Good luck, Linda Yaccarino, on convincing the public that Musk renaming Twitter to just an X is a good thing. Oh, sure, you claim “[t]here’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything. @elonmusk and I are looking forward to working with our teams and every single one of our partners to bring X to the world.”
The foundations of Twitter are pretty well shot at this point, and now the brand recognition will be, too. Musk already pointed out they should rename “tweeting” once the name “Twitter” is gone. This could happen as early as Monday morning if “a good enough X logo is posted tonight”.
In order to create a product that is as endlessly flexible as Yaccarino says it will be, they need to hire people to replace the ones that are gone. Will they hire some of them back as consultants? Will they hire new employees that are willing to risk being shown the door the next time Musk starts getting antsy because he’s overdue for gutting something else at the company, even if Yaccarino is the CEO?
I might be able to understand how this endlessly flexible future product could be built off of Twitter if what had been gutted was inefficient code and what took its place was more robust and more feature-rich. But it was employees that were jettisoned, leaving a lot less to maintain and try to build on the existing code base.
I can’t immediately come up with a replacement name for a “tweet” because of the limitations of a name that is just an X. Twitter, tweet. Very similar. They go together, they flow together.
Are you going to say you’re going to “X it” when you send a message? (Cue the jokes about all the people that already “exited” Twitter in the last half year.) But calling it a “message” after calling them “tweets” for 15 years is bland. A “text” is also bland and not marketable because the name isn’t distinct enough. Are you “Xing” when you send a message and making sure you’re pronouncing it as “ecks-ing” instead of “zing”?
Ooh, I know. You can “zing” an “Xing”. The message is the “Xing”, and the “zing” is the sending of the message. It’s genius! And if that isn’t good enough, we can call the message a “Y” to go with the brand name “X”. “Just Y-it” will be the new slogan. Y not?
Hopefully, Musk sets aside a little bit of time to figure this out in between suing the lawyers that forced him to go through with buying Twitter. They asked for $90 million in “success fees” for their services and the Twitter board paid them $84 million just ten minutes before the Twitter became his. He wants the money back because he’s objecting to asking for something beyond their billable hours at the last minute for successfully concluding the law suit. It’s about 6x more than what they billed Twitter for their services. (Other stats show the billable hours was different so the multiplier was different, such as 2.6x.) Oh, and that the lawsuit forcing him to buy Twitter wasn’t that complicated, so he says they didn’t have to put in that much effort to justify that high a success fee.
And if that isn’t enough, Musk recently unbanned Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Trump was brushing it off, saying he was fine on Troth Senchal. That’s because, if you remember, it’s a legal condition of the purchase of Trump’s TMTG by DWAC that Troth Senchal had to be Trump’s primary outlet.
That deal’s still not done and isn’t doing well, coming up on the end second one-year period with no real progress towards finalizing it other than paying about an $18 million fine to the SEC, so Trump was weighing if he’d give up on the $300 million he’d make from it in favor of getting all of his followers back on Twitter. But now you can only see what’s on Twitter if you have an account and it’s about to lose its brand recognition, so maybe he will stick with his Twitter clone and figure out how he can help get the deal closed, even though you’re also required to have a Troth Senchal account in order to read messages there so communication to the outside world has to be done manually.
He might have to crack open his “The Art of the Deal” book that was ghost-written for him in between dealing with trying to get out of paying E. Jean Carroll $5 million when he was found liable for sexual assault against her (but not the rape charge), dealing with the second set of indictments that came from Jack Smith, the upcoming third set of indictments that Smith will bring shortly, the upcoming fourth set of indictments that the Attorney General in Fulton County, Georgia is about to drop on him, any other indictments that may also be coming, and dealing with running for president, and the trial for the second indictment that will be happening right around the Republican primary in the spring, and the fact that he keeps having to hire new lawyers to replace the ones that leave, and the new lawyers are asking for more money, and he had to change the fine print in the donations page for his presidential campaign SPAC to say 10% of what’s donated will be shifted to his other SPAC so it can pay his legal bills instead of the 1% it used to be.
And then he has to find time to keep buttering up Judge Aileen Cannon so she will remember that he appointed her and keep ruling in his favor, plus all the time he has to spend attacking Jack Smith and all lawyers, judges and other people that are involved the court cases against him, plus making sure he gets in his golf time, plus playing the martyr so that people will keep donating to him, plus figuring out how to attract new voters that are outside his MAGA base so they will donate to him to make up for the dwindling donations from the mega donors and the smaller donors that won’t give him money any more, plus where he can get money to keep Troth Senchal and TMTG afloat.
And then he has to find time to send angry messages ranting about The Lincoln Project and Chris Christie. And of course, he can’t forget about Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden. He’s gotta keep attacking them. And figure out a new name for when “Ron DeSanctimonious” gets stale because “Meatball Ron” didn’t stick. He did get a little bit of a breather when he decided to switch from “Crooked Hillary” to “Crooked Biden”. But he still has to attack anyone that says his poll numbers are lower than what he says they are.
And then he has to keep planning on how to ensure he’ll win the 2024 election like he believes he will because that will make all of his legal problems go away because he can pardon himself, even though a pardon only covers federal crimes and does nothing for state crimes, but those will go away because they won’t go after a current president. And figure out how to be our “retribution” that he’ll unleash as president because he’s being indicted for us.
Yeah, so, keeping Troth Senchal alive past September this year is going to be a bit tough. He might just have to go back to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.