So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
I mean she’s not wrong!
I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
- she is inept
- she never had any say (which I interpret, perhaps incorrectly, that she is competent but had her hands were tied)
Which is it?
If I were in her shoes, I would have known I was going to leave during the worst of his tantrums, but I would have timed my exit for a more graceful moment.
Dramatically bailing out during a storm would not be a good look for an exec who wants another key role somewhere else
"Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok"
Life got short for quite a few historical Nazis.
> > Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Pay special attention to the phrasing "a role". We are not talking about specifically this role.
Again: you would not be insane to do so if staying in the job has substantial non-compensation consequences. Like jail.
Self-respect, for example.
Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.
Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.
Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall.
My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM.
Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a number of perspectives).
Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.
It's really different facets of the same thing, right?
Ultimately though, this is a bit of a weird aside to go on I fully admit. The "solutions" so to speak for people like this are basically the same whether they are dark-room schemers or dickheads with far too much money and not nearly enough accountability.
I think he saw a good (to him) opportunity to steer public discourse by tossing a big stack of cash at probably the most influential social media network in terms of mindshare, to push whatever ideas were careening through his mind at any given point.
He may not have even been sober, much less playing 5D chess.
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42444-z
Our findings revealed a moderate positive association between psychedelic use and beliefs in alternative facts, as well as the specific belief that facts are politically influenced.
Amazing you didn't get that point even after it was made explicitly clear three times, but you still remember my username 10 days later.
Also, asserting that someone who expresses class awareness and media literacy is dabbling in "alternative facts" and must be on some kind of psychedelic drugs is wildly uncalled for. This is the second time you've cast such aspersions on me for some reason - stop.
That he's the wealthiest known man in the world seems like relevant context here.
(His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)
But I don't see any of those having impacted the California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up, sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see: Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to do with that?
As a side note: there are some really poorly thought through parts of the project, for example they don't have a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...
1. https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-sca...
Is a strawman, to which the conclusion is also defied by the plain evidence of everything Musk has done on Twitter
Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not talking about everything, it's talking about one specific thing in a very plausible scenario.
It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a Signal or Telegram thread saying
> someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these crazy leftists
> Hmm
> I'll help line up financing.
> Ok!
This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.
* Every private media company has beneficial owners * Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living
These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.
When?
Isn't Twitter the go-to example of a rage filled social network?
(In fact, if you're being praised
When someone says that they need to manage their boss, what they usually mean is that the boss reacts poorly or unproductively to bad news, or that they like to interfere in parts of the work process that would best be left to the employees, and so this normal part of everyone's job turns into a constant walk on eggshells.
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
That seems in the same category as saying there's some blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator: Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)
I don't think you become the CEO of any major company by believing that "social responsibility" exists. Doesn't the job pretty much select for the type of person who thinks the world owes them $20+ million a year?
With that said - it's dumb to blame the puppet for the acts of the ventriloquist.
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.
My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
Ooh, a new life goal that I've already achieved, thanks!
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
I know you meant your comment as sarcasm, but to do it, you need to have a legacy worth those kind of numbers to begin with, instead of selling your labor as most of us here do. It's not so different that celebrities associating themselves with brands through advertising.
And as distasteful as it seems to many of us, people like her spend years building their social networks and a reputation for various personality and behavioral traits in a boardroom.
Also, I doubt her legacy is closed at this point. The traditional next step would be to write a book based on her career capped off by her experiences at Twitter.
(2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?
> *I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her* but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
What was there to thank her for?
My read wasn't that the "inept" was specifically her, but rather the leadership of the company at the time in general (for which, regardless, she is being thanked on Twitter). In other words, either
(1) she was a figurehead that didn't do anything and thanking her is stupid
(2) she wasn't a figurehead and actually was in charge, in which case thanking her is still stupid because such leadership was inept (suing their advertisers, etc.)
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
Which fascists?
His children break contact with him moment they become adults. If it wasn't for the money he would have been forbidden to see them long ago.
Everyone hates him on the left and the right.
If you consider a rich 50 year old creep doing drugs and going around impregnating young women and paying them to go away as successful? Then yes he is ..
Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.
I would like to believe that people can change over time.
She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close enough to retirement age.
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
I understand she did convince a lot of advertisers to come back and provided a veneer of credibility.
1) Most tech valuations dropped about 50%-80% in between Elon's offer and Reddit formally accepting it. This was the end of the 2021 tech boom.
2) Elon being a moron and turning off brand advertisers in any way he can when direct response ads don't really work on the platform.
That already happened before she got onboard.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of such a thing being done by her.
It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.
Context?
Outcomes suggests she failed at that.
Hopefully the next chief will be better.
Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
HN is censoring news about X / Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...
Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709
Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven, though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with, and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end of the article!
Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.
It definitely attracts people who are competent in technology and propaganda is sufficient numbers for the task being discussed, especially when as a mass movement it has (or is perceived to have) a position of power that advantage-seeking people want to exploit. If anything, the common perception that fascists are "astonishingly, astonishingly stupid" makes this more attractive for people who are both competent and also amoral opportunists (which do occur together, competence and moral virtue aren't particularly correlated.)
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-antisemitism
The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
Surely you can be both accurate and certain, otherwise you should just shut up and be right all the time.
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
The problem is ranking and relevance
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".
Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]
I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.
BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.
> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"
I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.
The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.
Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker -- almost certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.
You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone relies on language to think together, so when the meaning of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at thinking together.
What, pray, is your reason?
I assumed you knew the modern and the original use. I generally assume folks know the basic definitions of the terms they are using (until proven otherwise), because otherwise the conversation will get really tedious and pointless…
That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.
Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.
I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to something that was being touted there. The context of the post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get you blanked banned from many other placed.
Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just another kind of "free speech" that exists.
I think what you're trying to say is that on default subs, or some popular ones, that you can't post/comment some things without it getting removed, and possibly banned from those subs. Which is absolutely true. Same thing is true on HN, you can't even make a post about Grok's latest escapades without getting flagged.
But if you just want to have some space to discuss some topic, make subreddit for it, moderate it however you want. Reddit itself isn't going to ban you unless it's against site level guidelines.
It's pretty hard to get a site level ban. One easy way is to use a VPN though. My account (and any new one I make, so probably my IP/device too) was banned for ban evasion because I accidentally left my VPN on when using the Reddit app.
You don't see this an as issue because you share their opinions
I agree it's pivoted into another community. A lot of the mainstream and left leaning contributors have been downranked or moved to other platforms.
But Twitter hasn't felt like raw, egalitarian conversation since 2009
Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on. Now it's usually Twitter I check.
This is compounded by the fact that so many political events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done directly on twitter.
So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.
Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have a place - it absolutely does and most of the current affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving' events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes, which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you how important network effects are.
Not possible if you are exposed to it periodically. So the value of 'news' source seems to be negative.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
At least, that's how I would spin it.
But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
Just not Grok specifically. Wouldn't want it "massaging the text" with ethnic jokes.
As Rust Kohle said in "True Detective": "People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time..."
People keep saying that, but what did she take the fall for?
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
Haha...ok. I gave a bunch of stock from one of my companies to another one of my companies and made up a value during the transaction.
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.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
“From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence platform MediaRadar found that (X’s former top advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the same period in 2023.”
Remember Tay Tweets?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
Grok actively leans into racism and nazism.
To be fair, 'exposing' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as racist will get you a lot fewer clicks.
Musk claims Grok to be less filtered in general than other LLMs. This is what less filtered looks like. LLMs are not human; if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things. If you want this so-called problem solved by putting bowling bumpers on the bot, by all means go use ChatGPT.
It's so "less filtered" that they had to add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide
This idea that "less filtered" LLMs will be "naturally" very racist is something that a lot of racists really really want to be true because they want to believe their racist views are backed by data.
They are not.
Answer: "I can't help with that."
This is not helping your case.
Gemini had a better response: "xAI later stated that this behavior was due to an 'unauthorized modification' by a 'rogue employee'."
Try.
The white genocide thing I remember hearing about and looked really forced
And Tay was a non-LLM user account released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random users’ markov chains.
Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it, I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not remember the Google image model that made the founding fathers different races by default?
Not to mention that now Grok is just openly white supremacist, calling itself MechaHitler and is flat out accusing Jewish people of wanting to kill white babies (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/elon-musk-grok-antisem...)
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads that's catching up w twitter.
But it was always worth less that half of the purchase price. The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk. Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots and actual users.
True but since he never provided any hard numbers, especially after totally owning the thing, makes this point moot.
Monthly active users, fair, but it also depends on the type of users that remain. My take still is that the users X cares about are politicians, journalists and the general elite. They are still on X. It doesn't matter that some random tech worker switched to Bluesky or Mastodon, those were never profitable anyway, complained a lot and used third party apps.
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019
I was wrong.
I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk takeover, especially as many of the most direct comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or not.
Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network effects are real.
Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving
Subscriptions: 2021 (https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-launches-subscrip...)
Community Notes: 2021 (https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir...)
Native video: 2012-2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope_(service) / https://www.videonuze.com/article/twitter-unveils-30-second-...)
Musk buys Twitter: late 2022.
That leaves… Grok.
(side note: Birdwatch was a way better name than Community Notes)
Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already.
> private favorites
To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-boosted-elon-musk-tw...
> new media gallery
We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?
> "E2E" messages
Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.
The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters. 4k characters tweets have been introduced in 2023.
The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
"Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did, renaming them from "Birdwatch".
The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
Not saying that Musk innovated (doesn't take much to make blue checks subscription-based or to increase the length of tweets) but he did act decisively to introduce changes in the good old Twitter, something the previous CEOs had hesitated to do.
So, longer.
> The "subscription feature" is a content creator one, while I meant paid blue check.
I consider the paid blue checks a negative, not a positive.
> "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before Musk did
As with the long tweets, this then becomes a pretty minor tweak.
> The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had been discontinued.
I mentioned three iterations. The last link, in 2015, is the current native video handling.
If I, personally, went to my boss and rattled this off as a list of primary personal achievements in the past couple of years, they'd say "you're padding things"… and I'm a single developer.
Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
2024 isn't a story of how Trump outwitted his opponents but one of how his opponents tied their shoelaces together.
DJT and his supporters could craft narratives directly, rather than going through traditional media.
DJT's information flow: DJT -> Twitter-based Supporters -> News Orgs -> Electorate
Other Candidate's info flows: Candidate -> News Orgs -> Electorate
So not only could DJT move faster, but he also didn't need permission/buy-in from Editors/Owners of news orgs.
I really don't think so, at least not in isolation. It probably contributed a small part but the right wing media machine is multi-faceted. There were a lot of podcasters (i.e. Joe Rogan), comedians and youtubers all publicly in support of a second DJT presidency and I think that had a much bigger factor overall than Twitter.
I also doubt hispanics and other minorities voted for Trump because they were obsessively on twitter. Not being able to make ends meet, a weekend at Bernie's president, and the over-the-top blank check given to Israel played more of a role than Elon buying twitter.
> It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016
I think the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco played a bigger role, and I don't think they utilize Twitter. On top of that, frankly, TV and his behavior at rallies/debated helped him a lot more than Twitter did in 2016. I don't know a single MAGA supporter who was even on Twitter in 2016.
> they successfully suppressed him in 2020
How? He was banned after the election.
> and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
DJT was not on Twitter in 2024. Did it really make a difference when he had his own social network? We all have our opinions, but is there actual data supporting this for the 2024 election?
By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very far-right, success.
I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal, his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!
As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable.
For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the price.
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 mostly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It makes X an increasingly niche website.
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".
I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.
I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.
It's a private company now so I don't know what their revenue looks like but they certainly don't seem to be low on cash given how much they've invested in AI. You may not use X but it's definitely not "destroyed" lol
Also X isn't funding Grok, it's a separate B corp with funding of it's own, it's just been tightly integrated into X, so it doesn't really say anything about the money situation at Twitter/X.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/x-report-first-annual-ad-...
X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
Love all of these on paper, I think any tech person would. But they are non-starters. Normies have zero chance of ever deciding to use these.
Yes.. non-starters, too complicated and fiddly..
I have one word for you: "cisgender".
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twit...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...
[4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-user...
Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to be.
But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.
(Sorry she ever boarded?)
how fascinating that the NY Times didn't find any room to mention in the article that despite this:
> She did not provide a reason for her departure.
it might possibly be related to the Elon's custom-tuned Grok LLM spent the last twenty four hours becoming even more Nazi-y?
seems fairly relevant especially given she didn't give any actual reason.
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
Not everything is about the current news cycle.
But he didn't? She wasn't even in the loop for many of the consequential decisions
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.
That's a bingo. 3 weeks ago, Musk invited[1] X users to Microsoft-Tay[2] Grok by having them share share "divisive facts", then presumably fed the over 10,000 responses into the training/fine-tuning data set.
1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090
2. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users, and was praising Hitler in short order. They did it twice too, before shutting it down permanently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.
Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.
What's disconnected from reality in what I said? As for Grok, so? It's an LLM and all of them are prone to saying all kinds of invented bullshit. Are you seriously going to get morally scandalized by an LLM parrot, with no self-awareness, saying some racist nonsense? It would be better to know how it was prompted into this, and by whom, then blame them more specifically.
Also note that I was referring to X having the potential to be a valuable asset to Musk, and a business asset that grows back in value in a financial/user sense. I didn't mention any moral considerations. That aside, even if it's loaded with racism, do you think other social media platforms aren't? Or in other cases, aren't loaded with their own brand of intolerant fanaticism?
To call a social network deploraable is fine, but at least should be done with a bit of perspective for your own personal biases in favor of or against anything, and of course, it's useful to remember that something being morally deplorable to a bunch of people doesn't translate to it being a bad business, or a failure in that sense for its owner.
Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say anything about failure.
enjoy the retirement!
In late June, [Elon Musk] invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
“Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
[1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-g...
Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.
[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.
[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.
You would have to hold me at gun point to get me anywhere near the shit show at the fuck factory known as Elon Musk.
Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.
> Groundbreaking innovations like community notes
This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.
1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the same time...
2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers are back on the platform.
We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it doesn't seem as big a deal.
Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...
toomuchtodo•8h ago