every morning, Donald Trump wakes up and tortures his few remaining hairs into that famous fucked up rat’s nest of cotton candy bullshit that sits atop his big dumb pumpkin head.
he then puts on one of his shapeless, ill-fitting, off-the-rack cheap blue suits, and finishes it off with a ludicrously long red tie.
he looks like a fucking clown. and you know what? he knows that he looks like a fucking clown. but he does it anyway.
do you know why he does this?
because it’s his brand.
Donald Trump is a fucking moron, but he absorbed one lesson from all his years of being a game show host on TV:
never fuck with your brand.
you can spot Donald Trump a mile away. he’s counting on that.
if Trump went on TV tonight wearing a well-tailored suit and with his hair combed back in a dignified manner, you wouldn’t hear a word he said. you be too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
that’s why you never fuck with your brand.
Elon Musk, tHe SmArTeSt BuSiNeSsMaN iN tHe GaLaXy, is fucking with his brand.
twitter and its blue bird logo, one of the most instantly-recognizable brands on the planet, has overnight become X.
as with most of Elon’s decisions, this one seems to be hastily-made, ill-thought-out, poorly-implemented, and bone-headedly dumb.
Elon hasn’t just fucked with his brand, he’s poured gasoline all over his brand and set it the fuck on fire.
he’s replaced one of the world’s most iconic logos with a generic letter of the alphabet, one that thousands of business already use.
why?
Elon has always been in love with the letter X.
in 1999, Elon took some of his aparthied-ere emerald-mine money and started an online bank. he called it X. a year later, X merged with PayPal. Elon wanted to continute to call his venture X. his new partners wanted it to remain PayPal.
he lost that battle, but he did get to name his rocket company SpaceX.
and he got to name on of his children X Æ A-12.
again, we ask, “why”?
there is no “why.” Elon is convinced of his own greatness. he truly believes he’s Tony Stark. you do not question Elon. if you work for Elon and you ask him “why,” you will be swiftly shown the door.
Elon wants X to be an all-in-one app: streaming media, dating, job search, and a bank.
X is going to be none of these things. the guy can’t even afford to pay his rent.
renaming twitter as X is a last-gasp desperation move. he’s already wrecked the place — fired his top engineers, abandoned infrastructure, destroyed the verification system, allowed the worst of the worst to return to the site, boosted conspiracy theories, and scared off most of his advertisers.
Elon’s up to his eyeballs in debt, and twitter — excuse me, X — is running out of money. the app was never worth the $44 billion he paid for it, and now it’s worth only a fraction of what it was worth.
and now, after one breathtakingly stupid move after another, Elon has decided that by destroying the last remaining thing he had — recognition — he will magically turn it all around.
imagine being less business-savvy than Donald Trump.
now that is an accomplishment.
never fuck with your brand.
honestly, the whole time I was writing this, I was half-expecting I'd have to set it aside and write about Trump getting indicted this morning. oh well, maybe tomorrow.
Once again Elon Musk is proving to everyone that money does NOT equal intelligence.