this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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It's pretty ironic how companies will spend so much money on advertising to gain brand recognition, but then throw it away on a whim.
I imagine executive meetings with people rambling about (an already well established) brand cannibalizing (what could become, if everything goes perfectly, an equally or even more recognized) brand. Basically, throwing away what you have for what you could have in the future.
It's just like spending, what was it, 44 billion dollars or something like that to own Twitter, and not even a year later you drop the brand and rename it X. Like, dude, any decent programmer or sysadmin could spin up a copy of Twitter in a few days of work. You paid $44 billion for the brand.
44 billion for the brand, but more importantly the user base. Although let's not discount the tech behind the scenes. Any decent programmer or sysadmin might be able to spin up a copy of Twitter in a few days. But it's not going to scale to the size Twitter is, and have all the moderation and legal tools Twitter does (although Elon is gutting those by the day), integrate into as many places as Twitter does, have the app infrastructure Twitter does, etc.
But regardless, all those things are irrelevant without people actually using the service. No clone is going to have the user base, and even with the rebrand to X, Elon still has a lot of users. Not as many as when he started, but still a lot. That's what the 44 billion bought.