Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

(nytimes.com)

511 points | by donohoe a day ago ago

1013 comments

  • toomuchtodo a day ago
  • hakanderyal 20 hours ago

    Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier, of Gas and tbh fame (https://x.com/nikitabier), as head of product some days ago.

    He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.

    • Aurornis 2 hours ago

      I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.

      • MisterTea an hour ago

        A casual glance of his twitter stream makes him look like an ass hole. I dont see anything nice about this person at all.

      • afavour 30 minutes ago

        There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.

      • emodendroket an hour ago

        For everyone getting angry about those things there are three people who’ve personally had a hand in them, I imagine.

        • PaulHoule 40 minutes ago

          Done plenty of "growth hacking" myself, I recognize that any successful social site did something spammy at one point, but never targeted kids.

        • varelse 5 minutes ago

          [dead]

      • blitzar 11 minutes ago

        > a checklist of things every person who made it in silicon valley has done.

      • Dwolb an hour ago

        His work may be unsavory, but he's good at his craft.

        Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.

        • ecb_penguin an hour ago

          > Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.

          People are talking about Nikita Bier, not a movie about Nikita Bier.

          You can be hated and reviled, and media about you can still be popular.

        • CydeWeys an hour ago

          Ironically, most of his stories were blowing smoke. He wasn't actually nearly as successful at any of that as he was at making up stories and convincing everyone how successful he had been at it. When dealing with a con artist, rule number one is believe nothing they say, certainly not about what they've done!

        • dinkumthinkum an hour ago

          I have a suspicion some people might draw a distinction between financial crimes and exploiting children. I don't have a dataset for this at the moment but that is my suspicion.

        • MisterTea 42 minutes ago

          Jeffery Dahmer has books, TV shows and films too. Your point?

    • danpalmer 15 hours ago

      Reading his timeline is somewhat rage-inducing. He's just another edgelord who can't decide if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.

      It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.

      • Apfel 12 hours ago

        Twitter only showing a sample of posts for non-logged-in users allowed me to see just how weirdly hung up on "Europeans" that guy is.

      • mrheosuper 9 hours ago

        Birds of a feather flock together.

      • halfmatthalfcat 2 hours ago

        Nikita has always been like this - vastly overstating his importance but making it seem like a joke so he can feign ignorance. Just another self-absorbed Valley goon.

      • trustinmenowpls 9 hours ago

        are we reading the same timeline? what's he posting that's offensive?

        • atetraxx 2 hours ago

          who said anything about offensive? Edglord just means he thinks hes posting hot takes.

      • fake-name 9 hours ago

        > if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.

        The thing is, as I get older, I realize more and more that this is a distinction without a difference.

        If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?

        The same is true for edgelord stuff. Whether you believe it internally is irrelevant, the active act of the posting is the only part that matters.

        If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.

        • pickledoyster 8 hours ago

          “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

        • Wowfunhappy 8 hours ago

          > If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?

          ...well, the legal system does take intent into account.

          • dpe82 8 hours ago

            "Intent" in this context means more more like: "did you intend to stab this person?" (battery/murder) vs. "did you recklessly swing a knife not knowing someone was about to walk by?" (reckless endangerment/manslaughter).

            Harming someone "ironically" would be an intentional act of the first category.

        • throwaway37153 8 hours ago

          > Whether you believe it internally is irrelevant, the active act of the posting is the only part that matters.

          > If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.

          Is Trump a constitutionalist because he claims to love the constitution? Is Kim Jong Un a "democratic republican"?

    • defraudbah 8 hours ago

      I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition

      • Aurornis 2 hours ago

        > Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition

        I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.

        It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.

        The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.

        • defraudbah 41 minutes ago

          > It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post

          ha-ha, this is true, but I also find it hilarious

          and I don't mind people with tons of followers monetizing it. If I see a person bait-posting - I can unsubscribe any time.

      • defraudbah 41 minutes ago

        HN has become a new reddit :D

        I have no idea why people are so negative here

  • wnevets 21 hours ago

    I forgot she even existed but atleast she brought mechahitler to twitter I guess.

    • plorg 34 minutes ago

      And immediately got sexually harassed by it.

  • nikolayasdf123 3 hours ago

    ads.x.com is the worst platform to run ads. not surprised

    • CydeWeys an hour ago

      I curate a relatively tame Twitter feed, but X has been showing me animated advertisements of some fleshlight-like device going to town on a dildo. W. T. A. F.

      It's started making me worried that I can't even use the app in a place where anyone else is, lest someone shoulder surf that and wonder WTF I'm looking at.

      • fourside 19 minutes ago

        It continues to surprise me how much people insist on using this platform after everything that’s happened in the last couple of years.

        It’s like having dinner at a restaurant that you know is owned by a mafia boss and then being surprised when you get robbed while you eat there.

      • mucha 36 minutes ago

        That's actually an ad for X Premium+. No embarrassing ads!

    • daveguy 2 hours ago

      But it is one of the only places you can pay to have your message delivered next to messages from Hitler bots and coup plotters. So... there's that.

    • froggertoaster 2 hours ago

      The lack of controls on anything related to ad running is astounding. How they make money at all blows my mind.

  • martinpw 17 hours ago

    The Economist always comes up with good tag lines for stories. In this case:

    Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO.

    https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...

  • Hoasi a day ago

    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.

    • mrweasel a day ago

      More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.

      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.

      • jbreckmckye 19 hours ago

        I cannot see how it was a success.

        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.

        • makeitdouble 17 hours ago

          Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.

          I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

          • davidw 12 hours ago

            > 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

            • giingyui 8 hours ago

              I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.

              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.

              • jmcqk6 3 minutes ago

                > Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.

                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.

              • matthewdgreen 2 hours ago

                It’s not a question of who benefits from it. It’s that the place got weird and creepy and the algorithm is maximizing for engagement of an unpleasant type. I quit last July because I couldn’t stand the angry know-nothing blue checks being promoted into my replies and the cryptocurrency scams.

              • ulfw 8 hours ago

                I'd love to know a reason why not to use an iPhone because of Apple's leader. Is he not right wing enough like Musk?

                • giingyui 7 hours ago

                  We all have our ideas on politics. Not all ideas are as universal as some think or pretend.

                  • ncallaway an hour ago

                    Right. And in my idea of politics, people who are willing to tolerate Nazis in social company are completely and utterly morally compromised.

                    I think all Nazis should be socially shunned. I think all those willing to knowingly socialize with Nazis should also be socially shunned.

                  • davidw 2 hours ago

                    "Nazis are bad" ought to be pretty damn universal.

                    We're not talking "has different ideas about corporate taxation or environmental regulation" like, say, Mitt Romney.

              • michaelmrose 8 hours ago

                [flagged]

                • collyw 7 hours ago

                  "literal Nazi" What utter nonsense.

                  • MSFT_Edging 4 hours ago

                    If it quacks like a duck.

                  • UltraSane 6 hours ago

                    [flagged]

                    • Ray20 5 hours ago

                      What probably puzzles me the most is the cowardice of multi-billion dollar corporations developing AI, whose main goal is to make sure that no one, God forbid, is offended by a chat bot

                      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"

                      • matthewdgreen 2 hours ago

                        Do you think that reprogramming a smart model to the point where it produces Hitler takes is any better?

                      • UltraSane 30 minutes ago

                        I'm not going to use a LLM that praises Hitler but you do you.

                    • bbarnett 6 hours ago

                      [flagged]

                      • maest 2 hours ago

                        He didn't just extend his arm, the whole motion matters. I am having a hard time believing you are arguing in good faith.

                      • stirfish 3 hours ago

                        He knew what he was doing, and he knew people would say "what about Obama" or whatever. This is not the first time Musk has violated a societal norm for attention, he just went way too far this time.

                      • guappa 5 hours ago

                        Well, right wing lovers at work have asked me to take down sarcastic images of elon musk doing a "totally not nazi" salute, just in case someone who voted for trump might be offended.

                • AStonesThrow 7 hours ago

                  [dead]

                • ChocolateGod 7 hours ago

                  [flagged]

                  • CursedSilicon 6 hours ago

                    [flagged]

                    • ChocolateGod 5 hours ago

                      [flagged]

                      • motorest 4 hours ago

                        [flagged]

                      • mapt 5 hours ago

                        He's not a member of the Nazi Party. The Nazi party hasn't existed in a long time. At this point in time, "literal Nazi" cannot mean, contextually, direct subservience to Adolph Hitler. He's dead.

                        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.

                        • ChocolateGod 4 hours ago

                          For someone to be a literal nazi, to meet the "literal" part they must either be a member of a nazi party or subscribe to beliefs of them.

                          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.

                          • mapt 14 minutes ago

                            Actual victims of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Laura Loomer are literally being gathered off the streets thousands at a time and sent to concentration camps.

                            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.

                  • foldr 3 hours ago

                    Even the literal literal Nazis didn’t campaign for minorities to be sent to gas chambers. If you’re going to do this silly pedantic act about how no-one in 2025 can literally be a Nazi, at least do it right.

              • motorest 6 hours ago

                [flagged]

                • giingyui 6 hours ago

                  >"If there's a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with eleven Nazis."

                  Change nazi for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.

                  • WindyMiller 5 hours ago

                    Different words mean different things.

                    "Tall people can reach things on high shelves." Change "tall" for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.

                    • ChocolateGod 4 hours ago

                      If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?

                      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.

                      • motorest 2 hours ago

                        > If I'm at a bar and one man is a pedo, does that mean all people at the bar are pedos?

                        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.

                      • guappa 2 hours ago

                        If you are a regular at a bar of a well known nazi, you're a nazi.

                  • guappa 5 hours ago

                    Account created 3 days ago with the sole purpose of trolling.

                  • 5 hours ago
                    [deleted]
                  • 2 hours ago
                    [deleted]
                  • CPLX 4 hours ago

                    Nazi is a noun.

                    Also try swapping in the word “criminal” and you’ll understand the argument being made.

                    • giingyui 4 hours ago

                      Swap it for vegan. Or cricketer. Or beekeeper.

                      • stirfish 3 hours ago

                        You didn't need to make an account for this.

                      • CPLX 3 hours ago

                        If anyone is in fact confused instead of being purposefully obtuse, the point being made that being a Nazi (like being a member of a criminal conspiracy) has the attribute of conveying responsibility to those who associate with the group.

                        • giingyui 3 hours ago

                          And I’m saying I disagree. I don’t need to associate with someone else’s political beliefs to sit with them. Unless you go around asking people if they are <thing you don’t like> before you share a meal. I doubt you do. And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them? I believe this to be an apt comparison because abortion has killed orders of magnitude more humans than nazis ever did.

                          • diputsmonro an hour ago

                            >> And if you found out accidentally that you find their beliefs unsavoury (say, they like abortion whilst you don’t, whatever) would you not sit with them?

                            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.

                          • wrboyce 2 hours ago

                            Abortions kill _people_? Hundreds of millions of people?

            • irusensei an hour ago

              > I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute

              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.

            • petesergeant 11 hours ago

              I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.

              • davidw 11 hours ago

                NPR found that they really didn't lose much:

                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.

                • petesergeant 11 hours ago

                  NPR's audience is very different from mine (AI researchers and thinkers) though. Some communities seem to have managed the move wholesale: all the cartoonists I like switched, for example.

                  • guappa 7 hours ago

                    [flagged]

                    • MSFT_Edging 4 hours ago

                      The "thinker" is one of the main audiences of twitter now.

                      The Statue PFP, incorrect assumptions about the path, and extreme dunning kruger.

              • ghaff an hour ago

                Are you really? I found my personal network got pretty much shredded. At this point it doesn’t matter much if I used X or didn’t use it.

              • Applejinx 6 hours ago

                By the time I left I was deleting multiple bot followers a day. You cannot take X's claims at face value, everything about the platform is aggressively dishonest. NPR's experience is instructive: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/

                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.

            • watwut 9 hours ago

              They liked the gesture. The rationalization is just public pretending they would theoretically mind.

          • rob74 4 hours ago

            Ok, everything can be seen as a success if you set your expectations low enough...

          • emodendroket an hour ago

            I don’t think most people were betting that or if they were they weren’t thinking that hard about it. Musk can run a money loser as a hobby if he likes.

          • jxjnskkzxxhx 9 hours ago

            Were they? My recollection is that in the tech space a lot of people were saying "it's just an app, why do they need so many people"

            • makeitdouble 7 hours ago

              The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?

              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.

              • jxjnskkzxxhx 5 hours ago

                > The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?

                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.

                • stirfish 3 hours ago

                  It's an easy (but often wrong) transition from "I don't understand why" to "it must not be necessary".

                  • jxjnskkzxxhx an hour ago

                    "I don't understand why ..." is a polite way of saying "I have some experience on the matter and have come up the belief that ...". The actual conclusion may still be wrong, but I hope this helps with your reading of my comment.

            • pyrale 6 hours ago

              Tech industry has been perpetually growing in the last decades. That means juniors are always a large share of the tech population, and as any demographic, some are bound to be clueless and still vocal. The issue is that in more stable industries, there would be a larger share of seniors to respond with more grounded takes. In ours, these voices are drowned, especially on relatively anonymous media such as HN.

          • Centigonal 15 hours ago

            Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades.

            Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.

            • raydev 12 hours ago

              The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).

              • guelo 8 hours ago

                Investors are insane throwing money at elon's xai at a $75 billion valuation. And knowing that elon is probably taking their cash to pay twitter's debt. How is that possible? That shitty also-ran mechahitler ai is never going to make any money. It makes me suspect that a lot of these VCs are more political than rational.

              • phs318u 11 hours ago

                Higher value AI company? Not for long if "mechahitler" keeps popping up.

                • raydev 10 hours ago

                  Honestly, after years of hearing that Elon's mishaps and faceplants will actually have a meaningful impact, with no meaningful impact, I'm sure xAI will be fine as long as they stay somewhat competitive.

                  • notahacker 6 hours ago

                    Isn't that the point though? In a market of multiple competently-executed chatbots, a entrant whose distinguishing feature is edgelordism isn't likely to stay competitive. There is a market for "like the other chat bots in terms of parsing instructions, but with clumsy ad hoc prompting to make it generate more racist output rather than less racist output" but it isn't a particularly lucrative one Cf Musk's other businesses with lockin effect or massive technical advantages, and in some cases where his politics are largely irrelevant

          • michaelmrose 7 hours ago

            Virtually nobody said that it would go under in a year because that makes no sense. It's financially possible for it to tread water for years whilst losing money.

            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.

            • bitlax 3 hours ago

              Lol the overwhelming tech jerk opinion was that he was firing elite engineers and the site would be unmaintainable as a result, and that he had over-leveraged himself to the point of bankruptcy.

          • myko 4 hours ago

            Seems like it is mostly bots and neo-Nazi adjacent folks

          • motorest 9 hours ago

            > Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.

            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.

          • mistermann 10 hours ago

            I joined it about 6 months ago and absolutely love the ~uncensored free for all nature of it!

            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.

            • guappa 6 hours ago

              Censoring people who disagree with you is not the same as no censorship.

            • MSFT_Edging 4 hours ago

              > ~uncensored

              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.

            • watwut 9 hours ago

              See, example of a guy thay calls X uncensored despite it literally doing that. Just not to fascists.

        • ghaff 2 hours ago

          From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.

        • bydlocoder 10 hours ago

          Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes

          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

          • motorest 9 hours ago

            > Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes

            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.

            • morngn 3 hours ago

              “Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software.”

              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.

            • dinkumthinkum an hour ago

              I generally agree with you but I think you were a little strong in your view that the OP was "oblivious." I only say this because an enormous percentage of companies hiring software engineers specifically with requirements of X years with Y language and W years with framework with silly name Z. I think they are also misguided in that but I think it is is too prevalent to say they are all oblivious but honestly that may actually be more of an apt description.

            • varjag 5 hours ago

              From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.

              • phanimahesh 4 hours ago

                Senior ICs tend to commit relatively unfrequently compared to junior ICs who keep pumping tickets.

                • varjag 3 hours ago

                  Not in my experience, as long as we are talking about ICs.

              • mrcarrot 5 hours ago

                Or alternatively (assuming that's true) he fired the people who thought about what they commit and kept those whose commit logs look like: "push feature WiP", "fix", "more fixes", "push", "maybe this works?"...

                • varjag 3 hours ago

                  Reportedly a portion of them were thinking so hard they did not commit anything at all.

                  • morngn 2 hours ago

                    Ironically, those may have been the staff with the most institutional knowledge. Seeing people argue, here of all places, that loc or commit frequency == institutional knowledge is … unexpected. New hires committing “whitespace cleanup” != institutional knowledge.

                    • varjag 39 minutes ago

                      Someone had to actually write all that code and it inevitably shows up in the stats. People who work on the code most tend to know it the most. Although people in non-coding roles sometimes prefer to deny it.

                      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.

              • motorest 5 hours ago

                > From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.

                This take is, quite bluntly, stupid and clueless. Do you think each commit reflects the volume of institutional knowledge of any individual? Unbelievable.

                • CydeWeys an hour ago

                  Hey man, just wanted to let you know, I had to downvote a bunch of your comments in this thread, not because I disagree with you, but because your commenting style is unnecessarily hostile and abusive. You can politely disagree with someone without calling their take "stupid and clueless", or any of the other mean-spirited things you've said elsewhere in the thread.

                • varjag 3 hours ago

                  Twitter had thousands of coders, each certainly with varying cadence and style of committing. But variation goes only so much and taken in aggregate yes, the amount of commits/diff size is correlated to contributor prominence. It's kinda hilarious the "my -2000 lines" types deny the obvious.

        • AirMax98 16 hours ago

          > 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.

          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.

        • brookst 4 hours ago

          There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed.

          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.

          • monocasa 2 hours ago

            A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.

          • intended 2 hours ago

            The evidence is that Trumps win has more to do with the dynamics of the party+media symbiosis on the right side of the spectrum, than anything X did.

            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.

        • mapt 5 hours ago

          Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures.

          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.

          • CPLX 4 hours ago

            Bluesky seems to be doing reasonably well all things considered. It’s active and relevant. They also seem to have a pulse and ship new features.

            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.

            • 0_____0 an hour ago

              I check in on bsky every now and then and I'm kind of surprised at how much is happening. My city posts bulletins there. I follow journos and some individuals I used to follow on twitter who migrated. There are shitposters. Idk why people think it's dead?

            • cindyllm 4 hours ago

              [dead]

          • wonderwonder 3 hours ago

            BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.

            • gammarator 43 minutes ago

              JD Vance is not banned, he’s just widely blocked, which is something BlueSky users are free to do.

            • HDThoreaun 2 hours ago

              The sitting vice president is a monarchist, not just a little right of center

              • dinkumthinkum an hour ago

                A monarchist? Can you explain what a monarchist is? I would think having the position of Vice President would largely imply one is particularly not a monarchist.

              • AnimalMuppet an hour ago

                Is he? I'm not so sure.

                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.)

        • cryptoegorophy 11 hours ago

          3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.

          • motorest 9 hours ago

            > 3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people.

            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?

            • tonyhart7 30 minutes ago

              discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team

              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

            • dinkumthinkum an hour ago

              It never experienced before? Were you aware of the Twitter "fail whale"? I think it is very hard to say that it has been a complete technical failure as many anticipated. I think if Musk had the "correct opinions" as you see them then many people would probably not have been making these proclamations.

          • Simon_O_Rourke 10 hours ago

            Crashing isn't the totality of unsupported code. I previously worked in a company where a goodly proportion of the back end product team was let go, and their system stayed running for two plus years without a single fix or update going in.

            • PicassoCTs 10 hours ago

              Proofing that it was a real good back end team..

              • sflicht 5 hours ago

                Not good at engineering their own job security

          • mortehu 3 hours ago

            Twitter has a permanent outage reporting breaking news. Whenever something big happens now, the feed looks like any other day. This didn't use to be the case.

          • UltraSane 6 hours ago

            "One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts”"

            Really? THAT is what you learned?

        • goodkiwi 11 hours ago

          Can confirm the frontend piece - there is previously available functionality that was removed from the ui that you can still access via the web api

        • karel-3d 2 hours ago

          He did not make X "everything app" but X is still somehow still working, functioning, and somehow adding new features, even if they suck.

          Also it made him win an election.

        • baobun 17 hours ago

          I don't think DOGE would have happened without it. Maybe not even Trump winning the election.

          It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.

          • acjohnson55 16 hours ago

            I give a lot more weight to the $250M Elon spent on the campaign.

            • Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago

              That was a factor, but his CV stating "I cut Twitter's expenses and staff by 80%" or however much was probably a big factor too. Of course, he's the only one actually bragging about that being a success.

              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.

            • energy123 10 hours ago

              Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much.

              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).

              • dinkumthinkum 41 minutes ago

                You don't think the left had all these things in their favor? You think the media are all far right wing conservatives? People like Rachel Maddow and Oprah, you might consider to be much more right wing than even Dick Cheney? You don't think maybe there might be some issues out there that people voted on and maybe saying "I'm a middle class kld" and "I'm speaking" on a loop just didn't do it for them? No, it must be Murdoch, because Soros is a relative pauper by comparison. Really?

            • kandesbunzler 8 hours ago

              [dead]

          • notahacker 6 hours ago

            He doesn't seem particularly happy with how things are going with the new administration, and Trump seems to be enjoying the fall out rather more. As Elon himself acknowledged, to the extent he actually believed in cutting the deficit the Big Beautiful Bill is doing the opposite, and I'm pretty sure some of the cuts that actually are taking place are ones he isn't happy with.

            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...

        • mnky9800n 5 hours ago

          X exists in other languages than english. it provides insight into non-english speaking places that other platforms owned by elon musk do not.

        • CivBase 17 hours ago

          > It makes X an increasingly niche website.

          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".

          • Lu2025 14 hours ago

            Yeah screenshots getting around is a funny metric but it's a good one.

            I see BlueSky picking up and occasionally Threads. Sometimes you can't tell where it's from due to crop.

          • watwut 9 hours ago

            I domt see screenshots of tweeta anymore tho. That one defintely stopped in places where I go.

        • 12 hours ago
          [deleted]
        • guappa 7 hours ago

          > where the news happens

          It never was, despite what lazy journalists led people to believe.

        • biztos 11 hours ago

          I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries.

          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.

        • bbarnett 6 hours ago

          This msy surprise you, but the average person doesn't even know who owns what tech platform. Not Meta or X or Google. They don't care either.

          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,

        • windvoder 15 hours ago

          [dead]

      • andrewflnr 20 hours ago

        His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.

        • consumer451 19 hours ago

          > pretty successful

          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!

          • matthewdgreen 2 hours ago

            He also damaged one of the most valuable companies in existence. I don’t think “moving the Overton window slightly to the right in 2024,” if that’s what he did, is going to be as durable.

          • andrewflnr 14 hours ago

            He sure claimed to also want to make money on it. With how much debt he took on, he didn't have much choice. Even with the political goal, he could have moved the overton window better by less ridiculous means. (And as I mentioned in another comment, his attempts to squirm out of the sale are evidence against it being a big master plan; for that to be a fakeout requires an unlikely level of depth.)

          • petesergeant 11 hours ago

            > I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter, and Musk was very open about this

            I mean he sued in order to not to have to buy it. To describe this as the _goal_ rather than just him making what he considers to be the best of a bad situation feels like a reach.

      • ahmeneeroe-v2 21 hours ago

        >A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there

        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.

        • BeetleB 20 hours ago

          This is far more nuanced (and disputed) than you make it out to be.

          > 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?

          • 71bw 9 hours ago

            >and I don't think they utilize Twitter

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Y-P0v2Hh0

          • throwpoaster 19 hours ago

            > How? He was banned after the election.

            By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.

            • the_why_of_y 18 hours ago
              • throwpoaster 6 hours ago

                > The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important

                “The story was true but…”

                Stopped reading here.

            • BeetleB 19 hours ago

              It's a stretch to say this would have made a major impact. Biden won fairly comfortably. COVID was Trump's bad luck.

              • wredcoll 16 hours ago

                Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.

                • raydev 12 hours ago

                  The extended lockdowns 100% ended his term. It upset too many people for too long. Regardless of actual responsiblity, big nationwide negative events always get laid at the feet of the current sitting president.

                • usefulcat 11 hours ago

                  Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.

                  In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.

                  In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.

                • theonething 4 hours ago

                  > Covid was the definition of an easy layup.

                  I don't understand this at all.

                  Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?

                • Lu2025 13 hours ago

                  > Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11

                  Anything but. Trump could have won in 2020 if not for Covid. A lot of turnout was anti-Trump protest vote.

                  • sleepybrett 13 hours ago

                    he lost because of covid because everyone watched him fucking botch the response.

                    'it will go away in two weeks, no one will even remember...'

                    injecting bleach

                    getting uv light 'inside the body'

                    the look on all his health advisors faces whenever he showed up at a press conference.

            • UltraSane 6 hours ago

              Why does Hunter Biden matter at all in anything?

              • HideousKojima 2 hours ago

                Because the laptop includes a lot a emails. A lot of those emails include Hunter selling access to his father and suggesting that his father was in the the scheme with him. Whether or not Joe was actually involved vs. Hunter making it up to get these people to give him what he wanted is an open question, but this isn't something that should have been actively suppressed by the media just a few weeks before the election.

                • UltraSane 31 minutes ago

                  Fox News hyped up Hunter to distract people from the immense corruption between Jared Kushner and the Saudis. Kushner got a $2 billion investment fund from the Saudis.

        • petersellers 20 hours ago

          > Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President.

          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.

          • throwaway48476 20 hours ago

            The media gets their news from Twitter and Twitter drives the questions the media asks. It's indirectly a bigger factor than you give it credit for.

            • raydev 12 hours ago

              The vast majority of his base, and a majority of his voters, doesn't even trust legacy media unless it agrees with Trump. Even Fox News is routinely under fire not by Trump, but by his fans and Republicans broadly.

              I very much doubt there was a different set of questions that would change peoples' minds about him after how his first term went.

              • ChocolateGod 11 hours ago

                I think you're confusing the majority with the most audible.

                The silent majority imho exists and is still the one deciding, not political activists on social media of both ends of the spectrum in their respective echo chambers.

            • sillyfluke 19 hours ago

              To be fair, as I understand it they're saying the podcasters were most likely the ones that pushed him over the edge this time around. "Small part" meaning 10-15 percent is not too bad for twitter. And I do think rightwing podcasters and tiktok got the young male votes out more than twitter did this time around.

              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.

              • SonOfLilit 16 hours ago

                Did any Trump voters think he will be harder on Israel than Biden or Kamala?

                In Israel the debate was "should we be rooting for Trump because of how much of a blank check he will give our government, or against him because of the damage he will do to the free world that we are part of and also the blank check that he will give our government?"

                Since this prediction turned out basically correct, I wonder if across the seas people had different expectations?

                • sillyfluke 5 hours ago

                  >Did any Trump voters think he will be harder on Israel than Biden or Kamala?

                  I don't think they would phrase it like that, but I think they thought he had a better chance of ending the war.

                  I listed the reasons in order of importance. People voted against the incumbent because they couldn't make ends meet first and foremost.

                  But as for Israel, one would be hard pressed to find any gaps between the blank check Biden gave and the blank check Trump is giving Israel now. After Biden left office, people close to or in his administration admitted there was zero pressure applied to Israel for a ceasefire, despite public statements by the admin in support of a ceasefire at the time. But there were Muslim mayors and politicians as well as regular citizens in Michigan, some with family in Palestine, who thought it would be madness to vote for more of the same, knowing full well that Trump might not be better. They ultimately thought betting on Trump's ego and meglomania and his desire for getting the Nobel peace prize had the potential to shake the things up and was the preferrable option out of the two terrible choices. Now I don't think that was the right calculation at the time, but I wouldn't fault anyone who didn't want to try the same thing and expect different results.

                • guappa 6 hours ago

                  Did Kamala ever say anything at all against what israel is doing?

          • dinkumthinkum 34 minutes ago

            So, you really think there are no issues that anyone voted on? It's just that the left has no money and no audience? People like Soros and Oprah are just so unbelievably poor that they are no match? Basically, if it were not for Joe Rogan, who has a large audience but hardly captures half of the country, and other comedians, people would have been sublimely enamored with the intellectual tour de force that is "I'm a middle class kid" and "Today is the day that we will do what we do every day?" Basically, this view is that if it wasn't for podcasts and perhaps "foreign intelligence operations" people would have right realized that they agree with a litany or far left extremist positions. I guess that must be the only answer ::shrug::.

        • camgunz 7 hours ago

          This is maybe true for 2016. In 2020 and 2024 Trump/Biden/Harris were just part of larger trends that saw Western incumbents worldwide lose their seats.

          As a thought experiment, do you think X would have made the difference if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis were the GOP nominee? I would bet either people think X couldn't have helped enough (candidates didn't have the rizz) and ultimately they'd have lost, or they wouldn't be as toxic as Trump and wouldn't need whatever theoretical help X would provide.

          Or if you like stats, Harris broadly lost on all social media platforms [0].

          Years ago now I predicted Musk would burn through Twitter's attention capital and it'd become less and less relevant over time. I think that's happening: all the stats I can look up show declining users, usage, and revenue. A lot of people use X as "write only" now, or have very sporadic interactive use.

          Another way of saying this is Musk bought the peak, and is running this new Nazi-friendly version as a short position against American democracy. The only way he gains attentional or financial capital from that position is if something even more illiberal happens to society and this far-right version of X is suddenly as relevant as center-left Twitter was in 2016, like Nick Fuentes becomes president or something.

          [0]: https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-a-ma...

        • mvdtnz 21 hours ago

          If you think twitter made even 1% difference in 2016 I urge you to go and touch some grass. This stuff doesn't matter.

          • ahmeneeroe-v2 20 hours ago

            DJT's use of Twitter in 2016 allowed him to operate within his opponents' OODA loops.

            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.

          • HDThoreaun 2 hours ago

            Trumps ability to control the narrative is pretty much wholly based on his tweeting skills. He is legitimately a top tier tweeter up there with @dril and the likes. It is incredibly entertaining and end of the day that’s what politics is about now.

          • aaronax 21 hours ago

            Way more likely that it was /r/the_donald. In my humble, biased opinion--since I was around there but never really active on Twitter.

            • raydev 12 hours ago

              There weren't a lot of 50+ year old folks on Reddit in 2016. Now there are, but that's because they've aged into that range.

            • JSteph22 20 hours ago

              But Trump won more convincingly in 2024 without it? That doesn't support your argument.

              • lesuorac 20 hours ago

                Trump won by <1% in an election against a candidate who lost her only attempt at a primary and during a time period where western incumbents saw a 10+% drop due to their handling of covid inflation.

                2024 isn't a story of how Trump outwitted his opponents but one of how his opponents tied their shoelaces together.

                • lynx97 6 hours ago

                  That is so true, and needs to be repeated more. DJT didn't win because he was so great. DJT won because the DMC candidate was so hilariously bad.

      • JeremyNT 19 hours ago

        As a business it's a failure.

        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.

        • ActorNightly 11 hours ago

          I mean it didn't really influence public opinion that much, just enough to push election over the edge, and that was not just due to Twitter, but mostly due to non-voters.

      • 10 hours ago
        [deleted]
      • throw310822 a day ago

        And btw, how many features have been brought live since Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets, paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?), grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of stagnation.

        • numpad0 13 hours ago

          Do you consider massive reduction of impression/reacheability and "shadowbans" for organically influential users features? Lots of users are seen reporting those. Tweets and replies not showing or made "unavailable", followers silently deleted or muted without user input, etc.

        • ceejayoz 20 hours ago
          • throw310822 19 hours ago

            Thanks for the reply, but you get a number of things wrong.

            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.

            • ceejayoz 19 hours ago

              > The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters.

              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.

              • dinkumthinkum 29 minutes ago

                > So, longer.

                Yes, an order of magnitude longer.

          • sunaookami 20 hours ago

            Chronological feed by default with a setting that actually sticks, private favorites, new media gallery, "E2E" messages.

            (side note: Birdwatch was a way better name than Community Notes)

            • ceejayoz 19 hours ago

              > Chronological feed by default with a setting that actually sticks…

              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.

              • sunaookami 11 hours ago

                >Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that already.

                Irrelevant for the point but yes, API changes and killing TweetDeck was a shit move.

                >To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and to soothe the owner

                I don't care about your opinion on that, for me it's great and made me like more posts. I don't engage in politics on Twitter.

                >We're not really calling a bit of a redesign "innovation", are we?

                We are listing changes. Seems like you are just biased against Musk instead of engaging in a discussion.

                >Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said encryption is important is a loon, IMO. That's what Signal is for.

                Agreed but it's a new feature.

            • throw310822 19 hours ago

              Private likes too.

              • ceejayoz 19 hours ago

                They renamed favorites to likes. It's the same thing.

                • throw310822 19 hours ago

                  Sorry, you're right of course. I was thinking of bookmarks.

        • martythemaniak 21 hours ago

          From your list, only grok. All the other stuff was already there.

        • joering2 21 hours ago

          As a medicore programmer, other than AI I would imagine the rest of the list would take 2 weeks to program and implement.

          • chgs 9 hours ago

            “Long tweets” could be anything from changing a config variable to rewriting massive tomes of code.

            Unless you have knowledge of x’s internal code?

          • throwpoaster 19 hours ago

            Keep trying, estimation is hard! You’ll improve!

          • theonething 4 hours ago

            Yes, you are imagining.

      • baby 18 hours ago

        It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a job through it, successfully launched a book and a company thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less these days.

        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.

        • fsflover 17 hours ago

          Make a Mastodon account and post to both places simultaneously. They say Mastodon brings real discussions and engagement.

      • moomin a day ago

        I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.

        • mrweasel a day ago

          Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.

          • jcranmer a day ago

            The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how many visitors do we get to a story based on a Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of the social media's self-reported metrics--have all reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-performing social media sites. Especially if you're looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement do we get on social media [likes, quotes, replies, etc.] per conversion to visiting the site," where it strongly looks like Twitter is massively inflating its reported engagement.

            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.

            • pjc50 20 hours ago

              Twitter explicitly down ranks off-site links to prevent this kind of "conversion".

              • Lu2025 13 hours ago

                At least it allows links; Instagram doesn't without paying.

            • SV_BubbleTime 20 hours ago

              > The people I've seen who have talked about their engagement numbers

              Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network effects are real.

              • wasabi991011 14 hours ago

                Anecdotal, but everone that I've heard do those comparisons have done Bluesky vs X, and every time they've noticed better engagement ratio and higher quality engagement on Bluesky.

              • tristan957 17 hours ago

                I've seen people report they get better engagement on Mastodon and Blue Sky than they ever did with Twitter, based on percentages.

                • SV_BubbleTime 17 hours ago

                  And I’ve seen people report the complete opposite. Both can be true. The reality is BlueSky pushed echo chambering even harder than X and it’s a dying platform - maybe those two things are unrelated but not for me they aren’t. Unless some miracle happens to reverse its trend, BlueSky already had its shot.

                  • tristan957 16 hours ago

                    Luckily Blue Sky isn't the only competitor in the space, then.

          • n4r9 7 hours ago

            Does anyone outside X actually know the current monthly active users and revenue figures? They stopped releasing them publicly when Musk took over. It's all guesswork at this point as far as I can tell.

          • SchemaLoad 13 hours ago

            The site is incredibly broken. It returns API errors randomly and shows profile tweets out of order. It's on Pintrest levels of broken.

            • ChocolateGod 11 hours ago

              I believe showing tweets out of order on profiles is a feature to show the most engaging content to unlogged in users.

              It's annoying as hell

          • amrocha a day ago

            Revenue and monthly active users are still lower than in 2022, and decreasing. And thats based on estimates, because twitter doesn’t report those numbers.

            • mrweasel a day ago

              Revenue is meaningless for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it.

              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.

              • sjsdaiuasgdia a day ago

                > for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it

                Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019

                • mrweasel 21 hours ago

                  I was going to argue that they lost most of the 2019 profit in 2020, but you are technically correct (the best kind). Twitter probably made around $1.5B in profit ever, maybe a little more. That actually should just about cover the cost of building the company.

                  I was wrong.

              • basisword a day ago

                Having those users doesn't matter if the people they are trying to communicate with leave - as eventually they will too. Every single person I know who used Twitter (which was already the least popular of the main social networks in my region) has deleted their account. Politicians and journalists shouting into a void isn't sustainable.

            • a day ago
              [deleted]
          • reverendsteveii a day ago

            it's worth less than half of what he paid for it, lost 30 million users and went from being the default microblog to facing real competition in daily active users from ~~bluesky~~threads (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...). Building what X is today from nothing would be an incredible accomplishment but building what X is today out of what Twitter was in 2022 is still a pretty miserable failure.

            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...)

            • mrweasel a day ago

              > it's worth less than half of what he paid for it

              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.

              • reverendsteveii 2 hours ago

                You'll remember that first he waived the right to make his offer contingent on that fact, then he tried to back his offer out because of that fact.

              • moomin 20 hours ago

                This argument has been made, at length, in court. It was found wanting.

              • theshackleford 13 hours ago

                > The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk.

                He ripped himself off because he couldn’t keep his big trap shut.

              • miltonlost a day ago

                The Twitter board ripped him off? When he was the one who brought in the initial offer? He tried to back out of the deal once people told him how foolish he is.

              • joering2 21 hours ago

                > 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.

              • freejazz 11 hours ago

                Did he argue in that case that it was worth less than half the purchase price? I do recall he argued it was a material misrepresentation by twitter, but that the terms of the contract ran against him there. I do not recall it having been valued to that extent. It did seem like a facially bullshit excuse at the time. I'm curious as to why you're credulously repeating it now, after it's already been disposed of.

              • mvdtnz 21 hours ago

                They ripped him off? He made an unsolicited offer, signed, sealed and delivered.

            • apwell23 a day ago

              but thats due to musk poising the platform not due to cutting people.

            • bpodgursky a day ago

              https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

              You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.

      • threetonesun a day ago

        Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.

        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.

        • mrweasel a day ago

          I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to interact with you anyway.

          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.

          • kevinventullo 20 hours ago

            I don’t think we can say for sure whether it’s doing worse businesswise since the numbers aren’t public. But consider e.g. https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-returning-to-x/

            “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.”

          • greenie_beans a day ago

            you must not know many journalists because they certainly left in droves

          • amrocha a day ago

            Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.

          • archagon 21 hours ago

            The job of journalists and politicians is to broadcast to as wide an audience as they can. It is not particularly surprising that many retain Twitter accounts for the marketing value.

          • freejazz 11 hours ago

            Well, the HitlerGrok thing happened yesterday...

            I ask this genuinely and without any intent to cause offense: given your name, are you a bit?

        • rockemsockem a day ago

          I will fondly remind folks that Grok isn't even the first LLM to become a Nazi on Twitter.

          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.

          • blargey a day ago

            I don’t think the third+ flavor of “bad release” this year, of the sort nobody else in this crowded space suffers from, is as innocuous as you think it is.

            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.

            • rockemsockem 20 hours ago

              I posted the Wikipedia page, do you really think I don't know how long ago Tay was? I don't think the capabilities matter if we're just talking about chat bots being racist online.

              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?

          • amrocha a day ago

            There’s a difference between a 3rd party twitter bot and grok. And it’s not a “bad release”, it’s been like this ever since it launched.

            Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.

            • timschmidt a day ago
              • amrocha 17 hours ago

                Not to say there aren’t problems with ChatGPT, but it generally steers clear of controversial subjects unless coaxed into it.

                Grok actively leans into racism and nazism.

                • timschmidt 15 hours ago

                  It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself (I see you're very active in these comments) to claim that. But I see you've presented no quantitative evidence. Given the politicization of the systems and individuals involved, without evidence, it all reads like partisan mud slinging.

                  Any LLM can be convinced to say just about anything. Pliny has shown that time and time again.

                  • arp242 14 hours ago

                    Does ChatGPT start ranting about Jews and "White Genocide" unprompted? How can I even quantify that it doesn't do that?

                    This is a classic "anything that can't be empirically measured is invalid and can be dismissed" mistake. It would be nice if we could easily empirically measure everything, but that's not how the world works.

                    The ChatGPT article is of a rather different nature where ChatGPT went off the rails after a long conversation with a troubled person. That's not good, but just no the same as "start spewing racism on unrelated questions".

                    • timschmidt 13 hours ago

                      Friend, if you can't empirically measure the outputs of LLMs which provide lovely APIs for doing so, what are you doing?

                      20 lines of code and some data would really bolster your case, but I don't see them.

                      • arp242 an hour ago

                        You can't just run a few queries and base conclusion off that, you need to run tens of thousands of different ones and then somehow evaluate the responses. It's a huge amount of work.

                        Demanding empirical data and then coming up with shoddy half-arsed methodology is unserious.

                      • amrocha 6 hours ago

                        idk friend, it seems kind of presumptuous to demand other people’s time like this.

                        It’s pretty evident that the people building grok are injecting their ideology into it.

                        I don’t need more evidence, and I don’t need you to agree with me. Go ahead and write those 20 lines if you so desire. I’m happy to be proven wrong.

            • MetaWhirledPeas 21 hours ago

              > Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week

              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.

              • arp242 14 hours ago

                > if you get one to say racist things it's probably because you were trying to make it say racist things.

                When it started ranting about the Jews and "Mecha Hitler" it was unprompted on unrelated matters. When it started ranting about "white genocide" in SA a while ago it was also unprompted on unrelated matters.

                So no.

              • amrocha 17 hours ago

                Nobody’s trying to get grok to talk about MechaHitler. At that point you just know Musk said that out loud in a meeting and someone had to add it to groks base prompt.

              • mrguyorama 18 hours ago

                >This is what less filtered looks like

                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.

                • MetaWhirledPeas 18 hours ago

                  I asked MS Copilot, "Did the Grok team add a requirement in the system prompt to talk about white genocide?"

                  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'."

                  • saagarjha 13 hours ago

                    If you're asking a coding LLM about facts I don't really think you are capable of evaluating the case at all.

                    • MetaWhirledPeas 11 hours ago

                      If you wish to do better, please enlighten us with facts and sources.

                      • saagarjha 8 hours ago

                        Why should I do extra work when you are unwilling to do so?

                  • amrocha 17 hours ago

                    Avoiding sensitive subjects is not the same thing as endorsing racist views if that’s what you’re implying.

                    • MetaWhirledPeas 11 hours ago

                      No I'm saying the consequences of over-filtering are apparent with Copilot 's response: no answer.

                      And I'm also saying Grok was reportedly sabotaged into saying something racist (which is a blatantly obvious conclusion even without looking it up), and that seeing this as some sort of indictment against it is baseless.

                      And since I find myself in the position of explaining common sense conclusions here's one more: you don't succeed in making a racist bot by asking it to call itself Mecha Hitler. That is a fast way to fail in your goal of being subversive.

                  • thunderfork 17 hours ago

                    [dead]

            • rockemsockem 20 hours ago

              It absolutely has not been claiming that it's "MechaHitler" since it was released.

              Try.

              • amrocha 17 hours ago

                Right, it’s just been talking about white genocide and generating nazi images instead.

                • rockemsockem 17 hours ago

                  What Nazi images?

                  The white genocide thing I remember hearing about and looked really forced

      • archagon 21 hours ago

        Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge: there is a sizable population of interesting people who will never, under any circumstance return due to Musk’s insane behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a universal social network.

        • timeon 20 hours ago

          Good example is here on HN. There used to be at least one (often more) Twitter link per day on the front page. Now it is around 3 per month.

      • egorfine a day ago

        Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving.

        Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving

        • isleyaardvark a day ago

          Estimates are that its revenue has decreased by half. Even if Musk decreased operating expenses enough to keep or even increase profits, a 50% drop in revenue is not at all a good sign for the health of business.

          • egorfine 21 hours ago

            My bad: I have now edited the comment and clarified that I have meant engagement thriving, not financials.

        • BolexNOLA a day ago

          Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and last I read they’re still actively losing users.

          • egorfine a day ago

            Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the opposite.

            • Intermernet 14 hours ago

              When I finally left Twitter most of the engagement was obviously bots either repeating other tweets or spamming unrelated dross on high activity threads for engagement farming. The number is high, but the quality is negligible.

              • egorfine 7 hours ago

                That was my experience as well.

                But then people came back. The "For you" tab has been much more interesting for me than previously and in my industry I see tons of interesting content.

                Again, I hate what EM did to Twitter but there's that.

            • BolexNOLA 17 hours ago

              My understanding is overall engagement is also currently down

      • 21 hours ago
        [deleted]
      • Lu2025 14 hours ago

        It successfully served its purpose: gave us Trump.

      • amitrip 7 hours ago

        [dead]

    • alpha_squared a day ago

      Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.

      • conradfr 8 hours ago

        I just think that apps / social networks / whatever are usually not replaced by a copy of the same thing.

        Google+ didn't replace Facebook, Signal didn't replace Whatsapp, Bluesky won't replace Twitter.

      • taurath a day ago

        There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.

        The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.

        • gchamonlive a day ago

          There is also no technical reason people have to stay, because tech isn't the problem here. The value in these platforms aren't in the range of features they provide, but the engagement between individuals and the community and the value of the information it generates.

        • baby 18 hours ago

          how do you move platform when you have >10k followers on twitter?

      • 4gotunameagain 9 hours ago

        Which reinforces the concept of a digital fiefdom; the owners of said platforms have this immense power only because they were the first to implement their ideas during the internet boom.

        And now we're stuck with Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Out of all people, the last ones I would choose to have unelected power. Okay maybe the last one would be Joe Rogan.

        • nlitened 4 hours ago

          Sir, I've seen whom you _elected_, let's be humble here about preferred choices

          • 4gotunameagain 3 hours ago

            I'm wildly offended that you called me an american.

    • grafmax 2 hours ago

      That’s because it’s not really brand destruction so much as normalizing the support for fascism by a brand.

    • beAbU 9 hours ago

      And I blame the media. Politicians continue to post, and the media continue to quote them from twitter. I think it's shameful that politicians and other officials are using twitter as some sort of official media/announcement platform.

      In my own African country twitter has become the de-facto channel for various updates and announcements by various state organs and officials. Makes it even worse when you consider the majority of the population has no reliable way to access this information.

      And now its locked behind a user account! And it's owned by a potentially rival politician!

      • brigandish 7 hours ago

        I've been able to access posts for a while now without logging in, I think that might have changed when they got rid of blocking.

        • beAbU 6 hours ago

          It's usually possible to access a single post if it's directly linked, but not possible to go to the profile from there, or access other tweets or relevant discussions about the post you have open.

          That's my experience anyway.

    • mnky9800n 5 hours ago

      X collects data in all the places Teslas don't get sold. That is why it continues to remain of value. It is an intelligence generating engine for places that otherwise have very little.

    • spacechild1 6 hours ago

      > and it remains relevant.

      Which I find truely shocking. Who in their right mind still wants to support such a platform (except for Elon's target audience, of course)? Just don't use the damn thing. (I have never used Twitter I the first place and I don't think I've been missing out.)

    • paride5745 9 hours ago

      Let's be honest, there is no real alternative.

      • codingdave 4 hours ago

        "Not using it." is a completely acceptable alternative. It does not actually solve a problem in one's life.

      • spacechild1 6 hours ago

        What's wrong with Bluesky?

    • beambot 19 hours ago

      Tesla itself seems primed for a similar fate at an even greater magnitude -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

    • grishka 11 hours ago

      And most people, me included, still call it Twitter.

    • TheAlchemist 19 hours ago

      I was following fintwit quite a lot at a time, and some accounts already moved to Bluesky some time ago. I'm periodically checking via nitter, and 90% of answers are spam at this point.

      It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.

    • happosai 11 hours ago

      Relevant to who? My employers marketing has stopped using X and posts now on LinkedIn exclusively (we do B2B software).

      My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.

    • sixothree a day ago

      I feel like I need to shower every time I end up there. The place is repulsive to me.

    • wonderwonder 3 hours ago

      There is not a single place on the internet that comes close to providing up to the minute news and updates. X was the only place one could monitor the Israel / Iran conflict in almost real time. Same for a variety of other events. There is nothing else like it. Its the only place where anyone can have interactions with politicians, scientists, CEOs, etc.

      It is the only place that covers and provides a wide variety of information that traditional media does not. Almost no media companies reported that a dozen domestic terrorists ambushed ICE officers and shot one in the neck this past week. As far as I know, none reported on the Minnesota Department of Human Services requiring that hiring managers must provide a hiring justification to hire a white man. Violation of that policy results in termination. So state sponsored racism in the state of the governor that would have been our VP.

      Its the only place you can get a picture of what's going on. There is of course mountains of lies you have to filter through, no doubt spurred on by the monetization of X for posters.

      For all its faults and madness (Grok going full mecha-hitler was wild) there is no where else like it. Side note, the day after mecha-hitler xAi released Grok4 which appears to be the most powerful model to date on some tests, beating o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus.

      There is a non zero chance that xAi, which is part of the same company that holds X wins the AI race

    • guywithahat a day ago

      I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction

      • rtkwe a day ago

        They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.

        • guywithahat a day ago

          I find this X doomsday talk is pretty isolated to reddit/other minor social media sites. The site itself is doing fine, and maintains a strong investor/startup ecosystem, with a slight fall in usage after the election (which isn't uncommon for Twitter/X). My understanding is that a few advertisers threatened to leave and then returned after a few days/weeks.

          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

          • rtkwe a day ago

            It's growing... but from an all time low. Estimates put it at half of their ad revenue pre acquisition. A lot of advertisers did actually leave and seem to have largely stayed away or their CPM numbers are just way way down both of which are pretty bad.

            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-...

            • aorloff 14 hours ago

              My very first thought on the news that Yaccarino is leaving is that Twitter needs a new CEO who can sell some shares.

              • rtkwe 30 minutes ago

                I don't follow, why couldn't Yaccarino sell shares and to whom? As a fund raising?

          • jjfoooo4 20 hours ago

            X didn't "invest in AI", it was rolled into a buzzy AI company. Before that the holders of it's debt could not find buyers (aka buyers willing to bet against X bankruptcy)

          • baby 18 hours ago

            you realize Threads basically have the same amount of daily users now? This should never have happened

    • whalesalad 20 hours ago

      Does it? It is 100% a bot farm full of right-wing propaganda. Create a new account and start tweeting. Every single like/reply you get will be from a bot pretending to be either Elon, or Elon's mom, or someone who has recently won the lottery and is going to give it away to all of their followers. Every single recommended post you'll get in your feed will be the most unhinged q-anon conspiracy shit you can imagine. There is zero discourse happening there. It is an echo chamber of psychotic individuals.

      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.

      • calmoo 18 hours ago

        I’ve only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I think your experience isn’t universal.

    • a day ago
      [deleted]
    • lokar a day ago

      [flagged]

    • rvz a day ago

      ..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.

      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.

      • djeastm a day ago

        >..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.

        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

        • shortrounddev2 a day ago

          "Dinesh, don't fall for his “aw, shucks" routine. He is a shrewd businessman, and together, we have over $20,036,000 at our disposal"

        • nailer 20 hours ago

          But Twitter/X owns that training data. Tesla (or whatever else you’re trying to say is Stacey King) does not.

      • matwood a day ago

        > ..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.

        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.

      • CyberMacGyver a day ago

        xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close

      • stephen_g 7 hours ago

        I will admit that I was surprised and agree it was a clever move to extend his runway, but it relies on xAI being able to make huge amounts of profit eventually. Twitter/X’s brand value has declined so much and xAI has such a ridiculous cash burn and it really looks to me like he’s just delayed the inevitable by a bit by combining them…

      • moomin a day ago

        To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.

        • Applejinx 5 hours ago

          Does it count as irrational if he can get a puppet President elected, have his child mock that person publically while he's present, and repeatedly urge the trusted AI authority he presents for people's use into opinionizing on Boers and Mecha-Hitler?

          It sounds like he is getting exactly what he wants. That's the most rational thing about him in what's otherwise a storm of ketamine. I think all the other stuff he thinks is flat-out insane, but exploiting X and pushing it as hard as he can, that's about as rational and effective as Elon ever gets.

    • gorwell a day ago

      X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.

      • rtkwe a day ago

        Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.

      • pram a day ago

        Oh for sure, it's so important we should restart the count of years to mark the significance. 2022 will be year 1, the rest 'Anno X'

      • baseballdork a day ago

        Legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Saved free speech??

        • gorwell a day ago

          Yes, it did. Every large platform including Twitter was censoring its users due to state pressure. Even Facebook has since admitted that they were told to censor information that was true, and they knew to be true.

          • invalidusernam3 5 hours ago

            What are you basing this on? Because:

            https://www.carolinapoliticalreview.org/editorial-content/20...

            > the report shows X’s dedication to content moderation by suspending millions of accounts and removing harmful posts, which could potentially help rebuild trust among users concerned with safety and dangerous behavior. On the other hand, this increased moderation contradicts Musk’s earlier promise of promoting free speech, something he has been very vocal about, potentially alienating users who see X becoming more restrictive.

          • navigate8310 a day ago

            X censors journalists and media handles regularly in India

            • numpad0 13 hours ago

              They don't just censor, they limit organic influences. Your content won't get displayed more than n times, so you can't get more popular than n views, unless the system selects you as today's lottery winner, in which case it will be (reported as)viewed trillion times.

              The only defense against this is the fact that Twitter users know system too well for this to be not immediately obvious.

          • pstuart a day ago

            You mean the story about Hunter Biden's laptop? That story? About Hunter Biden supposedly selling access to the president?

            I find it odd now that Trump is in office and has the entirety of the government to investigate corruption in the executive office he's suddenly gone silent about that.

            I guess that means that the executive office is now free of any taint of corruption!

            • rejekt 15 hours ago

              Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son for any crimes during a 10 year period 2014-2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dx9n3m9y2o He later pardoned other family members and political allies.

              • collyw 7 hours ago

                And Fauci. Why would he do that?

                • hypeatei an hour ago

                  Because the new administration promised an unhinged DOJ. Biden was already vindicated in these pardons once Trump dropped legitimate charges against Eric Adams to try and further his political agenda. That and arresting judges, starting political witch hunts, etc...

              • pstuart 15 hours ago

                That was disappointing but understandable, considering who was following him into office.

                The Hunter Biden corruption story was true in the sense it was old school genteel corruption that virtually everybody in politics does: trade on their connections with promise of getting deals done and/or a veneer of legitimacy. It's a problem worthy of scrutiny but only if it is done across party lines.

                But this misses the entire point: the whole part about the Hunter Biden laptop story was to paint Joe Biden as crooked and was being done solely as negative campaigning. That's it, and it is self evident in how the story dropped once it was no longer useful for that means.

                But the millions of Americans who were outraged by this supposed corruption are just fine with it when it's done by their Dear Leader.

                That in a nutshell summarizes the "values" of the modern American conservative movement.

        • thrance a day ago

          [flagged]

          • pstuart a day ago

            Oh, the irony of all of these "free speech" defenders celebrating their "right" to be offensive online, when the OG free speech (1st Amendment) is actively being attacked and dismantled by a regime that they likely worship.

            Their viewpoints border on religious zealotry and it's pointless to try and reason with them.

          • brabel a day ago

            Can you point at any comment by them that is reminiscent of Nazi ideologies?

            • thrance 6 hours ago

              At this point in time, if someone is still hailing Musk as a champion of free speech, I can't see any other explanation than that they're ideologically a nazi themselves. The guy outed himself several times as a nazi, doing salutes on national TV, twitting anti-semitic bullshit, and now tweaking their AI to promote a new holocaust and glorify Hitler. There comes a time when you have to call out nazism for what it is.

          • gorwell a day ago

            You are projecting. Nazis were against free speech and big on censorship and ideological conformity. You are aligned with them.

    • sergiotapia a day ago

      X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of discourse. Thank God!

      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!

    • BeetleB 20 hours ago

      Twitter's brand was quite stained before Elon took over, so this is really a case of "continuing the brand destruction"

      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.

    • jgrowl 14 hours ago

      Was pretty effective using as a propaganda tool to get a candidate of the owner's choice elected. I don't see any reason to assume that wasn't the intended goal from the beginning. No reason to assume that won't be how it is used in the future.

  • dekhn a day ago

    I predicted she'd last 1 year but she made it to 2. She had effectively zero power, and a boss that constantly undermined her.

  • leakycap a day ago

    When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.

    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.

    • tonymet 21 hours ago

      Can you drill into "everyone is here"? Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate .

      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

      • righthand 21 hours ago

        I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.

        • martinald 20 hours ago

          To be honest though it is still by far the best place to get "news" about (very recent) current affairs. Obviously there is an incredible amount of disinformation on it, but if you can filter that out mentally (though I don't know how possible that is), you tend to get a far more 'real time' take on things.

          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.

          • jazzyjackson 16 hours ago

            I loved seeing Dave Chappelle dismiss his critics by quipping "Twitter is not a real place." Changed my whole view of social media. It's only seems real if you're on the inside of it.

            And yea, I would question the utility of getting a 'real time feed' of what rumors people think they heard.

            • collyw 7 hours ago

              People post plenty of videos of things happening. Often clipped so that context is removed (for example Manchester airport thugs getting kicked by police, without the preceding part where they attacked the police before that).

          • bandrami 14 hours ago

            Huh. I find it worse than useless for current news.

            I also keep reminding myself that more Americans play golf than use Twitter

            • MangoToupe 14 hours ago

              You really just need the journalists tweeting without an intermediary editor to make it more useful than any news that you can pay for. Plus, being less american centric is a benefit, not a drawback, unless the only news you care about is american.

          • timeon 20 hours ago

            > (though I don't know how possible that is)

            Not possible if you are exposed to it periodically. So the value of 'news' source seems to be negative.

      • aorloff 17 hours ago

        > Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate

        Your take on a highly selective propagandized "expose" done internally by a corporation raider who just raided the corp that he is exposing, is to say that before oligarch took over things felt a little "corporate" ?

      • 19 hours ago
        [deleted]
    • kylebenzle a day ago

      Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels like freedom but to everyone else it looks like a liberal echo chamber.

      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.

      • fkyoureadthedoc a day ago

        > liberal echo chamber

        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.

        • peab 21 hours ago

          reddit is like the most censored part of the internet at the moment.

          • arp242 15 hours ago

            [ Removed by Reddit ]

          • bnralt 14 hours ago

            Right, Reddit banned any sub that disagreed with the progressive positions on Transgender issues, any mainstream subs would ban users for disagreeing with those positions, and heterodox subs were warned not to discuss them or else they could be banned. For instance, here's the Moderate Politics sub discussion on why they banned transgender topics[1]:

            > The first of these banned topics: gender identity, the transgender experience, and the laws that may affect these topics.

            > Please note that we do not make this decision lightly, nor was the Mod Team unanimous in this path forward. Over the past week, the Mod Team has tried on several occasions to receive clarification from the Admins on how to best facilitate civil discourse around these topics. There responses only left us more confused, but the takeaway was clear: any discussion critical of these topics may result in action against you by the Admins.

            Also mod efforts to enforce an ideological view across the entire site. For instance, in the run up to the 2020 election, mods on the boardgame sub started going through the history of users and would ban anyone who voted for Trump.

            [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/mkxcc0/st...

            • fkyoureadthedoc an hour ago

              But subreddits are free, and unlimited. You can make one yourself if you don't like how another one is moderated. People that like your approach can gather there. Of course that takes effort and is not easy, but Reddit itself (for the most part) is not banning you or your sub if you want to make a right wing house plant subreddit. If you want to make a pro Luigi anti transgender house plant subreddit, it probably gets banned.

              Leftist subreddits also get banned for breaking site wide rules. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit got banned in 2020, for example.

              Reddit is best experienced in general by ignoring default subs and finding smaller ones that are relevant to your interests.

              Moderating a large sub is hard. The scale is just too big, and it's individual volunteers doing it.

          • thunderfork 18 hours ago

            [dead]

        • swarnie a day ago

          Reddit really doesn't.

          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.

          • fkyoureadthedoc a day ago

            There's a subreddit for everything. Reddit as a whole has plenty of users that represent any opinion you can imagine. Fairly conservative subreddits hit r/all regularly, but not as much as less conservative ones.

            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.

            • Hyperboreanal 17 hours ago

              Your subreddit gets banned immediately if you don't agree with the redditeurs.

              You don't see this an as issue because you share their opinions

              • wredcoll 16 hours ago

                Weird how you can find both trump worshipping subreddits and anti-trump ones... or pro catholic and anti-catholic, or pro child porn and anti child porn, and so on and so forth.

                • numpad0 13 hours ago

                  There are no "pro child porn sub" on Reddit anymore. Nowadays the threshold of is at screenshots and artworks of Asian games - you could get banned for posting top 10 contents on App Store. There are barely patches of green parts on the frog, and it is no longer beating.

                  There are also hardly concept of subreddits. Subreddits seemed to have completely homogenized. It's more of hashtags now, with so many obviously in-organic posts likely written by minimally trained call center type personnel, obviously quoting prefabricated scripts, everywhere. There are typos, "I'm on phone" remarks, bad punctuation, or honest misunderstandings are few and far between.

                  What I don't understand about it, though, is why. Reddit is supposed to be a social media with massive MAUs. Why can't they just let it run itself.

                • 15 hours ago
                  [deleted]
                • latency-guy2 14 hours ago

                  If you went to a website that consisted of roughly within 2 standard deviation population representative of multiple sides, then maybe you would have a point.

                  But this is reddit. It is not a population consisting of anywhere near that generous 2 standard deviations.

                  You know precisely what you're doing and you know you're being dishonest.

                  Tell me, a website that is not wholly owned and operated by shills on the left would respond with the state of /r/pics any day of the week, and exclaim that is entirely organic behavior, let alone consisting of representative population of the real world USA.

                  We can go blow for blow in any large sub. In fact, tell me why /r/Idaho, a state that has consistently voted red for decades somehow has "organically" resulted in posts entirely consisting of run-of-the-mill liberal posts? What of /r/Texas which is the same story and out of the question not a liberal stronghold that it presents itself to be.

                  You can pull the wool over your eyes all day, don't expect anyone else in the world to believe your bullshit.

          • afavour a day ago

            What, specifically, did you say that was “in opposition to the core hive mind” that led you to being blocked?

            • swarnie 21 hours ago

              Sorry, maybe i wasn't clear.

              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.

              • wredcoll 16 hours ago

                So your argument is that reddit is, what, bad at free speech because subreddits aren't forced to let you in?

                • swarnie 5 hours ago

                  No that isn't my argument.

              • campbel 20 hours ago

                I think the intention of it, as weird as it may seem, is to punish people for engaging with content the other subreddit mods feel is distasteful enough to warrant the effort.

                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.

                • tbrownaw 13 hours ago

                  It's also that even engaging with ("platforming" or "amplifying") wrongthink makes you guilty by association. If someone's feeling talkative and generous you might even get the "tolerating intolerance" speech.

              • arp242 14 hours ago

                > 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.

                It's not great, but on the other hand: it's also not a completely terrible heuristic.

                The challenge here is that some of these popular default subs attract tens of thousands of comments every day. Dealing with flags is time-consuming, and also "too late": better for racist bollocks to not be posted.

                In the end every subreddit is a private fiefdom of the moderator(s) where they can do more or less what they want. Many subs have overly strict, obnoxious, or even bizarre rules. The original sub for The Netherlands got hijacked by some American who proceeded to ban everyone posting in Dutch.

                It's not perfect, but in the end I don't think it's a bad thing. A global set of rules for all of Reddit won't work. For example of course you should be free to talk about religion, but proselyting Christianity on /r/atheism (or Atheism on /r/Christianity) would obviously not be desirable.

                The thing Reddit replaced was web forums (phpbb etc.), newsgroups, and mailing lists, and those worked more or less the same.

              • robocat 16 hours ago

                > boomer

                Is usually used as an derogatory term. The offensiveness is because it's based on age and it is deemed acceptable by some within one age group to use it - while racism is usually less acceptable. I haven't yet seen zoomer get used similarly.

                Disclosure: I'm between younger and older

                • Lu2025 14 hours ago

                  Boomers got weirdly defensive these days. It's no more derogatory than a Millennial is.

        • desichix1 16 hours ago

          > 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.

          This happened on Quora until almost all western users left. Initially it was nice to have diversity of users and opinions, but then people started using Indian parlance that only other Indian users could understand (started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors, etc.)

          • Lu2025 14 hours ago

            > started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors

            Crore is a funny word, I should use it more often. English is an international language now and no country has a monopoly. We should take contributions from everyone.

          • gsky 9 hours ago

            by your logic Americans using millions is also a problem. Remember number system came from India. you cant tell them to change it for your convenience

        • doitformango 13 hours ago

          "a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find."

          I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.

        • fourseventy 14 hours ago

          Nowadays Reddit is a far left echo chamber that will downvote you into oblivion for voicing an opinion as controversial as "men can't get pregnant"

          • saagarjha 14 hours ago

            You've gotten downvoted here for saying the exact same thing. Maybe you should improve your opinions?

            • fourseventy 2 hours ago

              So your opinion is that men can get pregnant?

            • collyw 6 hours ago

              Men can't get pregnant. It's a humiliation ritual to make you say that they can.

              • saagarjha 5 hours ago

                Nobody is making you say anything. You can just keep quiet.

        • apwell23 a day ago

          [flagged]

          • regularjack 20 hours ago

            Your ban was deserved

            • apwell23 19 hours ago

              why is that ? btw i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians

              • arp242 14 hours ago

                The "perceived as" could be interpreted as a genuine "perhaps this is what they think?" or just as "empty language", in which case you're effectively saying "they're all scammers and mass migrating here to steal our jobs". I'll assume you meant the first, but with loads of flagged comments in the queue and many people who do genuinely mean that sort of thing, it's easy for moderators to misinterpret things.

                I once called out a blatantly racist post and used "the n-word" while doing so. Admittedly not my finest moment, but I was fed up (the content was something along the lines of "I think this is called ethnic cleaning. Why don't you just admit they're all n----s to you?")

                I got banned for my "racism". For calling out racism. The racist post that called for ethnic cleaning was left standing as that was lengthy and used polite language.

                For the hasty moderator with tons of flagged comments: one is a wall of text and scans okay, the other used a bad word so could perhaps be racist. 537 more flagged comments in the queue. Ban. Next. It is what it is.

                • apwell23 14 hours ago

                  yea that makes sense. btw, i appealed the ban and they reviewed it again and ban stands.

                  Never went back to reddit again. even blocked it on /etc/hosts

                  I am not sure about why comment here was flagged and ppl saying "you deserve ban". So I guess everyone is assuming "empty language" .

                  • arp242 13 hours ago

                    > I am not sure about why comment here was flagged and ppl saying "you deserve ban". So I guess everyone is assuming "empty language" .

                    Yes, without the clarification of "i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians", it looked kind of racist here too. On these types of topics, you do need to spend a little bit of effort making sure your intent is communicated clearly, because for every well-intentioned person there's another actual racist troll.

                  • saagarjha 13 hours ago

                    Yes. If you don't want to be perceived that way, prefix your comment with clarification that it's not actually your opinion.

                    • apwell23 13 hours ago

                      even if its not my opinion. Is it really something Reddit should permanently ban me for?

                      • saagarjha 13 hours ago

                        The point is that they did think it was your opinion.

      • kragen a day ago

        Possibly leakycap is thinking about 02012 and you're thinking about 02018. In that case you'd both be right about Twitter.

        • numpad0 13 hours ago

          OT but why isn't longnow format LSB(LS Digit) first? 8102, 2102, etc. The problem is that years as variables are often processed as left aligned fixed length MSB first, so it's hard to make year processing code robust over wide ranges of time. If it had been LSB/LSD first, overflow checks can be just a truncation.

          8102 and 2102 clearly belong to same age, 5491 and 8391 are more far apart but it's visually apparent that they share two LSDs, and a C program that displays rate of return of a 01-year bond will only have to care at most "654" part of year 654321 entered by user.

          "02012" is more perplexing and it can be longer by whole 16 bits[than regular notation] or so[on some systems].

          edit: edited for basic clarity

        • tonymet 21 hours ago

          this was my take as well. twitter nostalgia not reality. I put the egalitarian age at around 2009 but you're right Kony-2012 was a huge pivot for social media

          • kragen 17 hours ago

            I was talking about reality. Twitter wasn't perfect in 02012 but it was before the reproductively viable worker ant.

        • 17 hours ago
          [deleted]
      • baby 18 hours ago

        It's literally impossible to post anything on any interesting subreddit right now, your post will just repeatedly get deleted.

      • krunck a day ago

        All caps don't make it true.

  • alganet a day ago

    Is this another case of "may this sacrifice appease the rain gods and bring forth a good harvest"?

    • JKCalhoun a day ago

      Perhaps that and "Let me just disembark this sinking ship if I may…"

      (Sorry she ever boarded?)

      • alganet a day ago

        I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.

  • petemc_ 8 hours ago

    Unrelated to the article, and I can't seem to reply to the comment, but clicking on the archive.today link while I'm on holiday in Italy gives me a warning that it contains child pornography.

    https://imgur.com/a/PXNY7vp

    • WatchDog 8 hours ago

      I'm not sure if it's related, but the operator of archive.today has done odd things with DNS in the past, such as blocking DNS requests from cloudflare because they don't forward edns information.

    • lmm 8 hours ago

      It's an archiving site. Probably someone archived some child pornography there, and the Italian authorities decided the sensible thing was to block the whole domain.

  • eviks a day ago

    > I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me

    But he didn't? She wasn't even in the loop for many of the consequential decisions

    • rwmj a day ago

      Rule #0 is you don't disparage the company on the way out. She may even have a contractual obligation not to.

      • ceejayoz a day ago

        Even barring a contractual obligation, "do I want to be the target of an angry tweetstorm that might result in real death threats" is a consideration.

      • TechDebtDevin a day ago

        Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.

        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.

        • spacechild1 4 hours ago

          > which I think is going to come soon.

          Including the hammocks?

      • libraryatnight a day ago

        "This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend some time with family" lol

      • creatonez 9 hours ago

        So Rule #0 is be silent about the absolute shitshow you are running away from, even when that shitshow is about to ruin many more lives? I think that reflects more poorly on someone than a break in pro-corporate decorum.

        • rwmj 8 hours ago

          Yes, it's exactly that. Most likely as she was a senior executive she'll have signed an NDA containing a "non-disparagement clause". That's the deal with the devil that you make in return for being paid $millions each year.

          Edit: A few examples of these clauses: https://contracts.justia.com/contract-clauses/non-disparagem...

      • eviks a day ago

        "him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.

    • tshaddox a day ago

      Replace “entrusting” with “paying.”

  • throwaway150 a day ago
    • layer8 a day ago

      > As always, I’ll see you on X

      So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.

      • robertlagrant a day ago

        Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account while remaining CEO!

      • DealFl0w a day ago

        "Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform, it's a role with the company.

        • namenotrequired a day ago

          The title does literally say she is leaving the platform

          • DealFl0w a day ago

            Here on Hacker News, we should be good internet citizens and do more than just read the title.

            • jdiff 21 hours ago

              We can also be human together and find enjoyment in shared, incorrect first impressions.

    • namenotrequired a day ago

      > the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.

      I mean she’s not wrong!

  • hamuraijack 2 hours ago

    Did anyone actually believe she was CEO?

  • calmbonsai 15 hours ago

    Let's be perfectly clear, given the ownership and board structure https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522... , the CEO of Twitter is a figurehead.

    • hn_throwaway_99 12 hours ago

      I don't understand your comment at all:

      1. What is the relevance of posting that years old 8-K about Twitter? The corporate structure is totally different now, with xAI having acquired X Corp in March.

      2. Regardless of that, X is a private company with a hired CEO (by "hired CEO" I mean as opposed to a founder CEO or family CEO). There are tons and tons of companies like this, and most of them have active, traditional CEOs. The ownership and board structure of X isn't the thing that implies that the CEO is a figurehead - I'd argue Musk's megalomania is what does that.

      • calmbonsai 10 hours ago

        Did you read the section regarding the merger requirements which is quite unusual and reveals the level of control of Musk et. al (X Holdings)? This is why I brought up that particular 8k.

        The ownership and board structure serve as de facto evidence of control by Musk.

        There really aren't any other companies (notably in the social media sector) that have this ownership structure. Hilariously enough, by board structure and stock ownership, Trump has less control over Truth Social.

        • fastball 9 hours ago

          Yes, owners of companies obviously control them.

          That doesn't make the CEO a figurehead.

          There isn't a company in existence where the (hired) CEO has more power than the person who owns the company.

  • teenvan_1995 8 hours ago

    Just in time for Grok to go crazy

  • paxys 20 hours ago

    Despite her CEO title she was at best #2 at the company (behind Musk) and I imagine with the xAI buyout she's now further down the ladder. Even going back to her old role (head of advertising and partnerships at a $100B+ company) will probably be a step up at this point.

  • thordenmark a day ago

    I would gladly pretend to be CEO for the kind of pay she got. Blame it all on me, I'll take the money and go retire in Hawaii.

    • Wurdan 20 hours ago

      She could probably pad her paycheques quite a bit with a book deal touting insider gossip, too.

      • vdfs 13 hours ago

        It wouldn’t be a surprise if that were covered by an NDA, but it also wouldn’t be surprising if it weren’t

    • xyst 17 hours ago

      [flagged]

    • navigate8310 a day ago

      [flagged]

      • martin-t 19 hours ago

        You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car rammings for the same period.

        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.

    • denysvitali a day ago

      There are probably cheaper places to retire (that will guarantee a longer retirement) than Hawaii - but your idea is good

      • barbazoo a day ago

        The cheapest option is death, but even that costs you your life.

        • 5 hours ago
          [deleted]
      • rsynnott 9 hours ago

        You can't, as they say, take it with you.

  • Zigurd 16 hours ago

    The whole thing was a toxic brew of an autocratic owner choosing a weak CEO he can push around plus the glass cliff. Yaccarino was a perfectly fine ad sales executive in a legacy media company. She could've had a really pleasant couple of years. I hope she negotiated a severance that sets her up nicely.

    I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, but the cynicism is still pretty icky.

  • phendrenad2 a day ago

    She stepped in and did a job, nothing more nothing less. I don't see this as a failure, the post-Elon Twitter is not a company that operates based on traditional characteristics, and I don't know what a CEO even does for such a company. It's obvious that Elon put her in charge to appease advertisers, but that gimmick only works for so long.

    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.

    • flockonus a day ago

      X was gobbled by another of Elon's AI company, no doubt to reduce some of the mess. So yes, a CEO there effectively does nothing.

      https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...

      • fundad a day ago

        At least she can claim the success of getting the company sold, even if it was to a sibling company under X Corp.

    • wnc3141 17 hours ago

      I suspect a professional executive appointment was among the terms to finance Musk's purchase of Twitter.

  • randomtoast 6 hours ago

    I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Forbes reports that he's the first to reach one trillion.

    • motorest 4 hours ago

      > I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark.

      I'm not really sure about that. Tesla's stock price dropped around a third during the past year. Which source are you using to support that assertion?

    • rurban 3 hours ago

      With his skylink satellite business alone, the win exceeds the whole NASA budget.

      With grok now being openly fascist not many execs want to be publicly associated with that. That's a space for leaders only. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519642

    • wonderwonder 3 hours ago

      If SpaceX is able to eventually deliver starship and take people to Mars, Musk will quickly become a multi trillionaire. The riches of space are out there for anyone with the technology and will to take it, we have plenty of people with the will but only one company that is getting closer on the tech front. There is quadrillions in wealth on other worlds and asteroids (obviously bringing a trillion of gold to earth severely reduces the price of gold, I mean economic opportunities).

      • contrarian1234 2 hours ago

        Antarctica is more hospitable and accessible than Mars

        Nobody has made a profitable scheme to build a colony there

        I don't see how going to Mars will make anyone a dime. It'll just be a thing for researchers and funded by the tax payer on Earth

        • wonderwonder 2 hours ago

          Its not going to Mars that makes money, its the technology required to get there. That same tech can be used to setup asteroid mining facilities. Imagine life is found on one of the moons of Jupiter, the biological gold rush would be like nothing seen before. In addition there will be well funded people willing to travel to other worlds and moons to start new frontiers. It may take centuries but these outposts may eventually thrive opening up more economic opportunity.

          Its not getting to Mars thats important, its the ability to get to Mars and what it grants humanity

          • wrboyce 2 hours ago

            Wow, so all he has to do is find life on another planet and he’s quids in? Why has nobody else thought of this.

      • rini17 3 hours ago

        He won't be able to do that with adversarial domestic political relations. There are plenty of ways for Trump admin to hamstring SpaceX.

        • wonderwonder 3 hours ago

          I agree, there are few people as frustrated as I am that Musk had a tantrum and torpedoed his relationship with Trump. Primarily because I want humanity to go to space.

    • amelius 4 hours ago

      Winner takes all.

      • tmalsburg2 4 hours ago

        Also inflation.

        • kamaal 2 hours ago

          Given how immigration and trade controls have worked over this century.

          Anybody who goes up there first will put restrictions on who else can arrive and thrive.

    • n3storm 5 hours ago

      I don't see human lifestream as a sphere rolling up or down but a morphing goo flow through an unstructured topology. So, extrapolating last 20 years of Elon decissions in the future is impossible because humans tend to fail with time, bodily, emotionally and cognitivelly.

  • 21 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • emodendroket an hour ago

    It is perhaps just a coincidence that this happened the day after “Mecha-Hitler” Grok going on racist screeds and going into lurid sexual fantasies about her in particular for the whole world to see. But it does look bad.

  • joshuamorton 18 hours ago

    2 years and one month almost to the day makes it seem like she waited the minimum time to avoid some bonus clawback and then got out.

  • sylens a day ago

    Trying to make it clear she is not responsible for MechaHitler AI as if people don't already have her number

  • nacho2sweet a day ago

    There is a screenshot were Grok posts lurid sexual harassing stuff about her. https://x.com/highflystai/status/1942970125193547792 . Is there weird legal stuff around this with an AI? she is the CEO and it is a tool in the company and something she is supposed to "control"?

  • insane_dreamer 12 hours ago

    > Top executives regularly come and go at Mr. Musk’s various companies. One exception is Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, who joined Mr. Musk’s rocket company shortly after its founding in 2002.

    That's an amazingly long tenure under Musk. And considering SpaceX's success, she must be an exceptional leader.

    • cedws 11 hours ago

      I wonder what people like her who were around Musk in the early days think of him now. It’s striking how much he’s changed. When I see videos of him speaking 20, even 10 years ago, he seems much more grounded, inspired, maybe even intellectual.

      Something has happened to him I feel. Maybe drugs brought out the storm inside that was always there.

      • pickledoyster 7 hours ago

        It's also possible he hasn't changed much as a person and just stopped listening to his personal branding advisors.

  • steinbring 17 hours ago

    What value does X equal in that statement?

  • a day ago
    [deleted]
  • ulfw 8 hours ago

    What an utter joke this whole CEO-in-name-only setup has been since Day 1. Glad she is finally seeing the light.

  • LightBug1 16 hours ago

    Well that was sudden. Did Elon ask her to bear some children? Or offered a horse?

    • burnt-resistor 6 hours ago

      Maybe TC was going to be paid in sinks.

    • azernik 3 hours ago

      Mechahitler was likely the trigger.

  • CyberMacGyver a day ago

    One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.

    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.

    • sorcerer-mar a day ago

      It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?

      Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.

      • josefresco a day ago

        Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame.

        Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.

        • madeofpalk a day ago

          One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.

          • falcor84 a day ago

            Indeed. It was such a paradoxical situation from the start, with her both reporting to Musk as the chairman and owner, while at the same time "managing" him as the CTO. I'm surprised that the charade went on for as long as it did.

            • ethbr1 a day ago

              I'd imagine the paycheck helped resolve the quandary.

              • robocat 16 hours ago

                [flagged]

                • 16 hours ago
                  [deleted]
            • teyc 17 hours ago

              On Acquired podcast, Ballmer spoke of his experience as CEO with Gates as CTO. It was hell.

              • prepend 16 hours ago

                I just listened to that episode yesterday and that’s not how I perceived it all. Ballmer barely described it as much as I remember.

                • prng2021 12 hours ago

                  What’s there to perceive? Ballmer talked at length about how challenging it was and how often they disagreed on things.

                  “That's where I moved back to be president of the company and then CEO, and Bill and I went through a year where we didn't speak”

                  “Basically our wives were the ones who pushed us back together. We had a very awkward dinner at a health club down the street here, but we get back together. But we never really got the right mojo.”

            • xdavidliu 20 hours ago

              I wonder how this setup compares with Mira Murati and Greg Brockman.

            • nradov 20 hours ago

              I mean I've been in a few jobs where I had to "manage" my boss in order to accomplish anything.

              • JohnMakin 18 hours ago

                were those jobs fun? Certainly havent been for me

                • majewsky 17 hours ago

                  To a certain extent, you always have to manage your boss, whether as an individual contributor or as a subordinate manager. A boss managing multiple people does not have the same mental bandwidth as all the people in their team combined, so the employees cannot bring every matter to the boss's attention. Choosing which matters to bring (and how to present them) is precisely what managing upwards means.

                  (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.

          • frdnurd 16 hours ago

            Elizabeth Holmes had all the power. Also being competent matters.

          • a day ago
            [deleted]
        • thayne 21 hours ago

          I don't think she is entirely to blame, but I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.

          • dctoedt 21 hours ago

            > I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.

            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 ....)

            • SpicyLemonZest 21 hours ago

              I'm just not sure her complete lack of power to stand up to Musk is a defense. If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it. I'd be more sympathetic if she were some random person who couldn't otherwise dream of an executive level pay package, but she was the head of ads at NBC.

              • michaelt 18 hours ago

                > If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social responsibility not to take it.

                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.

                • XorNot 17 hours ago

                  "just following orders" has been well established as no defense, and is more relevant than usual.

                  • BurningFrog 16 hours ago

                    In a genocide context, sure. I don't think that applies here.

                    • sorokod 12 hours ago

                      In general "just following orders" implies being morally bankrupt.

                    • chgs 9 hours ago

                      It’s Facebook that causes genocide, not Twitter. Funny how the left gives sick a far easier pass.

              • Lu2025 14 hours ago

                > a social responsibility not to take it

                She was paid $6M a year + undisclosed stock package. A lot of people will set aside their morals for this amount of money.

              • 16 hours ago
                [deleted]
              • greedo 20 hours ago

                “We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.”

            • squeaky-clean 13 hours ago

              This analogy would work if she actually was the WNBA Finals MVP but didn't score a single point.

            • Aeolun 17 hours ago

              I mean, you are hired as a CEO by Elon Musk, there must be some certain expectations on the capabilities of a CEO, and I think one of the first one is being able to stand up for yourself, if nothing else.

        • rendaw 11 hours ago

          GP is specifically responding to

          > Remarkably inept.

          She did exactly what she was hired for. The plan was terrible, but she executed it as well as expected. It's hard to see any ineptitude.

        • Spooky23 a day ago

          She shut her mouth and didn’t cause trouble.

        • selcuka 16 hours ago

          It is possible that people think that the valuation would be even worse if she wasn't the CEO. Unlikely, but possible.

        • mandmandam a day ago

          > she was not to blame.

          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).

          0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36685384

          • jjfoooo4 20 hours ago

            I think Elon truly believed in the subscription model, which would free him from advertiser content influence. That and being terminally addicted to the platform himself, and being an impulsive gambler. I really don't think we've gotten where we are due to any (successful) master plan

            • reactordev 13 hours ago

              This. He was addicted to Twitter. He saw value in it and thought he could run it better. He wanted to be “The Place” where things were talked about. Where he could control the narrative.

              History has shown us, the more you try to control it, the more it slips through your fingers. The best surfers know, you ride the wave, not fight it.

          • woah a day ago

            It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.

            • quantified 20 hours ago

              You are conveniently omitting his reason to buy it. Personal megaphone and shortly thereafter LLM training data are the simplest reasons.

              • woah 18 hours ago

                Maybe he just spent a lot of time shitposting on there.

              • rgreek42 14 hours ago

                He did not want to buy it. He took an arrogant joke far enough that the Delaware Court of Chancery forced him to do it. He never wanted it earnestly.

                • stephen_g 7 hours ago

                  Buying a 9.1% stake in a company before making an unsolicited (but formal) offer to buy out the rest of it is weird behaviour for somebody who didn’t actually ever want to buy it…

              • contrast 19 hours ago

                I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread, rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently omitting anything.

            • scns 18 hours ago

              > formerly-brilliant

              When?

              • Zigurd 16 hours ago

                TBF going from the cobbled together roadster to actually mass producing cars was an accomplishment, as was giving his engineers the latitude to keep trying to land a Falcon 9 booster.

                Then he started to think it was his brilliance that made those things successful. Cybertruck is his baby. So is Starship. He's telling his people to make it work with a little or no moderation of his concepts.

                • evan_ 16 hours ago

                  It’s not clear to me that he had any hand in the actual successes of Tesla and SpaceX. Stories abound of the lengths to which each company went to to manage his whims. He’s apparently burned through all of those firewalls and now both companies are exploding, figuratively and in literally.

                  • saagarjha 14 hours ago

                    That's what the comment you're replying to said.

              • numpad0 13 hours ago

                Wasn't elonjet the turning point? There are some arguments around that he might not have clear cognitive distinction between verbal accusations and physical violence. Maybe that was the missed shot from rooftop for him. Elon before those events was a Steve Jobs Junior figure, that is to say, he was not problematic enough for the rest of the world including myself to focus on the crazy side.

            • cschep a day ago

              I'd love to hear why this is being downvoted? Not agreeing is one thing, but it seems like a reasonable thing to suggest?

              • spankalee 21 hours ago

                > It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight.

                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.

              • anigbrowl a day ago

                Because Musk has provided abundant evidence of his political orientation over the last several years.

                • greedo 20 hours ago

                  Witness his entire Boring Company being a sock puppet project to derail California's High Speed Rail system.

                  • larkost 18 hours ago

                    Can you provide more about this idea? I see the Boring company as being pretty feckless, and at the same time extremely boastful. They have gotten hopes up in a number of places about solving city traffic problems, only to go dark when the rubber (should have) met the road.

                    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...

                    • jazzyjackson 16 hours ago

                      The CHSR thing is a bit apocryphal (no evidence, just according to his biographer) since hyperloop never really competed in any way with CHSR. He did, however, play a very big role in fucking up a potential Chicago connection between downtown and O'hare, as the Boring company actually did win the bid to use the abandoned cavern below the Washington Red/Blue line stop, promising to run a hyperloop up to the airport. It never went anywhere, and the cavern below block 37 remains abandoned.

                      https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/elon-musk-ohare-airport...

                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Express_Loop

                      • zone411 14 hours ago

                        It never went anywhere because of the politicians. The Boring Company is opening new tunnels in Vegas without spending public money.

                        • ceejayoz 13 hours ago

                          Those tunnels are, like other Musk projects, using plenty of public money.

                          https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/las-vegas...

                          > Last week, the Boring Company won a $48.6 million bid to design and build a “people mover” beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The payout represents the first actual contract for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling venture. And Las Vegas, a tourist city that wants to be seen as a technology hub, will get a new mobility attraction with the imprimatur of America’s leading disruptor.

                          > “Las Vegas is known for disruption and for reinventing itself,” Tina Quigley, the chief executive officer of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said when the partnership between the Boring Company and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) was announced in March. “So it’s very appropriate that this new technology is introduced and being tested here.”

                          https://assets.simpleviewcms.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/...

                    • stephen_g 17 hours ago

                      It was the silly and obviously unworkable Hyperloop idea that was pushed as an attempt to stop CAHSR, according to Musk’s biographer [1].

                      1. https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloop-was-always-a-sca...

                    • greedo 17 hours ago

                      Hyperloop was a stunt Musk spun up to mess with the HSR, and the Boring company to fight against subway type systems. I mixed the two up.

                • andrewflnr 20 hours ago

                  He's provided evidence of being an impulsive fool for even longer. I defended Musk as a useful idiot for a while until be fully showed his true colors, but it has always been clear he's not a wise man.

                  (His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)

              • freejazz a day ago

                > perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight

                Is a strawman, to which the conclusion is also defied by the plain evidence of everything Musk has done on Twitter

            • schmidtleonard a day ago

              You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes, the tree is wacky, but

              * 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.

              • psunavy03 a day ago

                Better to put "facts" in quotation marks considering that is clearly a statement of opinion, and a fairly caricatured one at that.

                • qhiliq 15 hours ago

                  That there are a select few who own the capital, and that those people generally do not overlap with the people who work, is more or less the original definition of capitalism. And I don't think its controversial or a caricature to imply that those two groups will have different incentives.

                  From Wikipedia [0]: `The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")`

                  [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology

                • quantified 20 hours ago

                  I haven't downvoted you, I am curious. Why do you disagree? In what relevant ways are their interests aligned?

          • steveBK123 a day ago

            Pretty good theory

            • a day ago
              [deleted]
          • harikb a day ago

            hmm... I am drawing a parallel between your theory on 'controlled opposition' from the linked thread from 2023, to the current M vs T fight. Plausible...

          • yibg 18 hours ago

            Thing is, she failed at being the fall person. It's clear to everyone who was calling the shots, so ironically she was ineffective as the fall person.

          • breppp 21 hours ago

            My conspiracy theory was that because of Musk's involvement in OpenAI he had foreknowledge of the impeding release of ChatGPT. In that context, Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a rage filled social network. However he still failed horribly to time the market

            • debugnik 20 hours ago

              > Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a rage filled social network

              Isn't Twitter the go-to example of a rage filled social network?

              • foobarchu 13 hours ago

                I took them to mean it can be both things at once, and one is more valuable than the other. Not that being an ai training source would make it a rage filled social network.

                • debugnik 8 hours ago

                  > I took them to mean it can be both things at once

                  Thanks, now I get the intended reading.

                  > Not that being an ai training source would make it a rage filled social network.

                  I clearly didn't mean that would be the cause, though. Twitter's current state had been cooking for a decade.

                • 8 hours ago
                  [deleted]
              • fpia 16 hours ago

                nah, that's 4chan

            • claytonjy 15 hours ago

              how would you explain how hard he fought to NOT buy twitter?

              people seem to forget he was legally forced to buy Twitter after he tried for months to get out of his joke bid, primarily through claiming he was misled about the extent of bots on the platform

              • breppp 10 hours ago

                The entire idea is to buy an undervalued platform using insider information, if the stock price plunges after he committed to a price then it's no longer undervalued. This has happened between his bid and termination announcements.

                I also roughly remember he had his Tesla holdings as collateral creating some liquidity crisis for him.

                This elaborate explanation does not mean it isn't wrong and the original theory of idiot-with-money does not hold

              • sleepybrett 13 hours ago

                He just had to pay what 1/50th of his bid to exit the buy. He'd make that bill back in what a month?

          • ToucanLoucan a day ago

            See my only counterpoint to this theory is Musk has a long and well documented history of being absolutely stone desperate to be cool, which is the only thing he can't buy, and he simply revels in his ownership of Twitter even as he comprehensively runs it into the ground as a business.

            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.

            • JohnBooty a day ago

              I think you and the parent poster are doing a good job of describing the same thing from different angles. Both observations are true.

              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?

              • ToucanLoucan 20 hours ago

                I guess what I struggle with is seeing Musk taking that kind of top-down strategic view of things? Which that could entirely be a me problem. I think there's an inherent bias in the way a lot of people think where they assign these Machiavellian motives especially to the super-privileged and those in positions of power, the 5D chess type shit, and I tend to bias in the other direction where... a lot of times these guys are just fucking losers and they don't think terribly dissimilarly from your weird uncle who doesn't come to the reuinions anymore.

                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.

                • JohnBooty 18 hours ago

                  Yeah, I don't think it was 5D chess at all.

                  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.

            • Zigurd 16 hours ago

              He is an overgrown manchild in a playground full of overgrown Randian Straussian manchilds. They are lucky 90% of the normies don't care, yet.

            • mandmandam a day ago

              > He's an overgrown man-child.

              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.

              • talentedcoin 21 hours ago

                [flagged]

                • greedo 20 hours ago

                  If you don't believe that what we accepts as facts are politically influenced, I have a bridge to sell you...

                  • talentedcoin 19 hours ago

                    What I don’t believe is that somebody bought Twitter only, or even primarily, to further their “class interests”. The whole framing here is bent.

                    • greedo 17 hours ago

                      No one, not even the cringiest, wanna-be edge lord from 4chan spends $44B to buy Twitter unless they think there's value there. Even paying a big premium for Twitter. So what value does Musk see in Twitter? He's not going to make money off it. He bought a huge megaphone to push his social/class interests.

                      • evan_ 16 hours ago

                        He sued to try to get out of buying it!

                    • mandmandam 19 hours ago

                      > somebody

                      That he's the wealthiest known man in the world seems like relevant context here.

                      • mensetmanusman 19 hours ago

                        Also that he tried to back out and a judge forced him to buy it.

                • mandmandam 20 hours ago

                  Cannabis with high CBD and minimal THC isn't a psychedelic, fyi.

                  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.

                • dzhiurgis 18 hours ago

                  It's pretty depressing such derangement infiltrated HN. Psychedelics are really a fine line. Looking at SF as an outsider - it either mints billionaires or completely destroys people.

              • dzhiurgis 18 hours ago

                Sorry, what money did billionaires took from you?

          • PaulHoule 17 hours ago

            Nothing positive can come out of Twitter for McLuhanite reasons.

            Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if you see him in video you see him listening to people. Even people who aren't inclined to agree with him talk to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me." High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by this. [2]

            Even though Twitter does provide a back channel and a Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don't see that user listening and in fact the user interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that conversation for outsiders in the way that the heavy Twitter user doesn't get. Not least because the heavy Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't post links to Twitter on HN, you might see a great discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see a single sentence floating in space without any context)

            On video though, the person who listens listens visibly, you see the microexpressions in real time as they react to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job but constituents only see them talking!)

            The above is a second order concern compared to the general compression of discourse in Twitter which is talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a day traversing graphs to follow discussions and understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization increases, there is more and more talking and less and less listening, and the possibility of real social change diminishes.

            Burn it down.

            [1] https://darkfactor.org/

            [2] for once good NYT content that isn't paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...

          • afasdfsadfsa a day ago

            [flagged]

            • RugnirViking a day ago

              I find myself suspicious of your numbers given I don't get the sense blm changed much about policing but can you cite some source numbers?

              • ceejayoz 20 hours ago

                They're conducting some sleight of hand here. There was indeed a bit of a violent crime spike post-George Floyd in the US.

                But... there was also an unprecedented global pandemic and resulting economic shutdown, and the same crime spike happened in other countries that didn't have a BLM movement to speak of.

                • mrguyorama 19 hours ago

                  It's not even sleight of hand, it's just lying by omission.

                  "Our boat sank because you chose to go left instead of right" while not even mentioning the giant hole that opened up in the boat isn't sleight of hand.

        • lenkite a day ago

          > Valuation did drop during her tenure

          Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.

          • lenkite 8 hours ago

            No idea why the truth is being downvoted so heavily ? X is valued at $44 billion by the financial times as of March 2025.

      • xnx a day ago

        > her legacy will forever be stained

        Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?

        • danans a day ago

          > Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?

          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.

          • bottlerock 19 hours ago

            Sounds like a snooze.. But maybe someone will pay to not take chances.

        • abirch a day ago

          My question is where does she go from here?

          Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.

          • GCA10 a day ago

            Lots of corporate boards, university boards, nonprofit boards, etc. make room for folks like her. She understands something about social media and the digital future -- and even if that expertise doesn't impress many folks on HackerNews, it will seem quite sufficient and robust to the elderly trustees and big-donor board members of Pleurisy State University.

            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.

          • rtkwe a day ago

            Depends on how likely you think it is she's a puppet CEO for a drug crazed, edge lord, owner or if she'll actually be allowed to do the job.

          • pavlov a day ago

            She’s 62 years old. She can just retire.

          • snickerdoodle12 a day ago

            Invest the 6mil and enjoy a carefree life?

            • deathanatos 11 hours ago

              $6M/y, for 2 years. $12M. I'd take the carefree life.

          • vintermann a day ago

            Politics! Or maybe management consultants. Lots of consulting jobs are really just about taking the blame.

            • ethbr1 a day ago

              And politics are about asigning the blame to someone else. :D

          • frereubu 21 hours ago

            Failure can teach you a lot if you're willing to learn.

            • tempodox 20 hours ago

              But did she actally fail?

          • dyauspitr 19 hours ago

            With the tens of millions she made does she even need to go anywhere?

            • tbrownaw 14 hours ago

              Lifestyles tend to expand to consume the money available.

          • delusional a day ago

            To some other founder/acquirer that wants to maintain control while putting somebody else in the seat.

            You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.

            • NetOpWibby a day ago

              Elon's level of stupid feels unique at first glance but then if you look at how many people elected the current president...well.

              • adolph a day ago

                Which given the nature of democracy are many of the same as the people who elected the last one and the one before, etc. Are we not all snowflake-unique kinds of stupid?

                My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.

                • antonvs a day ago

                  > 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!

            • freejazz 21 hours ago

              You think he's just normal stupid? It's a minimum especially stupid

        • devnullbrain 21 hours ago

          Meta

        • a day ago
          [deleted]
        • belter a day ago

          I will do it for half that price....

          • geodel 20 hours ago

            Don't wait. Pick up your phone and Call Elon right now as this position is filling up fast.

      • npc_anon 18 hours ago

        What legacy?

        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.

        • sorcerer-mar 17 hours ago

          Do you not think someone who ran the ad department at NBC has a reputation?

          "Legacy" doesn't mean "guy-on-the-street's perception of you."

          • jazzyjackson 16 hours ago

            ?? I don't guess a guy on the street would have ever spared a thought for the head of NBC's ad department.

            • sorcerer-mar 15 hours ago

              Correct, which does not mean she doesn't have a legacy.

          • npc_anon 16 hours ago

            That's exactly what it does mean. If you're not famous, you have no legacy.

            • pharrington 15 hours ago

              Legacy means having a lasting impact on society or culture. As another example, the average Joe Schmoe has no clue that Fabrice Bellard even exists, yet Bellard inarguably has one helluva legacy.

              On the other hand, there are many people who are famous, but will probably leave no legacy.

              • npc_anon 7 hours ago

                True, one can not be famous but still have a lasting impact on society. This is not one of those cases.

            • sorcerer-mar 15 hours ago

              That's the most npc thing I've ever heard.

        • recursive 17 hours ago

          If you have enough money, any age can be retirement age. The whole concept of "retirement" is really for the working class anyway.

      • Imnimo 18 hours ago

        The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.

        • egl2020 13 hours ago

          Shotwell is amazing. She runs SpaceX, which is rocket science, and she has to manage Musk, which is harder than rocket science.

      • oooyay a day ago

        There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.

        • sorcerer-mar a day ago

          Oh sure, I have no doubt she can get another cushy job if she wants it. I just mean that she has revealed herself as a coward at best, and a deplorable snake at worst.

          • Onavo a day ago

            No, she's just helping to sculpt the glass cliff.

      • scyzoryk_xyz a day ago

        She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.

        Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.

      • Civitello 12 hours ago

        Perhaps if there was success she would have had no material power and not have been responsible for the success.

      • librasteve 21 hours ago

        well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume

      • thaumasiotes 18 hours ago

        > It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?

        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?

      • sdegutis 21 hours ago

        > her legacy will forever be stained

        I would like to believe that people can change over time.

      • a day ago
        [deleted]
      • mcphage a day ago

        (1) She had no power

        (2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?

        • sorcerer-mar a day ago

          I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.

          • anonymars a day ago

            Right but the point was:

            > *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?

            • sorcerer-mar a day ago

              Nothing! That's why I didn't comment on that. I commented on "remarkably inept."

              • anonymars 21 hours ago

                Gotcha. I guess another episode of "both participants think the other is crazy"

                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.)

      • trimbo 14 hours ago

        > her legacy will forever be stained

        Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.

        Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.

        Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!

        • ocdtrekkie 12 hours ago

          I think the founders tend to have a love for the business and a long-term plan for it. Followup CEOs are more about the stock performance and happy to sell it for parts if it serves their bonus. Sundar and Satya took all of the strengths of those respective companies and burned them to the ground. Made a lot of money doing it, stockholders love them, but they're pale husks of their former businesses.

      • DonHopkins 20 hours ago

        She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.

      • olalonde a day ago

        You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".

        • feoren a day ago

          Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well" means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged just for being associated with you, getting booed off stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.

          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.

          • AlexandrB 21 hours ago

            > licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy"

            Which fascists?

            • therouwboat 21 hours ago

              German far-right party AfD?

              • blockmarker 18 hours ago

                [flagged]

                • lawlessone 18 hours ago

                  They are fascist.

                • therouwboat 18 hours ago

                  What does sexual orientation or adopted daughter have to do it?

                  • CamperBob2 15 hours ago

                    He basically used 31 words to say "I've never heard of Ernst Roehm," for whatever reason. I don't think you can read much more into his comment than that.

            • DonHopkins 20 hours ago

              Do you mean that in the sense that he is licking the boots of so many fascists at once, including Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and any other fascist boot he can find, while calling them all daddy, that you're confused which of those many fascists feoren is referring to?

          • refurb 13 hours ago

            I’ve never seen so many political talking points packed into one HN comment.

          • olalonde 21 hours ago

            You have a distorted view or reality. Elon seems pretty happy to me and is undeniably successful in business - arguably the most successful entrepreneur of our time. I don't know much about his personal life but I suspect that him having babies with multiple women is due to personal choices rather than a sign of misfortune. He certainly doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. That said, I can understand that his lifestyle is not for everyone.

            • lawlessone 20 hours ago

              The man literally got punched out of the whitehouse for substance abuse lol

              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 ..

              • olalonde 10 hours ago

                What does being "successful in business" have to do with his personal life? Not to mention that most of the things you mentioned is based on questionable tabloid reporting.

                • sorcerer-mar 3 hours ago

                  Who said "successful in business?" No one except you, right here.

                  I said he was "off the rails", you said he is "doing remarkably well," and GP listed reasons he seems like a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person.

                  Now you're moving the goal posts to "successful in business". I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?

                  • olalonde 2 hours ago

                    I was referring to his professional life when I said he was doing remarkably well - I don't know much about his personal life, and that wasn't the point of the discussion. What did you mean then by Yaccarino staining her legacy then? Are you implying she took advantage of Musk's vulnerable mental state?

                    > I guess your reflexive need to defend the world's richest person is rubbing up against the reality of the situation?

                    I'm not defending him, he just doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. Having children with multiple women might be unconventional, but I wouldn't take it as proof of being "a deeply unhappy and psychologically damaged person". As for drug addiction, that would be far more concerning, but given how high-functioning he appears to be, I'd be genuinely surprised if that were the case.

                    • sorcerer-mar an hour ago

                      You thought that by "off the rails" I was suggesting that the world's richest man is doing badly in business? No you didn't. I think you're lying.

                      If you did, then clearly you require far more effort to communicate with than is worth conjuring up.

                      • olalonde an hour ago

                        I didn’t get what you meant, since he doesn't come across that way to me, and doing remarkably well in business seems pretty incompatible with being "off the rails." Believe it or not, quite a few people here are seriously arguing that he's failing in business.

            • netsharc 14 hours ago

              Commander Worf: "Captain, sensors are picking up a huge distortion up ahead. It appears to be... a reality distortion field."

        • thomassmith65 a day ago

          Elon Musk is doing well now the same way Elvis Presley or Howard Hughs were doing well in their final years.

        • freejazz 21 hours ago

          Like, financially? Sure. I don't think that was ever in dispute.

      • jauntywundrkind a day ago

        Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.

        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.

        • babypuncher a day ago

          I don't think this is what was happening. It's weird that people are thanking her when she functionally did nothing of value while the company has been spiraling. Either she was complicit in the whole thing, or she really did nothing at all. In either case, what is there for the users to thank?

    • mrtksn a day ago

      I don't think she ever was a fall guy, Elon run a poll on should someone else be CEO of Twitter and lost the poll. It was quite entertaining, He didn't seem happy with the outcome and probably had to pay CEO level salary due to the stunt.

      • gitremote 19 hours ago

        "The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

        • snypher 14 hours ago

          Is this what happened at Reddit? I feel like they made some unpopular changes and used Ellen Pao as a patsy.

      • joot82 a day ago

        She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform, after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades I guess she got some texts from people...

      • mrguyorama 18 hours ago

        You might have a point if he didn't ignore every other one of those polls he ran.

    • cm2012 a day ago

      Twitter valuation dropped for two primary reasons:

      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.

      • dzhiurgis 15 hours ago

        [flagged]

        • frankzinger 12 hours ago

          The owner of Twitter sieg heiled twice in front of millions of viewers. There is no need for anybody else to prove anything.

          • dzhiurgis 8 hours ago

            Those attacks happened way before. If you don’t see that someone is trying to build a narrative here - I’m sorry for you.

            • frankzinger an hour ago

              So the narrative Antifa were working so hard to build turned out to be true? Well then I guess the joke's on them for having wasted their time.

        • sleepybrett 13 hours ago

          his own fucking 'ai' was nazi posting, wtf are you talking about?

    • bhouston a day ago

      > The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.

      I understand she did convince a lot of advertisers to come back and provided a veneer of credibility.

      • tinco 17 hours ago

        Given the circumstances, is an 80% drop that bad? Many people were expecting Twitter to simply go bankrupt. Perhaps she's the one that saved Twitter.

    • mandeepj a day ago

      > the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising

      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.

    • odo1242 a day ago

      Genuinely, I wasn't even aware that Musk had actually done the initially promised thing of appointing a different CEO.

    • reactordev a day ago

      Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out to do.

      • JumpCrisscross 20 hours ago

        Hiring her would be a favour to Elon. She likely knew this when she took the job.

    • Invictus0 a day ago

      She got her bag and got out. Seems perfectly rational to me.

    • thih9 18 hours ago

      > One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.

      Context?

    • zzzeek a day ago

      if she had no power to make decisions then how would the company's decline in valuation be her fault?

    • a day ago
      [deleted]
    • misiti3780 a day ago
      • lostlogin 21 hours ago

        Even if the valuation is the same (seems unlikely), a fairly small rate of inflation on that sum of money is likely to be a number that matters.

        • shkkmo 12 hours ago

          "lost money due to inflation" (or even "lost money compared to an equivalent investment is a basket of similar stocks" is very different claim than "lost 80% of value". Currently the stock is down less than 10% from the purchase price (41 billion vs 44 billion).

          Down 10% vs 80% is the kind of egregious factual "error" that gets made so frequently around Musk, that it is hard to take any criticism at face value. You don't like the guy and want to call him out? Get your facts straight or you're being counter productive.

    • AtlasBarfed 21 hours ago

      So you are saying Elon musk is inept?

      We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.

    • andsoitis a day ago

      You’re saying two things:

      - 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?

      • Xiol32 a day ago

        Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.

        • mingus88 a day ago

          Can’t speak for her, obviously, but personally I tend to wait to make my exit once I know the role is not working out

          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

          • mdasen a day ago

            If she were trying to time it, this timing seems weird. This is literally the day after Grok kept posting anti-semitism, praising Hitler, and calling itself MechaHitler. This might not be the least graceful moment for an exit, but there were so many more graceful exit times.

            • bikezen a day ago

              FTA this was announced last week to employees.

              "Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok"

            • steveBK123 a day ago

              The speed at which replies mentioning Groks Nazi freakout get downvoted here make me really question where things are headed..

              • selectodude a day ago

                All the race science phrenology bullshit is coming out of Silicon Valley. It's not a surprise to me that HN would be full of people "just reading the stats".

          • andsoitis a day ago

            Another possibility is that she was fired.

        • snickerdoodle12 a day ago

          You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.

          • toomanyrichies 18 hours ago

            Some might argue there are more important things in life than compensation.

            Self-respect, for example.

          • ceejayoz a day ago

            Unless you think said job is edging into "oh shit I might be part of the Nuremberg Trials II" territory.

            Life got short for quite a few historical Nazis.

            • snickerdoodle12 a day ago

              Sure, and I agree, but that's not really related to what GP is saying

              • ceejayoz a day ago

                It's related to what you are saying. It's a non-monetary reason it'd be non-insane to leave the role; "set for life" doesn't do you much good if you're in The Hague.

                • snickerdoodle12 a day ago

                  No, it's not. Here, I'll repeat the context for you:

                  > > 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.

                  • ceejayoz a day ago

                    > You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.

                    Again: you would not be insane to do so if staying in the job has substantial non-compensation consequences. Like jail.

      • cjbgkagh a day ago

        My guess of what they meant; On the assumption she had influence she was unable to use that influence prevent a collapse in value. It's a hedge to cover both options.

      • a day ago
        [deleted]
      • a day ago
        [deleted]
      • sheepscreek a day ago

        Influencing the person pulling the strings is also a key skill. I won’t colour her entire person as inept but perhaps, wrong person wrong time. Musk doesn’t like or need yes men but if you say no him or want to try something different, you better have a well thought out idea/plan. There lies the challenge. How do you impress upon a very intelligent individual ever so often? Very few can.

    • a day ago
      [deleted]
    • gorwell a day ago

      [flagged]

      • anigbrowl a day ago

        Bullshit. Look how normal it is for people on X to cens*r c*rtain w*rds to avoid having their posts downranked.

        • eric-p7 21 hours ago

          Isn't the X ranking algorithm open source? Does it have hardcoded keywords or how does this censoring work?

        • 21 hours ago
          [deleted]
    • lonmydadda 13 hours ago

      [flagged]

  • justin66 a day ago

    [flagged]

  • moomin a day ago

    She was still there?

  • ryandrake a day ago

    I didn't even know that Twitter had a CEO that wasn't Musk.

    • Macha 21 hours ago

      Twitter CEO - Chief Excuse Offerer

  • Imustaskforhelp a day ago

    Oh I really imagined that it said that she was leaving twitter (not calling it X) as in leaving the account / social media / platform (not the company)

    I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.

  • jeffbee a day ago

    Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.

    • edm0nd 12 hours ago

      sidenote: Twitter search isnt that bad when you compare it to the shit show that is reddit search. its basically never worked.

      • jeffbee 12 hours ago

        Reddit search is just Google, is it not?

    • add-sub-mul-div a day ago

      Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.

      • mumbisChungo a day ago

        Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.

        • tristan957 17 hours ago

          There are no followers on HN, unless I've totally missed something about the platform.

          • mulmen 16 hours ago

            The dopamine hook on HN is karma.

      • bee_rider a day ago

        It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.

        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?

        • hollerith a day ago

          "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke". In both cases, the word or phrase was adopted first by progressives, then by critics of progressives to refer to progressive beliefs and sensibilities.

          It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.

          • bee_rider a day ago

            > It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.

            > "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.

            • hollerith a day ago

              I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".

              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?

              • dylan604 a day ago

                There was a lot of radio word play. They couldn't say "that sucks" so they said "that vacuums" instead type of nonsense. Now, they just say "that sucks". But back around the Bush Sr and Clinton period, there were changes to broadcast rules that led to talk radio becoming what it has which also led to Fox News and then everyone else following suit

                • hollerith a day ago

                  Hi, sadly, I removed my description the first time I heard "politically correct" (on KUSF during the Reagan admin or maybe a year or 2 later) because I did not need it.

                  • hollerith 17 hours ago

                    "my description of the first time I heard"

              • bee_rider a day ago

                > I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".

                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…

    • mikepurvis a day ago

      Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.

      Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.

      • euleriancon a day ago

        I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.

        • klank 19 hours ago

          > Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.

          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".

      • fundad a day ago

        Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).

        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.

    • UltraSane a day ago

      Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.

      • phillipcarter a day ago

        It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.

        • UltraSane a day ago

          Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot with that. But that requires user skill.

          • HeyLaughingBoy 18 hours ago

            Then it's not a solved problem in any meaningful way.

      • lokar a day ago

        Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years

        The problem is ranking and relevance

        • lokar a day ago

          Thinking more, I imagine each post has limited value for ranking. You need the context of the thread, re-posts, even other threads nearby in time (with the same people).

      • simonw a day ago

        They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).

        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.

    • meepmorp a day ago

      > Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking.

      That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.

    • delusional a day ago

      > turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else

      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.

      • hocuspocus a day ago

        After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.

        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.

      • ndiddy a day ago

        Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.

        • jeffbee a day ago

          His M.O. and that of everyone in Elon's orbit. That's how we got DOGE: a bunch of people of well below average skills and intelligence who nevertheless believe themselves to be the masters of the universe promised to radically improve government efficiency and greatly reduce waste, but found out that the government has been wound as tightly as possible by a bunch of hardened bureaucrats who paid attention in school, know how to use slide rules, are aren't ruled by "vibes".

  • awaymazdacx5 17 hours ago

    * X reported 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.*

  • AIPedant a day ago

    The AP News story[1] had a tidbit I missed:

      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.”
    
    Yaccarino is obviously not Executive Of The Year, but what are you supposed to do when your boss is even more reckless and stupid than Donald Trump? I'm surprised it took this long.

    [1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-g...

    • rsynnott a day ago

      Yeah, never understood why she took this job. It could only really end one way.

      • rtkwe a day ago

        I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).

  • cma 21 hours ago

    In her farewell tweet:

    > 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.

    • energy123 10 hours ago

      Advertising executives are professional liars and manipulators. They even lie about the fact that they're not that.

    • mrguyorama 18 hours ago

      Don't worry, nobody still on Twitter has ever cared about what actually happens in reality

  • m3kw9 21 hours ago

    She didn’t do nothing there

  • yieldcrv a day ago

    I sold a ton of shares on a private secondary market Starter Pack

    enjoy the retirement!

  • 1oooqooq 12 hours ago

    this is just a bottom of the drawer news they could pick the time to release (as all comments here prove, the hiring, the duration, and the firing, were all inconsequential for anything whatsoever)

    So, why fire now? What news would be getting attention instead, of the 600 comments here and who knows how many on xitter?

  • ujkhsjkdhf234 a day ago

    Good for her. Got paid a ton of money to be the fall guy and no one ever believed anything that went wrong with the company was her fault. That's a clean getaway in my book. Hopefully she can move on to something that isn't building Nazi chat bots.

    • nickthegreek a day ago

      pretty sure she did alot of reputational damage to herself along the way.

      • _ph_ 6 hours ago

        Is that so? Or isn't it that being the CEO of such a large and well-known company is basically always career enhancing? In my experience, with companies hiring for high-level positions, former job titles are valued often more than actual performance.

      • edm0nd 12 hours ago

        doubtful. Marissa Mayer literally killed Yahoo and still was able to get a new job and hold board member seats.

      • Invictus0 a day ago

        This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.

        • rsynnott a day ago

          She _accepted_ the job, though. If we're assuming it was obvious to everyone that it was an impossible job, then her accepting it shows a certain lack of judgement, surely.

          • HeyLaughingBoy 18 hours ago

            "I accepted a difficult position with the expectation that I would make a significant impact on the company's future. Now, looking back, I'm pleased with what I was able to accomplish. I look forward to more challenging engagements."

            At least, that's how I would spin it.

            But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)

            • toomanyrichies 18 hours ago

              > 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.

          • kjkjadksj a day ago

            If your boss was a jackass would you actually turn your nose at 6m a year? I sure wouldn’t. That would set me up for life.

        • add-sub-mul-div a day ago

          The reputational damage was taking the money to profit from and aid the megalomania. She'll never be taken seriously by serious people or have a substantive job again. But she'll do fine, her loyalty will probably get her similar opportunity with similar people.

          • kjkjadksj a day ago

            Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the next 30 or so years.

            • toomanyrichies 18 hours ago

              > Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the next 30 or so years.

              As Rust Kohle said in "True Detective": "People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time..."

    • idop 20 hours ago

      > to be the fall guy

      People keep saying that, but what did she take the fall for?

    • jimt1234 a day ago

      Sounds like being the manager for the Oakland... Sacramento... Unknown location Athletics. Well, minus the tons of money and Nazi chat bots. LOL

      • dylan604 a day ago

        At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.

        With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.

  • mihaic 9 hours ago

    Tangential, I still find it absurd people accept calling it X instead of Twitter. While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits, like naming your company "The" or "God".

    Still sticking with Twitter until a reasonable name is found, which by Musk is never.

    • pyrale 8 hours ago

      I used to Find the renaming a bit ridiculous, but in light of the sweeping platform changes, I find that making the distinction between twitter, the somewhat reasonable microblog platform and x, the far-right psyops operation is useful.

      Also there is some honesty in making the logo a half-drawn swastika.

    • cobbaut 8 hours ago

      > like naming your company "The" or "God".

      or naming a product "Word" or "Office" or "Windows". :)

      • LoveMortuus 7 hours ago

        Microsoft naming makes sense if you imagine that the person that came up with the names was stoned, like high on weed.

        "Yo dude, to use the spreadsheets you've got to like excel and stuff. ", "When you make your point it's gotta be powerful. ", "Ain't my point having a database if you can't access it. ", "A: I need a tool to write my book, it's gonna change the world. B: Word bro, word. ", "Bro, you have to connect with people to expand your outlook on life, the world and stuff. ".

      • smcl 6 hours ago

        Those can be easily identified as "Microsoft Word", "Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft Windows". However "X" is the name of the company and the product.

        I guess you could refer to it as "X The Everything App" or using the incredibly corny and near-immediately-binned tagline "X: Blaze Your Glory!" but I've only ever seen those used by people making fun of the product, company, Elon or all three.

      • mafuy 8 hours ago

        Microsoft is notorious for naming stuff in a way that makes it impossible to search for information. It is quite annoying.

        • windward 7 hours ago

          For this reason it's essentially impossible to search for solutions to the many bugs in Windows' Multiple Desktops

        • lou1306 7 hours ago

          But at least you can search for "Microsoft Office" to counter the issue. Plus, they have the excuse that they have been doing this since before the Web existed, literally.

          What do you do with X? "X social"? Ludicrous.

        • amelius 8 hours ago

          .NET, lol.

    • azangru 8 hours ago

      > While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits

      To me it's the other way around. If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message. We, the public, wouldn't have known any better. With Twitter, we do know better — better name, better nouns, better verbs (even a better logo; but that's by the by). Bosses can rename their products as much as they like; it's just surprising to me that we as a public so obligingly give up this tiny bit of our language.

      > like naming your company "The" or "God".

      Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.

      • account42 7 hours ago

        "Tweets" was already an embarrassing term. We used to be fine with just "posts" or "comments" instead of trying to put the company branding in every term.

      • motorest 8 hours ago

        > Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.

        The most Orwellian shit ever.

      • mihaic 8 hours ago

        > If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message.

        I'm not really sure. Some things don't compound, that's why I think a preposition for instance would make a bad name. But even if you may be right, I still want to put up a fight against corporate entities trying to take over basic concepts (X, the unknown, the letter that marks the spot, etc.). I don't want to be forced to use your name if your name is an absurdity, the same way I can't make a brand called "Trump is an idiot" (even if it's true).

    • fzeindl 8 hours ago

      I wonder if the purpose of naming it „X“, just like naming „Facebook“ meta is to do the opposite of SEO: Make it harder to find news pertaining to the company and their scandals.

    • squirrel 7 hours ago

      Shed Simove actually did this, with some funny results: https://www.shedsimove.com/content/i-changed-my-name-god

    • Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago

      Same with Facebook / Meta; the "metaverse" they tried to pivot the company to cost them billions and failed spectacularly. Google is still Google, not Alphabet, although separating the overarching org from the search engine / internet services branch was logical. They tried to pivot to social media with Circles, upheaving the whole company. The only good thing that (from an outsider's POV anyway) came out of that was unifying their logins across services.

    • noufalibrahim 7 hours ago

      I agree but given that the original twitter logo was a bird, It's nice to call it an "Ex Twitter" (Cf. Monty Python's dead parrot sketch)

    • LoveMortuus 7 hours ago

      I like to call it X-Twitter.

      In a way it is correct, since when spoken it sounds like you're saying ex-twitter.

    • Thorrez 6 hours ago

      How about B, C, C++, C#, D?

    • booleandilemma 8 hours ago

      It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder.

    • TiredOfLife 6 hours ago

      It's interesting how things change. Internet used to be against copyright and for the right to choose how to call oneself. And now it's for copyright and against the self naming thing.

      • mihaic 5 hours ago

        I'm actually for self-naming in general, it's just that there should be some common sense limits to self-naming. There's a reason why we differentiate between common and proper nouns.

    • knorker 8 hours ago

      The worst part, in my opinion, is that people fell for it. Instead of hearing a split second two syllable "twitter", we now keep hearing "X, formerly known as twitter".

      That's 8 syllables. You just gave 4x free advertisement for absolutely no good reason. You're the sucker.

      • account42 7 hours ago

        I like to shorten it to ex-twitter. Pun intended of course.

  • paulbjensen 15 hours ago

    She's the ex-CEO of a private company owned by a billionaire. What power did she really have?

    If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.

    The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.

  • bananapub a day ago

    edit: not sure why my ctrl-f 'grok' missed it, maybe I hadn't let the nytimes modal load thing load the bottom of the article.

    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.

    • dmix a day ago

      You didn't read the article then

      > 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.

      • slg a day ago

        That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?

    • delusional a day ago

      The Nazi robot is probably a good signal to get out.

      • eqmvii a day ago

        “prepare 3 envelopes” always leaves out the “what to do in case of Nazi robot” part.

  • banana_giraffe a day ago
  • elAhmo a day ago

    She was never in charge of anything at X, the title is doing a disservice to the public.

    • a day ago
      [deleted]
  • ctenb a day ago

    She is leaving the company, not the platform

    • BryanLegend a day ago

      True. It's a misleading headline.

    • a day ago
      [deleted]
  • mellosouls a day ago
  • steveBK123 a day ago

    [flagged]

    • redox99 a day ago

      They had literally added (and now removed) a system prompt to be politically incorrect. I'm sure no other LLM has that.

      https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...

    • intalentive 17 hours ago

      I suspect it has more to do with alignment fine-tuning.

    • ceejayoz a day ago

      The other LLMs don't have a "disbelieve reputable sources" unsafety prompt added at the owner's instructions.

      • steveBK123 a day ago

        It's gotta be more than that too though. Maybe training data other companies won't touch? Hidden prompt they aren't publishing? Etc.

        Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.

        • bikezen 16 hours ago

          It was starting N.... chains yesterday along with several other 4chan memes, so its definitely ingested a dataset consisting of at least 4chan posts that any sane company wouldn't touch with a 1000ft pole.

        • overfeed a day ago

          > Maybe training data other companies won't touch

          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)

          • epakai 14 hours ago

            That tweet seems like the bigger story.

            I've seen lots of deflection saying Yaccarino chose to retire prior to Grok/MechaHitler, but the tweet predates that.

            Even more deflection about how chatbots are easy to bait into saying weird things, but you don't need to bait when it has been specifically trained on it.

            All of this was intentional. Musk is removing more of the mask, and he doesn't need Yaccarino to comfort advertisers any more.

        • peab 21 hours ago

          I think it's more so that they push changes quickly without exhaustively testing. Compare that to Google, who sits on a model for years for fear of hurting their reputation, or OpenAI and Anthropic who extensively red teams models

          • steveBK123 18 hours ago

            Why does Grok keep "failing" in the same directional way if its just a testing issue?

        • thrance a day ago

          I think they just told grok to favor conservative "sources" and it became "mechahitler" as the result.

      • neuroelectron a day ago

        Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII propaganda that's still floating around.

        • Macha 21 hours ago

          Given the source of training data is primarily the internet, and not say scanned propaganda posters in museums, I'd have to imagine all the analyses or things attributed to the impact of world war 2 significantly outnumber uncritical publications of ww2 propaganda in the training sets.

    • empath75 a day ago

      All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.

      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.

      • lukas099 20 hours ago

        Could you use one LLM to filter out such bad training data before using it to train another one? Do they do this already?

        • empath75 2 hours ago

          You don't actually want to filter out "bad" training data. That this stuff exists is an important fact about the world. It's mostly just fine tuning to make sure it produces output that align with whatever values you want it to have. The models do assign a moral dimension to all of it's concepts, so if you fine tune it so that it's completions match your desired value system, it'll generally do what you expect, even if somewhere deep in the data set there is training data diametrically opposed to it.

    • a day ago
      [deleted]
  • tonetheman 17 hours ago

    [dead]

  • ceejayoz a day ago

    I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted this long, honestly.

    • andsoitis a day ago

      As chief, her job is, amongst others, making sure that type of thing doesn’t happen.

      Outcomes suggests she failed at that.

      Hopefully the next chief will be better.

      • JohnFen a day ago

        She was was never the chief, only the chief's main administrator.

      • ceejayoz a day ago

        Her only true role was to fulfill Musk's silly promise to step down as CEO after a public vote. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

      • torlok 18 hours ago

        You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for everybody.

      • baking a day ago

        She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had any control over Grok.

      • quickthrowman a day ago

        Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and I imagine he rolls with security so…

      • CamperBob2 a day ago

        There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.

        Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.

    • juujian a day ago

      I'm surprised the NYT article does not even mention it.

      • baking 14 hours ago

        The NYT had already sourced that she was leaving prior to the Grok incident, so they knew it was not the primary reason. Apparently, she has been planning on leaving since the takeover by xAI.

    • duxup a day ago

      Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?

      • rsynnott a day ago

        The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...

        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.

        • neuroelectron a day ago

          It turns out bluesky is useful after all, as an ad hoc archive of X. Xd

      • ceejayoz a day ago

        Not at this level, no.

    • sleepybrett 13 hours ago

      6mil a year for a job where she has no power why even show up...

    • miroljub a day ago

      What is the Nazi chatbot?

    • a day ago
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    • Bender a day ago

      Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they often succeed. If I am right it is a set of splintered groups formerly referred to generically as The Internet Hate Machine but they have (d)evolved into something worse that even 4chan could not tolerate.

      • coolKid721 a day ago

        It's just the prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...

        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.

        • phillipcarter a day ago

          We have no evidence to suggest that they just made a prompt change and it dialed up the 4chan weights. This repository is a graveyard where a CI bot occasionally makes a text diff, but we have no understanding if it's connected with anything deployed live or not.

        • pvg a day ago

          The mishap is not the chatbot accidentally getting too extreme and at odds with 'Elon's centrist stuff'. The mishap is the chatbot is too obvious and inept about Musk's intent.

        • zemo a day ago

          it's almost like Grok takes "politically incorrect" to be synonymous with racist.

      • hackyhacky a day ago

        > Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.

        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

        • philipallstar a day ago

          > we know exactly what happened

          The price of certainty is inaccuracy.

          • delusional a day ago

            So the only way to be accurate is to vaguely gesture at hodgepodge theories and suggestions that people "do their own research"?

            Surely you can be both accurate and certain, otherwise you should just shut up and be right all the time.

            • philipallstar an hour ago

              > So the only way to be accurate is to vaguely gesture at hodgepodge theories and suggestions that people "do their own research"?

              Yours was a hodgepodge theory. That's why I said that. I was advocating against hodgepodge theories in general, and yours in particular.

          • hackyhacky a day ago

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      • a day ago
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      • wat10000 a day ago

        It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”

      • lupusreal a day ago

        I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?

        • Bender 2 minutes ago

          In 1999 there was a perl chatbot called infobot that could be taught factoids, truths, lies. It would learn anything people chatted about on IRC. So I call LLM's infobots.

      • a day ago
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      • gtsop a day ago

        > it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.

        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

        • pxc a day ago

          There are, but fascism's internal cultural fixtures are more aesthetic than intellectual. It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do, and it shows very clearly in the composition of the "rank and file".

          Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.

          • dragonwriter a day ago

            > It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do

            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.)

        • pavlov a day ago

          Curtis Yarvin’s writing is insufferable and many of his ideas are both bad and effectively Nazism, but clearly he’s very smart (and very eager to prove it).

          • a day ago
            [deleted]
          • FireBeyond 19 hours ago

            Yarvin is an out-and-out white nationalist, though he denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy-mouthed answer is meant to mean.

            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!

      • rurp a day ago

        That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.

      • delecti a day ago

        No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.

      • a day ago
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  • pooty 21 hours ago

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    • ixtli 21 hours ago

      deranged. "far left" is anything you don't agree with. also, almost none of the people from before musk are actually gone, the only difference is a dramatic increase in antisocial nazi bots and the groypers being more bold.

      • slaw 21 hours ago

        [flagged]

        • wredcoll 15 hours ago

          I really wonder what prompts people to lie like this. Paid trolls has always seemed rather far fetched, but what's the alternative?

          • slaw 10 hours ago

            I know there are blind people who think something is a lie.

  • giardini a day ago

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    • eqmvii a day ago

      surely there are better things to be commenting on?

      • giardini 12 hours ago

        You're jealous!

        Old advice: If you have nothing good to say, best to say nothing at all.

  • myko a day ago

    So dumb some people call it "X"

  • gpi 17 hours ago

    Who?

  • southernplaces7 a day ago

    I assume he's reviving a new drive at internal consolidation and reviving the internal efficiency of X. This would be a good start considering this CEO's track record so far. She served a certain purpose and it's workable to replace her.

    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.

    • southernplaces7 a day ago

      Why not respond with an actual rebuttal of these points instead of downvoting? Are you 12-year-old schoolkids?

      • freejazz a day ago

        I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you. Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd probably find more purchase with your arguments at an adolescent playground anyway.

        >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.

        • southernplaces7 20 hours ago

          Hence the idiocy of downvoting.

          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.

          • sjsdaiuasgdia 3 hours ago

            > even if it's loaded with racism, do you think other social media platforms aren't?

            Most other social media platforms haven't had a bot, owned and operated by the social media platform, that promotes Hitler as the solution to the problems of the world today.

            Fuck off with your false equivalencies.

          • freejazz 12 hours ago

            None of this is in good faith. I'm not morally scandalized by Grok. I'm morally scandalized that they would make it do that. I'm sure you're going to argue some ridiculous semantic point about how Grok actually did it all on its own. It definitely did not spontaneously turn on hitler shit.

            >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.

            He sounds dumb pretty much every time he opens his mouth. I haven't heard him say anything intelligent. Good business man? If you insist. Total moron in my book. That's for sure.

            Have fun.

          • pooty 20 hours ago

            [dead]

  • lenerdenator 14 hours ago

    [flagged]

  • gigatexal 20 hours ago

    Who cares? What I’m curious about is if Elon will pay her what she must have negotiated: a golden parachute.

  • paulvnickerson 20 hours ago

    Linda's tenure was an overwhelming success if you judge it according to what her assigned goals probably were:

    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.

    • nticompass 4 hours ago

      Her tenure was an "overwhelming success" if you don't know what either of those words mean.

    • freefruit 16 hours ago

      Point number 2, was a great success with a controversial owner.

  • tonyhart7 27 minutes ago

    discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team

    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

    for example they fire legal team division and offload that into external agency

    they just fire all "administration" related people and keep the bulk of engineering team which they should since tech company being lean is most advantage of tech company has