But they're not just re-branding. Twitter is now under some kind of corporate shell company. I haven't seen much coverage of that, but my suspicion is that it's intended to act as some kind of insulator to contain Twitter's debts.

Like when they break a company into pieces and put everyone's debts and no assets into a single part and then that part declares bankruptcy and all the debt magically goes away, leaving everything else with lots of assets and no debts and a future that looks really rosy. I can't help but think that this is something similar to that.

Especially because they bought a bunch of companies that weren't Facebook. Another example is Google rebranding as Alphabet. Those make complete sense.

Musk didn't found PayPal. X.com merged with Confinity, another online financial site (founded by Peter Thiel and others). Confinity had already begun development of PayPal at that time. In the resulting company, still called X.com, there was a series of leadership conflicts, with Musk pushing out CEO Bill Harris to become CEO, before himself being replaced by Peter Thiel. It was under Thiel that the company changed it's name to PayPal, and later went public. By the time there was a company called "PayPal", Musk was not longer involved with daily operations.

everything “cool” was having an X in it, like XForce and stuff like that.

Like that show Wormhole Xtreme

Peter thiel did PayPal.

It feels more 1990s Xtreme! wannabe than anything, but what would I know

that doesn't make it less dumb

Haha, this makes me actually nostalgic thinking about some of the warez sites I frequented back in 2002/2003! Scanning for "pubs" with scetchy software was what I considered a good time back then.

Dude I thought the same. Thought it was some stock photo of "hacker". and absolutel looks like warez from the 90s.

Oh god just saw it, it reminds of my 12yo self

I want to start a rumor that he was just born a Lon but added the E to make himself look cooler.

It feels like Musk believes that its more important for people to talk about Twitter than actually to use it.

Or it would be in a parallel dimension where reactionary panic moves that are also stupid when seen in isolation would be considered good PR 🤷

One of the most recognizeable brands from the past 20 years is suddenly changing it's branding and throwing all that recognition into the trash. I don't know why people keep acting like this isn't worth talking about. I don't give two shits about musk or Twitter and don't even have Twitter accounts or whatever, but even I recognize this is a noteworthy change (and his reasons for doing it) for the world.