Elon thinks he’s a genius.
He’s a billionaire.
He’s a Lex Luthor.
But he’s no genius.

Hell, he could be Batman if he wanted to, or The Martian. Instead, he’s the self-elected king of X. Nothing. Nada. Nope. He canceled the bluebird. He gave it a really catchy name and logo that’s the joke of the internet over the last two weeks.

X?

Why not XXX.com isn’t that three times as good?

Well, Mr. Musk is also not very good at following laws or asking for permission. He’s more of a do-it-and-ask-for-forgiveness guy. Take the Friday before the misguided rebrand. The new CEO was Tweeting away about how proud she was that TWITTER was such a good influence. Over that weekend, however, Mr. Musk did a Kamikaze takeover. He torched everything. When he hired a huge crane to remove the large Twitter sign, the police came and stopped the unpermitted activity.

And then, the Mars Man put a horrendous neon sign, like something out of Blade Runner, on the top of the building. It was recently taken down. Company X is now under investigation for unpermitted construction over the sign.

If you needed a sign that Twitter was done, Mr. Musk handed you the final CANCEL of the Twitterverse. He removed all of the branding and replaced it with the universal sign for CANCEL. Musk literally X’d out the Twitter logo and bird from the internet. He’s given Thread and TikTok a real shot at replacing Twitter X. It’s not going to happen overnight, but Mr. Musk’s high-dream of X.COM becoming the financial platform for 1/3 of the global banking system is a bit of a crack pipe dream. I don’t think Rogan-weed would make him do such erratic *bs*!

Whatever you think of Musk, he’s keeping himself in the spotlight. On his new platform X he’s the dictator. He can trend any topic he likes. And, Mr. Musk likes himself a lot. Wanna know what the algorithm is for the right-side “trending” topics? Musk. Musk can drive millions of eyeballs in minutes. He has the keys to OZ. But this OZ had no fields of poppies to give us warm fuzzies while we were trying to remember what this ugly X logo was on our phones.

Twitter isn’t dead, it’s just been removed from the playing field. I’m not sure where we go. So far, I’m unimpressed with the alternatives. Threads is “ho-hum.” The others are ghost towns. Taken with Facebook which now has a less-than-1% reach, and LinkedIn which has become a job site rather than a social media platform, you’re seeing the degradation of social media. Sure there are TikTok influencers, YouTube content generators, and writers of all kinds making content. But the CONVERSATION is moving away from X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I’m not sure where it’s going.

The federated metaverse. The Fediverse is set to rebuild all of our social media platforms (for us laymen, our friends) on a decentralized server system of trust and ownership. In the fediverse you own your profile, you own your photos (though anyone can screenshot and repost them), and most importantly, when this network takes over, you OWN your profile, and your marketing demographics, and you may (in the future) be able to generate revenue based on who wants access to your “friends” data. Today, FB, LI, and TW just take it and sell it to the highest bidder. Google, Amazon, and most of the social platforms are the same. They are all in bed together selling swaths of data about you.

Today, your algorithm in the cloud knows where you are going to have lunch. It knows you’re about to buy shoes and backpacks for both of your lovely kids.

Nike and New Balance would like to push some ads to your “platform” of choice. Will you allow it? Will you sell your own marketing data? I know I will not. Until the number becomes significant enough to sell my soul. I don’t know what that number is, but I’m guessing…

… Mr. Musk has a direct line.

John McElhenney — LinkedIn