as opposed to either of these frames. I reject this pedantry as motivated reasoning. This term has power and that power is needed because shit's going down again in similar ways.
In critiquing a cartoon not produced by Disney as derivative, "He's a sort of Mickey Mouse" might describe any number of cartoon characters that give off the same vibe, versus saying "He's literally Mickey Mouse" describes a blatant ripoff or even actionable IP violation. Obviously these people are not being selected for office by the Fuhrer, and "Literally" has a useful meaning here separate from that designation.
Whereas "Nazi" might be diluted into common hyperbole over the decades, "Literal Nazi" stands as essential terminology to refer to somebody who endorses ideas compatible with Umberto Eco's list, who puts into practice Roger Griffin's "Palingenetic ultranationalism", who scapegoats an ethnic minority to the point of advocating violent action, while at the same time adopting & hanging out with those adopting some of the symbology of the historical German fascist state.
Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.
That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.
> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]
Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.
https://zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligar...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...
Thiel in his VC hat has also been deeply involved with ycombinator.
You have to really work at it, to think Elon made such a salute, but others have not. It's ridiculous and absurd.
When I see and hear mad lunacy amd character assassination such as this, I immediately think "well everything else said about Elon must be made up too"
You speak of "good faith", do you know what this means?
It means that best intentions should be presumed, not worst, when examining the acts of others.
Have you done this?
[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...
20 years of anti-fascists who are jealous that some other people have better footwear calling wolf was a magic spell that brought real fascists into existence.
(If you had to say what was wrong about Twitter in a short text it is that it is easy to say something like the above message in a short text but impossible to conclusively refute as it involves introducing concepts such as "The meaning of a communication is its effect", "The purpose of a system is what it does", "Chaos Magick is real", and that even though physics is real some things obey the laws of 'pataphysics instead.)
2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter.
3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff.
4. TSLA stock price seems impervious to reality.
Connecting the USSR with free health care and education is, uh, "nice try, but completely wide of the mark". We have free education in the US after all, as do most wealthy countries. Denmark and Italy are night and day from the USSR politically and economically.
I think you can both recognize that the past of the US has some very ugly moments while still thinking the ideals were directionally correct and that we should attempt to live up to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
That wasn't a wave and the other commenter is full of shit.
Maybe that’s just anecdotal but given how frequently meta tries to trick me into clicking on a Threads link I have my suspicions about all that traffic.
Most left left left folk that I know have zero idealization about Rome or the USSR, and haven’t forgotten the atrocities the US has committed both home and abroad.
Anyone who seriously talks about the Roman Empire without wrestling with the realities of it is putting their head in the sand.
Anyone pining for the USSR probably doesn’t know a lot of what went on during its existence. Similarly most people actually wanting some form of communism or socialism probably don’t mean “just like the USSR”.
Discord is renowned for it's small engineering team, but I'm afraid you somehow claimed it has half the staff it does. A few years ago Steam reportedly employed around 90 engineers. Is it less than 500? I guess. What does that comparison tells you? Well, nothing. You need staff to roll out new features on multiple projects. If you add no feature, have no projects to work on, or have nothing to do then you don't need engineers. If your business plan has ambitious goals then you need engineers to achieve them. If all you're doing is keeping the lights on then you barely need anyone. Does this sound obvious?
I've been at companies that doubled their engineering staff overnight because they made a call to invest in a feature. I worked at companies that fired an entire floor of engineers because management decided some projects could be put on cold storage to improve financials. Why do staffing agencies are so popular? Have you ever thought about it?
The Alt-Right Playbook feels like a bummer version of XKCD for these discussions: [Control the Conversation](https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM)