The Brand Toolkit page needs updating - https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit
Not only does it still have the bird it says "Our logo is our most recognizable asset. That’s why we’re so protective of it. Take a moment to think about how you apply it and take a read of our Brand Guidelines for examples of how we like you to use it."
Do you really have to wonder? I think it's one of his episodes, just like the purchase of Twitter itself, where the too quickly decides on something and pushes it through.
Why? I'd be hanging out with my loved ones in mountain cabins and beach houses. I truly cannot comprehend what makes these people want to spend their time and money on internet nonsense.
If your character is about chilling and hanging out it's unlikely to be one a billionaire.
Most people getting into that group donthat by focussing their time on making money. This usually requires quite some dedication, which is a character trait you can't simply replace for going to the beach.
There are exceptions, but it's rare. And then there are the ones who got spoiled as a kid and were lucky with some decisions, like making some good real estate deals in Manhatten or finding the right partners to build some online payment service, who never learned about responsibility.
Do you see other billionaires wasting time on “internet nonsense”? This guy bought a social media network and was on it 24/7 before that.
Even Zuckerberg who made his fortune with social media seem to post less than him. I have never even heard of Bezos posting while Gates probably only post as PR for his foundation.
Yes, but the prompt was that I'm a billionaire. And I'm the way I am, and described the way I believe I would be as a billionaire. But there was no part of the prompt about the path I took to become a billionaire, just that I am one.
Right? I would be enjoying life to the fullest, privately. This guy has already reached end game, instead of enjoying it, he's squandering his name/reputation for internet points.
That's true: most people want to hoard wealth for personal consumption. That's the normal way for wealthy people to behave. Very few want to change the world. Some of those who want to change the world will change it for the better and some for the worse, but the hoard-and-consume lifestyle is most definitely the common lifestyle.
Personally, I think the "spend time with loved ones and donate money" approach is the far preferable wealthy lifestyle over the "narcissistic egomaniac constantly talking about how theyre 'changing the world for the better' while mostly just being an asshole" approach.
I'd like to think if I was a billionaire I would act the way that I think an ideal billionaire would, being shrewd with my money and making myself richer in an upright and respectable manner while also ensuring that the people who work with me get wealthy as well.
Proving to others that you can act like an 8th grader while pissing away $44 Billion (actually, closer to $33 Billion, maybe $24 Billion if we ignore the outside $9 Billion investors) on an asinine project and still living the life of private jets, and party yachts is the point.
Flaunting your wealth attracts supporters in this day and age. People *like* rich assholes. Its fashionable, or at least it was in the 2010s. The pendulum of society is finally swinging back and demonizing this outrageous display of wealth but we're still in an age where people literally worship wealth. Not the "figuratively literally", I mean literally literally worship as per the prosperity gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology).
Its not just Elon Musk, but also Arkk's Cathie Wood and Bill Hwang.
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The outrageous displays of wealth is proof that you've achieved God's good graces. Its basically Mandate of Heaven (Chinese concept) except the American version of it.
Once you make $999,999,999.99 dollars, congratulations you have won at life!
All future income you make beyond $1B goes to helping society.
You should probably get a say into where the money goes (so it aligns with your values, whatever those may be) but that's it. You are done enriching yourself personally.
I kind of like that (although I'm sure plenty of people hate it).
Norway doesn’t have that, but it does have a wealth tax, which I like. If your net wealth sums to over 2mnok (approx $200k), you pay some percentage of tax on that wealth, every year. There are plenty of exemptions, your primary residence is only worth a quarter of assessed value, and of course this is net wealth, so mortgages and things subtract from this. But it does mean that if you’re just sitting on a horde of gold, you’ll anyways pay taxes, which makes sense to me. Just because you became wealthy enough to stop earning any income doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for your share of keeping society running.
I've done some math on this. It's INSANE how tiny of a percentage you can usefully tax away and get enormous societal benefits. You really, really don't need to go all 'Beatles Taxman' on it and confiscate everything over X amount. You can take just 1% of the pool of wealth and come out with enormous funding by the standards of what we use social benefits for.
The play money is so many orders of magnitude beyond what's used to keep society creaking along, that it's positively silly. The tiniest of wealth tax percentages can amount to whole social services budgets. These social services stop people with pitchforks from going after the billionaires and each other.
A though occurred to me the other day. Taxes have become the offset for the inefficiencies capitalism. Each entity is independent, and therefore has to reproduce common things that could have been shared if society was organized differently.
It’s a Unicode symbol that can’t be copyrighted that was suggested in a comment reply and the CEO had to spin the rebrand after Musk tweeted for 12 hours through the night with no sleep.
He has no plan. How is that not painfully obvious at this point
First of all by saying “the PayPal days” shows you have very little idea what you’re talking about and I’m not going to elaborate.
Second of all, so what? What does that have to do with him just picking a Unicode character at 4am on a Saturday?
Your argument was this logo change was planned.
Okay, so he’s planning on turning it into a finance platform, and you’re saying it was “part of his master plan” to pick a logo at 4am that can’t be trademarked (because it’s just a Unicode character), such that any one can setup a login page for using the logo, to harvest X.com credentials, and they can’t do anything because they don’t own the trademark?
Hey isn't he still majority owner of SpaceX (Jesus, there's the X again, somehow that hadn't dawned on me yet)?
Doesn't a huge proportion of their income come from government contracts?
Aren't there... you know, some laws about that exact thing?
Oh who'm I kidding, only the peons have to sweat about their lives being ruined by getting high on the weekends. Rich people are too good for that, of course.
Besides, he's probably got bullshit prescriptions for most of it.
Absolutely. He's been open, even evangelistic about that, and anyone familiar with drugs can quickly recognize that it's a WHOLE other thing beyond your basic Joe Rogan bakemind routine. Elon has gone full Syd Barrett. It's not going to get better.
I remember back in 2018/ 2019 in SF, when "microdosing" ketamine and/ or LSD started becoming big with tech folks. It was (and still is) always painfully and embarrassingly obvious when someone is "microdosing".
You’re acting as if Musk’s actions don’t affect anyone. Ask the two decapitated individuals who died at the hands of Tesla auto pilot how they feel about Musk’s poor decision making. People had communities they liked on Twitter and Musk destroyed them ruining careers and upending lives in the process.
And he did it all so capriciously. There still doesn’t seem to be any reason for it.
If it was the plan from the beginning then why announce it via rambling tweets late at night, before it's even announced to the employees? LOLOLOL. UNICODE X "ICON" LOLOLOL
The app is also "Twitter", the <title> tag is etc. Everyone is going to keep calling them tweets. It's just the logo and redirecting the x.com domain really. Which makes sense IMO (regardless of whether it was a good idea which I'm skeptical), I don't think they should go hard with the rebranding immediately. You need to slow roll it so people don't get confused. The logo is a good start making people notice and get curious without making a big disruption in Google results and mobile app discovery.
> Anyone looking for a little horror story?
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> I'm one of the only two in-house designer in the whole Twitter corporate, and I wasn't told anything about this rebranding...
I honestly didn't even know that I could still view individual tweets. I used to go read new tweets from my favorite posters from time to time, but I haven't been back since they forced that behind a login.
you can still view it through https://nitter.net, which I guess makes the open source Javascript-less front-end to Twitter more accessible for SEO? maybe Google should start indexing that lol
The site favicon hasn't been updated either. I imagine that last employee working at Twitter who hasn't been fired has had a difficult weekend updating the logo.
Wait is this just because they aren’t rebranding Twitter? Just the company that operates it? I don’t have Facebook but I was under the impression that it was still Facebook even though the company rebranded to Meta.
