They had a brand that was so powerful it was used as a verb, and he gave it up for the letter that is used as a generic placeholder, just because he's obssessed with it for whatever reason.
Its a good use of brevity. Otherwise it would look like this:
“twitter (which is currently named x and will be renamed back to Twitter after the eventual decline and subsequent fire sale of the smoldering remains of the company)”
While funny, it wasn't intended as a burn. They are reporting on events that happened at Twitter, because it was named Twitter when these things happened, and is now called X.
It won't always be called X. 2027: Elon buys a domain registrar. 2031: Elon buys unicode. 2032: Elon allows unicode in domain names. The same day, Elon adds an "Xtreme X" emoji to unicode (it sort of looks like it's spinning, xtreme style), and registers the domain.
2024: Elon is found guilty of failing to uphold the obligations imposed on Twitter back in their 2011 lawsuit around misuse of information; Former Twitter staff are found to have heroically attempted to follow the law but were fired for doing so; Elon is ordered to sell X
2025: Mastodon buys it for five million dollars; Elon is forced to sell all his shares in Tesla/SpaceX to pay a $200b fine to the FTC (his net worth is $201b, so he'd still be filthy rich - important to make the fine actually payable so he can't declare bankruptcy);
late 2025: Mastodon rebrands X to Twitter which becomes just another Fediverse instance. One that is popular among high profile celebrities who can pay a fee to have their identity verified. One where posting discriminatory content gets you banned, permanently. Anyone who retweets your post is also banned for a month.
2026: FTC sets gets to use all $200 billion on their own budget in order to hire more staff and do their job properly going forward
2027 into the foreseeable future: every company in America suddenly starts pro-actively obeying FTC regulations instead of waiting for enforcement actions that almost never happen due to a lack of funding.
Ultimately the third-party individuals did not receive direct access to Twitter's systems, but instead worked with other company employees who accessed the systems on the individuals' behalf.
Everybody who is still there must see him as their master, either voluntarily due to a cult-like demeanor or due to visa restrictions that equal servitude.
Twitter employees prevented Elon Musk from violating the company's privacy settlement with the US government, according to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
The access given to outside individuals raised concerns that Twitter (which is currently named X) violated a 2022 settlement with the FTC, which has requirements designed to prevent repeats of previous security failures.
The deposition testimony revealed that in early December 2022, Elon Musk had reportedly directed staff to grant an outside third-party individual "full access to everything at Twitter... No limits at all."
When contacted by Ars, an FTC spokesperson said the agency cannot rule out bringing lawsuits against Musk's social network for violations of the settlement or US law.
"When we heard credible public reports of potential violations of protections for Twitter users' data, we moved swiftly to investigate," the FTC said in a statement today.
In a filing, US government lawyers said the FTC investigation had "revealed a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring X Corp.'s compliance with the 2022 Administrative Order."
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