X Is Bad, Though

I think he’s a great writer. I think he’s smart as hell. He’s annoyingly funny, too. I am impressed and inspired by his success with both Daring Fireball and The Talk Show.

I get excited when John links to one of my apps or articles. When he linked to my story about relaunching Strategery, that led to a wave of extra exposure orders of magnitude over a typical story on this site.

With decreasing subtlety over the past few weeks, John keeps pointing out that there’s a lot of fun to be had over on X, culminating in his piece today that “X Once Again Marks The Spot.”

His point, as I see it, is that yes, Elon Musk is awful, but the X algorithm no longer shoves his posts into John’s feed, and new Apple CEO John Ternus is posting there (along with other Apple executives), and that there are interesting people who post on X and not elsewhere.

That all may be true. But it’s not the point.

It is true that X has, by some definition, “won.” Elon bought it, quickly ruined it, squandered its great Twitter branding, drove many users off the platform — but because it’s the most popular microblogging platform, it continues to succeed. And business leaders like Ternus, celebrities, and other smart and interesting people are posting there again, or they never left.

But it’s also true that Elon Musk absolutely sucks. Let’s use receipts.

For the record, Musk says he’s not antisemitic, not a Nazi, and just protecting kids. I think his words tell a different story.

So the question becomes this: Can you disagree with Elon Musk, or consider him an anti-trans, racist Nazi, and still use X?

Full disclosure: I still own two Teslas. They’re old. One’s from 2017; one’s from 2019. We bought them, as our bumper stickers say, before we knew Elon was crazy. They have unlimited supercharging, so I feel like I’m costing Elon money every time I use them. I’m selling one of the two as soon as our new car arrives, which should be any day now. Tesla replaced the full battery on it recently under warranty, again, at their $20,000 expense, which brought me great joy — since they had to pay it and I didn’t.

I don’t visit X because I think X profits benefit Elon Musk, and I think Elon Musk is a bad person. My kids loved Harry Potter, but we don’t give any more money to trans-hater JK Rowling, either.

It’s hard to miss out on fun things. I miss what Twitter was. I wish I were still enjoying the party. But I sleep way better at night knowing I’m taking the steps I can to not make that smug, rich, hateful asshole any richer.

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