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.
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.
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.
> 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 ....)
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
I think he saw a good (to him) opportunity to steer public discourse by tossing a big stack of cash at probably the most influential social media network in terms of mindshare, to push whatever ideas were careening through his mind at any given point.
He may not have even been sober, much less playing 5D chess.
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
Our findings revealed a moderate positive association between psychedelic use and beliefs in alternative facts, as well as the specific belief that facts are politically influenced.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> *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.
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.)
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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 ..
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.
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?
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.
"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."
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...
> 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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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" ?
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to something that was being touted there. The context of the post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get you blanked banned from many other placed.
Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
I 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.
Is usually used as an derogatory term. The offensiveness is because it's based on age and it is deemed acceptable within one age group to use it - while racism is usually less acceptable. I haven't yet seen zoomer get used similarly.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That link errors ("Failed to fetch" banner on the page) for me. Perhaps hugged to death, but I would be interested in the DAUs/MAUs if they're available.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
..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.
>..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
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
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!
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
Just like all the normies who don't use web browsers, email, podcasts, calendars, jpeg image standards. Like how btc and ethereum finally died out and companies aren't adopting stable coins.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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…
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
"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 ;-)
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.
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.
> 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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
There's no mystery to it: if one trains a chatbot explicitly to eschew establishment narratives, one persona the bot will develop is that of an edgelord.
To me, and I'm guessing the reason Linda left is not that Grok said these things. Tweaking chatbots is hard, yes prompt engineering can help say anything, but I'm guessing it's her sense of control and governance, not wanting to have to constantly clean up Musk's messes.
Musk made a change recently, he said as much, he was all move fast and break things about it, and I imagine Linda is tired of dealing with that, and this probably coincided with him focusing on the company more, having recently left politics.
We can bikeshed on the morality of what AI chatbots should and shouldn't say, but it's really hard to manage a company and product development when you such a disorganized CTO.
... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.
Do you think that Tay's user-interactions were novel or perhaps race-based hatred is a consistent/persistent human garbage that made it into the corpus used to train LLMs?
We're literally trying to shove as much data as possible into these things afterall.
What I'm implying is that you think you made a point, but you didn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.)
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).
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!
> 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]
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.today/9zvHZ
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...
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.
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.
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.
One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.
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.
I'd imagine the paycheck helped resolve the quandary.
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Different strokes for different folks (to move the world)
On Acquired podcast, Ballmer spoke of his experience as CEO with Gates as CTO. It was hell.
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.
I wonder how this setup compares with Mira Murati and Greg Brockman.
I mean I've been in a few jobs where I had to "manage" my boss in order to accomplish anything.
were those jobs fun? Certainly havent been for me
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.
Elizabeth Holmes had all the power. Also being competent matters.
It is possible that people think that the valuation would be even worse if she wasn't the CEO. Unlikely, but possible.
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.
> 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 ....)
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.
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.
> 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.
"just following orders" has been well established as no defense, and is more relevant than usual.
In a genocide context, sure. I don't think that applies here.
“We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.”
She shut her mouth and didn’t cause trouble.
> 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
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
Pretty good theory
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.
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...
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.
You are conveniently omitting his reason to buy it. Personal megaphone and shortly thereafter LLM training data are the simplest reasons.
Maybe he just spent a lot of time shitposting on there.
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.
> formerly-brilliant
When?
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.
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.
I'd love to hear why this is being downvoted? Not agreeing is one thing, but it seems like a reasonable thing to suggest?
> 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.
Because Musk has provided abundant evidence of his political orientation over the last several years.
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.)
Witness his entire Boring Company being a sock puppet project to derail California's High Speed Rail system.
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...
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
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...
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.
> 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
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.
Better to put "facts" in quotation marks considering that is clearly a statement of opinion, and a fairly caricatured one at that.
I haven't downvoted you, I am curious. Why do you disagree? In what relevant ways are their interests aligned?
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
> 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?
nah, that's 4chan
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sorry, what money did billionaires took from you?
This is what I was talking about before, fwiw. Your beliefs are predicatable:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42444-z
Our findings revealed a moderate positive association between psychedelic use and beliefs in alternative facts, as well as the specific belief that facts are politically influenced.
If you don't believe that what we accepts as facts are politically influenced, I have a bridge to sell you...
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.
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.
He sued to try to get out of buying it!
> somebody
That he's the wealthiest known man in the world seems like relevant context here.
Also that he tried to back out and a judge forced him to buy it.
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.
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.
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...
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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?
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.
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.
> Valuation did drop during her tenure
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
> her legacy will forever be stained
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
> 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.
Sounds like a snooze.. But maybe someone will pay to not take chances.
My question is where does she go from here?
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
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.
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.
She’s 62 years old. She can just retire.
Invest the 6mil and enjoy a carefree life?
Politics! Or maybe management consultants. Lots of consulting jobs are really just about taking the blame.
And politics are about asigning the blame to someone else. :D
With the tens of millions she made does she even need to go anywhere?
Failure can teach you a lot if you're willing to learn.
But did she actally fail?
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.
Elon's level of stupid feels unique at first glance but then if you look at how many people elected the current president...well.
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'.
> 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!
You think he's just normal stupid? It's a minimum especially stupid
I will do it for half that price....
Don't wait. Pick up your phone and Call Elon right now as this position is filling up fast.
Meta
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.
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."
That's exactly what it does mean. If you're not famous, you have no legacy.
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.
?? I don't guess a guy on the street would have ever spared a thought for the head of NBC's ad department.
If you have enough money, any age can be retirement age. The whole concept of "retirement" is really for the working class anyway.
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.
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.
No, she's just helping to sculpt the glass cliff.
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.
She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.
Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.
(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?
I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.
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?
Nothing! That's why I didn't comment on that. I commented on "remarkably inept."
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.)
> 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?
well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume
> her legacy will forever be stained
I would like to believe that people can change over time.
She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.
You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".
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.
> licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy"
Which fascists?
German far-right party AfD?
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What does sexual orientation or adopted daughter have to do it?
They are fascist.
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?
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.
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 ..
Like, financially? Sure. I don't think that was ever in dispute.
In what sense is he "off the rails" then?
My eleventh wife just gave birth to my 58th child. Musk seems perfectly normal to me /s
Elon Musk is doing well now the same way Elvis Presley or Howard Hughs were doing well in their final years.
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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.
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?
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.
"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
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...
You might have a point if he didn't ignore every other one of those polls he ran.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Genuinely, I wasn't even aware that Musk had actually done the initially promised thing of appointing a different CEO.
Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out to do.
Hiring her would be a favour to Elon. She likely knew this when she took the job.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
Context?
She got her bag and got out. Seems perfectly rational to me.
if she had no power to make decisions then how would the company's decline in valuation be her fault?
So you are saying Elon musk is inept?
We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.
it didnt drop 80%:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
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.
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Bullshit. Look how normal it is for people on X to cens*r c*rtain w*rds to avoid having their posts downranked.
Isn't the X ranking algorithm open source? Does it have hardcoded keywords or how does this censoring work?
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?
Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
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
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.
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"
The speed at which replies mentioning Groks Nazi freakout get downvoted here make me really question where things are headed..
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".
Another possibility is that she was fired.
You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Some might argue there are more important things in life than compensation.
Self-respect, for example.
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.
Sure, and I agree, but that's not really related to what GP is saying
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> (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.
> 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" ?
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.
It's literally impossible to post anything on any interesting subreddit right now, your post will just repeatedly get deleted.
> 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.
reddit is like the most censored part of the internet at the moment.
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> 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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
What, specifically, did you say that was “in opposition to the core hive mind” that led you to being blocked?
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.
So your argument is that reddit is, what, bad at free speech because subreddits aren't forced to let you in?
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.
> boomer
Is usually used as an derogatory term. The offensiveness is because it's based on age and it is deemed acceptable 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
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Your ban was deserved
why is that ? btw i am indian too. It was in /r/askindians
Possibly leakycap is thinking about 02012 and you're thinking about 02018. In that case you'd both be right about Twitter.
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
I was talking about reality. Twitter wasn't perfect in 02012 but it was before the reproductively viable worker ant.
All caps don't make it true.
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.
She could probably pad her paycheques quite a bit with a book deal touting insider gossip, too.
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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.
There are probably cheaper places to retire (that will guarantee a longer retirement) than Hawaii - but your idea is good
The cheapest option is death, but even that costs you your life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I give a lot more weight to the $250M Elon spent on the campaign.
> 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".
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.
> 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!
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> How? He was banned after the election.
By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referre...
It's a stretch to say this would have made a major impact. Biden won fairly comfortably. COVID was Trump's bad luck.
Bad luck? Covid was the definition of an easy layup. It's like bush and 9/11, should be a trivial re-election.
If you think twitter made even 1% difference in 2016 I urge you to go and touch some grass. This stuff doesn't matter.
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.
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.
But Trump won more convincingly in 2024 without it? That doesn't support your argument.
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.
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.
Long tweets: 2017 (https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/twitter-officially-expands...)
Subscriptions: 2021 (https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-launches-subscrip...)
Community Notes: 2021 (https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir...)
Native video: 2012-2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope_(service) / https://www.videonuze.com/article/twitter-unveils-30-second-...)
Musk buys Twitter: late 2022.
That leaves… Grok.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
Private likes too.
They renamed favorites to likes. It's the same thing.
Sorry, you're right of course. I was thinking of bookmarks.
From your list, only grok. All the other stuff was already there.
As a medicore programmer, other than AI I would imagine the rest of the list would take 2 weeks to program and implement.
Keep trying, estimation is hard! You’ll improve!
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.
Make a Mastodon account and post to both places simultaneously. They say Mastodon brings real discussions and engagement.
I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.
Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.
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.
Twitter explicitly down ranks off-site links to prevent this kind of "conversion".
> 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.
I've seen people report they get better engagement on Mastodon and Blue Sky than they ever did with Twitter, based on percentages.
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.
Luckily Blue Sky isn't the only competitor in the space, then.
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.
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.
> for a company that has never been close to covering the cost of building it
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019
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.
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.
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...)
> 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.
This argument has been made, at length, in court. It was found wanting.
Good thing 35% of the country still trusts the courts https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-courts-ame...
> 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.
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.
They ripped him off? He made an unsolicited offer, signed, sealed and delivered.
but thats due to musk poising the platform not due to cutting people.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
That link errors ("Failed to fetch" banner on the page) for me. Perhaps hugged to death, but I would be interested in the DAUs/MAUs if they're available.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads that's catching up w twitter.
It goes up and down. The stats site, not BlueSky, that seems to only go down.
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.
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.
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.”
you must not know many journalists because they certainly left in droves
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.
After NPR left twitter they saw a 1% drop in traffic from socials. It is not a useful platform.
Source: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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'."
Avoiding sensitive subjects is not the same thing as endorsing racist views if that’s what you’re implying.
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This ChatGPT? https://futurism.com/chatgpt-encouraged-murder-sam-altman
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.
It seems that there is tremendous incentive for people like yourself 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.
It absolutely has not been claiming that it's "MechaHitler" since it was released.
Try.
Right, it’s just been talking about white genocide and generating nazi images instead.
What Nazi images?
The white genocide thing I remember hearing about and looked really forced
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.
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.
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
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.
My bad: I have now edited the comment and clarified that I have meant engagement thriving, not financials.
Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and last I read they’re still actively losing users.
Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the opposite.
My understanding is overall engagement is also currently down
Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.
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.
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.
how do you move platform when you have >10k followers on twitter?
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.
Tesla itself seems primed for a similar fate at an even greater magnitude -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
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.
I feel like I need to shower every time I end up there. The place is repulsive to me.
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
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.
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
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-...
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)
you realize Threads basically have the same amount of daily users now? This should never have happened
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.
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.
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..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.
>..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
But Twitter/X owns that training data. Tesla (or whatever else you’re trying to say is Stacey King) does not.
"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"
> ..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.
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
To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
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!
He said he would reinstate freedom of speech, but did he actually? [1][2][3][4]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twit...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...
[4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-user...
> everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law
I have one word for you: "cisgender".
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
Saved?
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
>free protocol oriented services.
Love all of these on paper, I think any tech person would. But they are non-starters. Normies have zero chance of ever deciding to use these.
Just like all the normies who don't use web browsers, email, podcasts, calendars, jpeg image standards. Like how btc and ethereum finally died out and companies aren't adopting stable coins.
Yes.. non-starters, too complicated and fiddly..
what speech specifically did it save?
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.
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.
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'
Legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Saved free speech??
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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.
Can you point at any comment by them that is reminiscent of Nazi ideologies?
You are projecting. Nazis were against free speech and big on censorship and ideological conformity. You are aligned with them.
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.
X censors journalists and media handles regularly in India
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!
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-yaccarin...
TIL you can "gift" NYTimes articles access. Sounds weird but thanks stranger!
Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
> 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
Rule #0 is you don't disparage the company on the way out. She may even have a contractual obligation not to.
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.
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.
"This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend some time with family" lol
"him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.
Replace “entrusting” with “paying.”
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.
I forgot she even existed but atleast she brought mechahitler to twitter I guess.
Is this another case of "may this sacrifice appease the rain gods and bring forth a good harvest"?
Perhaps that and "Let me just disembark this sinking ship if I may…"
(Sorry she ever boarded?)
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.
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.
The announcement on X: https://x.com/lindayax/status/1942957094811951197
> As always, I’ll see you on X
So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account while remaining CEO!
"Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform, it's a role with the company.
The title does literally say she is leaving the platform
Here on Hacker News, we should be good internet citizens and do more than just read the title.
We can also be human together and find enjoyment in shared, incorrect first impressions.
> the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.
I mean she’s not wrong!
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.
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.
What value does X equal in that statement?
So do all the other LLMs have a "don't praise hitler" safety prompt that Musk insisted be removed from Grok or what?
The other LLMs don't have a "disbelieve reputable sources" unsafety prompt added at the owner's instructions.
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.
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.
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
Why does Grok keep "failing" in the same directional way if its just a testing issue?
> 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)
I think they just told grok to favor conservative "sources" and it became "mechahitler" as the result.
Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII propaganda that's still floating around.
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.
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...
I suspect it has more to do with alignment fine-tuning.
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.
Could you use one LLM to filter out such bad training data before using it to train another one? Do they do this already?
Some non-paywalled sources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/tech/linda-yaccarino-step...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gy3j9xq6o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/x-ceo-ste...
etc
Well that was sudden. Did Elon ask her to bear some children? Or offered a horse?
Who cares? What I’m curious about is if Elon will pay her what she must have negotiated: a golden parachute.
Trying to make it clear she is not responsible for MechaHitler AI as if people don't already have her number
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.
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-...
At least she can claim the success of getting the company sold, even if it was to a sibling company under X Corp.
I suspect a professional executive appointment was among the terms to finance Musk's purchase of Twitter.
At least she still has her dignity.
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"?
* X reported 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.*
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.
Don't worry, nobody still on Twitter has ever cared about what actually happens in reality
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.
She was still there?
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.
She didn’t do nothing there
So dumb some people call it "X"
The AP News story[1] had a tidbit I missed:
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...
Yeah, never understood why she took this job. It could only really end one way.
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).
I sold a ton of shares on a private secondary market Starter Pack
enjoy the retirement!
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
"my description of the first time I heard"
> 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…
Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.
There are no followers on HN, unless I've totally missed something about the platform.
The dopamine hook on HN is karma.
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.
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.
Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot with that. But that requires user skill.
Then it's not a solved problem in any meaningful way.
Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years
The problem is ranking and relevance
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
pretty sure she did alot of reputational damage to herself along the way.
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.
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.
"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 ;-)
> 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.
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.
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.
Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the next 30 or so years.
> 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..."
> to be the fall guy
People keep saying that, but what did she take the fall for?
Sounds like being the manager for the Oakland... Sacramento... Unknown location Athletics. Well, minus the tons of money and Nazi chat bots. LOL
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.
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.
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.
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"?
The Nazi robot is probably a good signal to get out.
“prepare 3 envelopes” always leaves out the “what to do in case of Nazi robot” part.
She was never in charge of anything at X, the title is doing a disservice to the public.
She is leaving the company, not the platform
True. It's a misleading headline.
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I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted this long, honestly.
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.
She was was never the chief, only the chief's main administrator.
"Assistant to the regional manager". [1]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA9kQuWkU7I
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.
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
She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had any control over Grok.
Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and I imagine he rolls with security so…
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.
I'm surprised the NYT article does not even mention it.
Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?
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.
It turns out bluesky is useful after all, as an ad hoc archive of X. Xd
Not at this level, no.
What is the Nazi chatbot?
Grok, the xAI chatbot, went full neo-nazi yesterday:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
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How much prompt engineering was required to have Musk say the same kind of stuff?
The article points out the likely faulty prompts, they were introduced by xAI.
Is this what happened in reality? Otherwise how is your theory applicable to this case?
There's no mystery to it: if one trains a chatbot explicitly to eschew establishment narratives, one persona the bot will develop is that of an edgelord.
“which 20th century historical figure would be best suited to deal with this problem?” is not exactly sophisticated prompt engineering.
Can you though?
Yes. LLMs mirror humanity.
AI “alignment” is a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
To me, and I'm guessing the reason Linda left is not that Grok said these things. Tweaking chatbots is hard, yes prompt engineering can help say anything, but I'm guessing it's her sense of control and governance, not wanting to have to constantly clean up Musk's messes.
Musk made a change recently, he said as much, he was all move fast and break things about it, and I imagine Linda is tired of dealing with that, and this probably coincided with him focusing on the company more, having recently left politics.
We can bikeshed on the morality of what AI chatbots should and shouldn't say, but it's really hard to manage a company and product development when you such a disorganized CTO.
Left politics? He said he is forming his own political party.
Ha, good point, left the white house anyways.
... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.
Long live Tay! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Tay (allegedly) learned from repeated interaction with users; the current generation of LLMs can't do that. It's trained once and then that's it.
Do you think that Tay's user-interactions were novel or perhaps race-based hatred is a consistent/persistent human garbage that made it into the corpus used to train LLMs?
We're literally trying to shove as much data as possible into these things afterall.
What I'm implying is that you think you made a point, but you didn't.
It was an interesting demonstration of the politically-incorrect-to-Nazi pipeline though.
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I’m going to say that is also bad. Hot take?
grok yesterday.
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Censoring hard is not the defining feature that makes one a Nazi. It's the part think that you think is OK.
grok was praising hitler...
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ("Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts"—16 hours ago; 89 comments)
"Weirdly" always gets flagged almost immediately even though it's quite tech relevant.
With 8 points in an hour, my post drawing attention to this is missing from the front pages.
HN is censoring news about X / Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.ycom...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.ycom...
Naughty Ol' Mr Car's fanboys tend to flag anything that makes Dear Leader look bad. Surprised this one hasn't been nuked yet, tbh.
Yes, sensing this trend at HN lately
see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510635
Related discussions from the past 12 hrs for those catching up:
Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709
Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507419
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Yeah that's not even close to what's going on here. Grok is literally bringing up Hitler in unrelated topics.
https://bsky.app/profile/percyyabysshe.bsky.social/post/3lti...
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Direct evidence abounds. X is deleting the worst cases, but plenty are archived before they do.
https://archive.is/fJcSV
https://archive.is/I3Rr7
https://archive.is/QLAn0
https://archive.is/OgtpS
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.
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.
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.
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.
it's almost like Grok takes "politically incorrect" to be synonymous with racist.
> 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
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.
> 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.)
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).
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!
> 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
> we know exactly what happened
The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
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.
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I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?
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!”
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.
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.
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hot diggity dog
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surely there are better things to be commenting on?
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.
Why not respond with an actual rebuttal of these points instead of downvoting? Are you 12-year-old schoolkids?
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.
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.
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I didn't even know that Twitter had a CEO that wasn't Musk.
Twitter CEO - Chief Excuse Offerer
Who?
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.
Point number 2, was a great success with a controversial owner.
X went from a far left censored propaganda site, to one of the few places you can actually get real news what's going on in the world.
For this reason it has been absolutely essential to democracy, and simultaneously hated by by far left governments and activists alike.
Thank god musk bought it, and thank that lady for however she could help.
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.
Twitter was far left propaganda site.
I really wonder what prompts people to lie like this. Paid trolls has always seemed rather far fetched, but what's the alternative?