Elon has one final bad idea for Twitter
Cool logo. Did you get it at Hot Topic?
Elon Musk changed the name of Twitter to ‘X.' Here is the app icon, which looks like it was lifted from a Super Bowl commercial for Axe Body Spray:
I look at this logo and I can hear Incubus.
It is the dweeb in your high school showing up to home room in a leather jacket one morning.
This logo just cornered me at a work party and asked if I’d seen Donnie Darko.
It makes sense that Elon Musk thinks this logo is cool. Elon is, notoriously, one of the worst Twitter users of all time. Every tweet he sends is like if an account that only steals memes was forced to try writing original jokes.
Elon is FuckJerry trying out his own material.
We don’t need A.I. to write comedy. We have naturally unfunny men like Elon doing it for us. He processes actually funny tweets, diagrams them on his brain’s blackboard, and then spits out his own, slightly-off version.
This results in uncanny posts like this, which are formatted like a funny tweet but which are not, in fact, funny.
Elon is bad at Twitter, and I am sure he was getting tired of hearing how bad he is at Twitter.
Well, guess what? He’s bad at X now.
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A lot of people wonder what ‘X’ will be like. Here’s my guess:
Remember when Elon and his mouth-breathing VC friends interviewed Ron DeSantis?
There were endless technical errors; every participant was unpleasant to listen to in a different way; and you had to be 50 layers deep into Fox News paranoia to understand what these guys were so mad about?
Imagine all that in an app that has the color scheme of a Hot Topic.
Casey Newton pointed out that Elon Musk’s Twitter has been focused on “redistributing the company’s attention and wealth toward right-wing users.”
In retrospect, the DeSantis launch event feels like the last night of Twitter and the first night of X — the test flight of a website that could force eyeballs to gaze upon the worldview of sweaty Conservative men.
It’s brutal on there. I’d rather sling jokes for 15 people on BlueSky. I’d even rather go on Threads and watch Dr. Pepper talk about pegging Listerine.
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What will X become? Here’s a theory from the CEO of X:
What is a “future state”? Does she mean like Puerto Rico?
Did a human write this? This tweet feels made to be read over a loudspeaker in a movie about futuristic dystopia. Ryan Gosling is slurping noodles in the rain as this message blasts out from a flying taxi overhead.
Is Linda Yaccarino a real person? Has anyone met her? I feel like her profile photo is from the neck up because A.I. hasn’t figured out how to do fingers yet.
We already have ChatGPT. This is ChatCEO.
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Ignore this corporate gibberish. Here’s where I have to admit something unpopular:
Elon Musk has exactly one good idea for Twitter.
Last week, he sent out big checks to a bunch of right-wing Twitter power users. Musk put ads in their comments sections and gave them a cut of the profits.
This is how it should work. Not the part where a CEO handpicks ideological allies to send money to, nor the part where you have to pay $8/month to be eligible for ad revenue — I mean the general idea:
If you are tremendously successful on Twitter, and millions of people are looking at your tweets, and Twitter puts ads in your comments section, you should get a cut of that ad money.
In a just society Dril would have a nicer house than David Zaslav.
I hope Mark Zuckerberg steals this idea for Threads, and I hope the Chinese government steals it for TikTok, and I hope the crypto-obsessed virgins running BlueSky steal it, too.
Because, you can count on getting two things from being a Great Poster on a large social network:
a dopamine rush when a Post goes viral; and
guys in your replies telling you precisely what makes your face ugly
Money would be a nice third thing. You know what I’d love to never see again? The funniest people in America begging their hundreds of thousands of followers to donate to a GoFundMe for $300 surgery.
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I got sidetracked, but: This one good idea is not enough.
You could not pay me to work for the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign and, thus, you could not pay me to hang around Twitter anymore. The vibes are rancid. The boss is a toxic nut. The whole thing reeks of formaldehyde and Drakkar Noir.
Enjoy your fascist Hot Topic. You can find me on a social network that doesn’t give me the ick.