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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand how Twitter and the X idea overlap. Elon just wants to use the existing user base to seamlessly switch to the new app. If that’s the only reason he is bulldozing Twitter into X, feels like a bad idea. With his celebrity (though severely diminished) he can pull in a lot of interest to X as a new company. That would have automatically added a few billion in value for him. Instead trying to morph Twitter into X reduces Twitter’s value and doesn’t net anything positive at all. I don’t get this madness

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Lights are one but no one is home.

It’s a bit pointless trying to reverse engineer some sense out of the whims of some people who think very highly of themselves.

I think his idea is that Twitter as a pure diffusion platform is dead and/or insufficient, as shown by the competition meta is going to bring in the market with Threads.

His vision is that the west needs/wants a mega app - WeChat like - where you can communicate privately or publicly; interact with people / communities / companies and pay / exchange money. Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market.

To create that mega app; you can either start from scratch (hard) or flip an existing product. Ideally such a product would need to have a massive audience (network effect) and at least part of the feature your mega app needs.

Amongst the available platforms; TikTok was too big/expensive and targeted at minors. Meta and all their properties is too expensive. Twitter was the next on this list that was kinda aligned. It was loosing money (so not "too" expensive even if he arguably overpaid it); got a ton of (adult) customers; and communication already provided.

Engineering wise; twitter was known in SV as a place to "vest and rest". So he immediately put a stop to it and made the team leaner. As the saying go: "If you want to go fast; go alone. If you want to go far; go together". It looks like Musk wants to go fast right now. He seems to believe that there is hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of valuation waiting for the first company that would become the western world WeChat.

If he is right; then the 44 billions he paid for Twitter were just a way to kickstart the project; just like he did by turning Tesla from a so-so company to a global leader (depending on the metric you look like). Using his fame definitely would have drawn interest to X.com; but that alone isn't enough. Google itself failed multiple time to launch social networks despite their fame (Google +; Google Wave; ...). But if tomorrow he launches a "Send money to" feature in twitter, he will already have far more user in 24h) than everything he could have hoped for had he done it otherwise. And that might be worth those 44B.

Or he just fails miserably to deliver on the vision; he also had his failures (the boring company being an obvious one).

Absolutely nothing he did, starting a year before he bought Twitter to now, makes me believe that anything you said here. He has completely ruined the reputation, lost good will among engineers across the world, proclaimed himself to be a terrible boss, shown that he has no idea what he is doing, all this without even going to the extreme fringe he seemed to have moved.

> Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market.

His wealth came from PayPal investors paying him to go away, not because he was actually good at it.

WeChat exists because that's easier for China to regulate. There's no particular demand for an everything payment app; there's already Facebook and Venmo.

But if that was your goal, why not simply role Twitter into the X app shell? Why destroy the brand?

As Tom Nicholas (the British YouTuber) pointed out, a chat app that's used by the vast majority of the population (like WeChat in China, or perhaps in some countries WhatsApp) can add a payments method and be successful, but Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless. A chat app first needs the massive audience, and to be a normal way to send private messages to people you know in real life, before it can become a successful payments app.

WhatsApp could perhaps do it, but most of the countries where WhatsApp is popular already have decent payments infrastructure.

> Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless.

This is the key. Elon has been in this niche and can't see it from the outside, from the viewpoint of the Regular People who only hear about Twitter on the news but never actually go to the site.

Same with journalists and "journalists" who create "news" about some two follower default profile picture account with a hot-take on Twitter, pretending that it's the view of some larger crowd just because it was said on Twitter.

Twitter lacks what IRC had decades ago and Discord/Telegram have, a way to moderate who can see your message within a group. Currently it's just shouting to the void (with hashtags).

> Twitter lacks what IRC had decades ago and Discord/Telegram have, a way to moderate who can see your message within a group.

It has that, Circles.

Except they announced they were going to remove it recently but… haven't. I think they may actually be unable to remove things and have just told him it's gone.

I always thought circles were for some kind of voice chat real time podcast thing?

And people could just join them at-will without any moderation.

But I'm not a heavy twitter user in the least :)

That's Spaces.

Circles were a near-exact lift of the same-named feature from Google Plus. You could (can still?) set up ring privilege layers of your followers or specific subgroupings and send tweets only visible to those in that group.

I think it's because he was financially successful with PayPal and he wants to duplicate that success, so he's always been trying to break back into the money flows and this was too juicy of an idea to merge the two.

It's the same thing as Nostr, wanting to tie payments to identities.

That’s it. KYC with a head start of a 220M user base. 5% of that is a massive force in fintech.

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