Its been a few months since Elon Musk did anything unhinged enough to warrant coverage, but it was only a matter of time before he was back in the spotlight.
It wasn’t the birth of yet another child — we give Nick Cannon grief, but Musk is just as bad — or a massive controversy that brought him into conversations this time, either. It was a simple question, posed to the masses on Musk’s social media platform, but one that received a starkly different response from what the petulant billionaire clearly expected.
In the year or so since Musk first purchased Twitter for an eye-watering $44 billion, he’s been pushing hard to give the site a makeover. It hasn’t undergone any major aesthetic changes, but Musk’s biggest alterations are still struggling to stick more than 12 months in.
The implementation of a charge for verified users is deeply disliked among frequent Twitter visitors, but it wasn’t enough to kill the site completely. It did lead a chunk of people to depart the platform for greener pastures, but in many ways its still more popular than Musk’s other major change. That saw him attempt to pivot the site’s name from Twitter to simply X, an alteration that proved widely unpopular among the app’s user base.
In response, people simply opted out. They continued to post tweets, chit chat on the platform, and generally enjoy its services, and they continued to call it Twitter. They type “Twitter” into the search bar when looking for the site, and when they speak of it in conversations it is rarely, if ever, referenced as X.
It took awhile, but it seems Musk has finally caught onto the broad dismissal most users are treating the name change with. In an attempt to prove the new name far more popular than it actually is, Musk even went to Twitter (sorry, X), and quickly found himself shot down by the very people he was appealing to.
Musk tweeted (there’s no X equivalent for the term — almost as if X is a terrible name for a social media site) out a query to the online masses in late April, asking people to “be honest” and provide their votes on whether or not “the name X is far better than Twitter.”
And honest they were. People flooded the comment section of Musk’s tweet with their laid-bare opinions, and they did not disappoint. Comments range from the straightforward — “The name X sucks. Twitter is SO much better” — to the harsh — “bro it is literally still twitter we are just waiting for you to leave” — but all land on the same consensus: No one but Musk himself likes the name X.
This sentiment echoed from every portion of the platform, from its quietest corners to its most-followed accounts. Both Stephen King and Mark Hamill even got in on the pushback, and it only took a word each for the stars to lay X bare.
For King, that word was simply “Twitter” — a phrase he repeated several times, just to make sure Musk got the message.
Hamill went an even more simplistic route, opting to just answer Musk’s question rather than bog himself down in details.
Both sentiments are broadly echoed across the response to Musk’s pleading tweet. The app is home to a truly baffling number of Musk sycophants, and even they weren’t enough to provide the tweet with a positive lilt. There’s not a pro-Musk sentiment to be found in the comment section, as people rush to the post to share their (exclusively negative) thoughts on the new name.