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.
replies(23):
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.
I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
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.
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 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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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”.