"twitter icons covering elon musk's face"
-Images: Stable Diffusion AI Software
-Prompts & Curating: Paul Micarelli
* Full Disclaimer*: I do not have a Twitter account, nor do I really give a shit about Twitter as a social media platform.
Of course, I've read plenty of people's tweets, mostly related to politics or current events, but mostly I would be interested in the user comments of each post. Since Elon Musk made the 'Big Brain' move to hide comments unless your logged in, I don't even bother clicking on any links to tweets anymore.
Still, it is interesting to see how Elon has been running this company head-first into the ground. It has been a definitive example of what many have suspected- that he's kind of a dipshit, who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room because he was born ridiculously wealthy & made good investments off the hard work and research of others. He is probably never told "No Elon, that's a really stupid fucking idea." It's glaringly obvious that he's a skin-thinned egomaniac, as well. I know you can't be a total invalid & be a billionaire, so he obviously has a certain level of competency. The image of a "tech genius" has been pretty well shattered, though- especially since taking over Twitter. He makes monumentally bad decisions, and the latest news about Twitter's re-branding is my field of design & branding, so I felt compelled to speak on it.
ARS TECHINCA:
Musk rushes out new Twitter logo—
it’s just an X that someone tweeted at him
To me, this is just an absolutely insane marketing / branding decision. Words like "tweet" & "follow" are now being used as common verbs because they've become so widespread, & Twitter's unique branding was originally carefully crafted by a team of experts... but yeah, Elon thinks it's a brilliant idea to completely change the identity of the platform into the uninspiring - "X". If he thinks this is edgy or cool, he's dead wrong- because it's pretty much the most lame & stupid goddamn approach imaginable. It's like he never got past the 1990's "X-Treme!" trend. I know people with big ideas have been laughed at before, but this is so comically bad it's almost like he's doing it just to troll everyone. Besides throwing away a well-established name & brand, he's replacing it with a symbol that's near universal in the tech world for "close application" or "stop process". It's also a symbol for death in many cultures. Oh, and don't forget the porn connotations!
Besides the negative, hostile symbolism, it's also super-awkward to use. He wants tweets to be called "exes" now? So, people are supposed to say, "Did you see so-and-so politician or celebrity's 'x' about that topic?" How are people supposed to search for something from the site with such a basic & general name? Ugh, it's just so, so dumb in so many ways...
Apparently, Elon's dream that he can't let go of is to turn "X.com" into a multi-purpose digital platform that covers all the bases - social media, banking, news, etc. What his dumb ass doesn't realize, is that if he can't even keep one of the most popular communication sites in the world minimally profitable, he sure as hell isn't going to be able to completely re-brand it into a successful multi-purpose platform!
When I was reading this news, I couldn't believe how asinine this idea was. You couldn't make up a worse solution if you tried. It's like "How to Destroy Your Company Brand 101" with Professor Musk. As I stated in the beginning of this post, I didn't even want to bother with a Twitter account, anyway. Thanks to Elon's shenanigans, I'll definitely be sure to stay off whatever horrible iteration of the platform he comes up with in the future.
