X CEO Linda Yaccarino explains reason for getting rid of Twitter name

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/10/x-corp-ceo-linda-yaccarino-says-she-has-autonomy-under-elon-musk.html

by gslin • 3 years ago

23 40 3 years ago

cnbc.com

LambdaComplex3• 3 years ago

"The rebrand represented really a liberation from Twitter," she said.

Yeah, a liberation from a household name into something that sounds like a porn app. Genius move.

EA-3167• 3 years ago

I'm amazed that she still has the ability to get out of bed in the morning, never mind address the questions of why her boss does crazy things that will definitely end up as a whole module in decades of MBA courses under "what not do to."

Espionage7242• 3 years ago

Lol I'm sure that person is getting paid more than enough to not be thinking about that stuff

pavel_lishin2• 3 years ago

I'm amazed that she still has the ability to get out of bed in the morning

Once she climbs over the giant pile of money she's almost certainly getting paid, it's mostly an easy downhill slide.

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

“You might not agree” with all posts - yeah that poll by a white supremacist about Jews having undue influence on the world I really did not agree with.

LOL - who is she kidding - who wants to advertise on such a toxic platform.

abracadaniel• 3 years ago

Coca-Cola and Visa apparently. They say they have new protections to keep your ads from showing next to content you don’t like, but given that Twitter is paying those people to produce that content, they are still directly funding it.

Espionage7242• 3 years ago

Who wouldn't?

Fools who fall into that kind of toxicity likely have money to throw at your products. You want people to buy your product as a for-profit company, right?

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

“Elon has been talking about X, the everything app, for a very long time,” Yaccarino said in an interview with CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “Even when we announced that I was joining the company, I was joining the company to partner with Elon to transform Twitter into X, the everything app.”

So she's confirming what most have suspected and many have been saying: Musk wants to kill Twitter. (Indeed, has already done so!).

He wants to use its infrastructure as a base to make an entirely different product.

smt88• 3 years ago

So she's confirming what most have suspected and many have been saying: Musk wants to kill Twitter.

This feels like giving him too much credit for forethought. Killing Twitter would kill the "everything app" too. All of the everything apps (e.g. WhatsApp) that already exist have a messaging component.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

By "killing Twitter", what I mean is that he wants to change it to address an entirely different market than what it used to address. That makes the name change make sense -- he wouldn't want the old brand because he doesn't want the old user base.

I have no dog in this fight, personally, as I stopped using Twitter years ago, but it's going to be very interesting to see how this shakes out.

My guess is that it isn't going to go well, but that's only a guess.

croes2• 3 years ago

He didn't really want to buy it and was forced.

Then he noticed social media is hard.

So now he tries to copy WeChat.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Yes, this is true. It's why he wants it to be a different product -- he never wanted Twitter and now that he has it, he has to do something with it that he does want.

clouddrover• 3 years ago

He didn't really want to buy it and was forced.

Sure. He was completely minding his own business when suddenly, out of nowhere, a judge forced him to buy Twitter for no reason. Poor guy.

pavel_lishin2• 3 years ago

Yaccarino said X’s trust and safety team is “healthier” than it was when it was publicly traded. “You might not agree” with all posts, Yaccarino added.

What does it mean for the trust and safety team to be "healthy"? It's such a non-answer to any possible question.

whinenot• 3 years ago

Less bots and troll farms, perhaps? That may also be a consequence of overall user activity dropping like a stone.

AndrewKemendo• 3 years ago

I get it now

He’s trying to turn Twitter into WeChat - basically take an existing giant user base, burn off anyone that doesn’t want to hand their life away to an app like WeChat and then pull online transactions away from Amazon, Facebook etc…

I honestly didn’t see the plan until reading this article

vtee442• 3 years ago

He says that openly at least for a year. Is it even possible to trademark a single letter name?

I wonder if he would even make it to the point where you would be able to pay somewhere/someone with his app. Hard mode: don’t search for places by accepted payment methods. With his current reputation it can be tricky. Who would even want to be banned from payments because he posted something he didn’t like on Twitter?

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Is it even possible to trademark a single letter name?

The letter by itself, maybe, but maybe not. The letter in a distinctive font, though (which is what they're doing), very likely.

Remember the purpose of trademark is consumer protection: to be able to tell that a product or service really is from who you think it is. As long as the trademark is distinctive enough in the product categories it applies to, it's allowed.

HillRat• 3 years ago

He’s had an “everything app” obsession for years (to his modest credit, even before apps as such!), but I charitably put the odds at pulling such a thing off in the US at epsilon above zero. WeChat, LINE and the like developed under very specific regulatory and market conditions that don’t exist in the US, and trying to replicate their products without the gravitational pull that made them successful in the first place is a fool’s errand. “Twitter” could probably limp along indefinitely in a degraded state, but “X” is headed for the treetops at speed.

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

My theory is that Elon was getting blazed and thought it would be cool to change the name.

LambdaComplex3• 3 years ago

My understanding is that he tried renaming PayPal to X, and that's actually the event that led to him being replaced (because there were actually people around then to tell him that it was a terrible idea).

He's been trying to have something named X for a long time.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Almost. When Musk was fired from PayPal, it wasn't called PayPal yet. It was called X.com. PayPal was a competing company started by Theil.

The two companies merged, and a lot of discontent came about in that process, leading to Musk being kicked out.

Musk says it was because he was too insistent that the new company should be called X rather than PayPal, but everyone else says that it was because Musk was incompetent and that incompetence was hurting the company.

I don't claim to know who's closer to correct, but the ouster was brutal and each party had lots of vitriol to spew about the other.

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

He, and his wife at the time, named one of his kids X Æ A-12.

Really.

3cats-in-a-coat3• 3 years ago

Nothing she says matters and everyone knows it and she knows it. But that’s what the job entails. To BS.

rsynnott2• 3 years ago

There's this odd phenomenon in US media (it is less of a thing in other anglosphere media) where coverage by the same outlet can gyrate from critical coverage of a thing to basically publishing press releases for the thing disconcertingly rapidly. This is a bizarrely softball piece, under the circumstances.

EDIT: Okay, CNN went with a rather less press-release-y headline: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/media/linda-yaccarino-elon-mu...

porkbeer• 3 years ago

I get the hate on elon and his decisions around twitter/x, but the comment quality here is leauges velow what I expect from HN. Why are we enshittifying our own spaces out of spite? Dang, do you not care about this? While I agree with most posters sentiment in general, none make any good points or express anything but adhoms and insults. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard, particularly when we are critical.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino explains reason for getting rid of Twitter name

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