X is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between September 13, 2023 and April 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "When he started the original X (later PayPal),"; "worst thing he's done at Twitter/X"; "X and the rest are pulling every trick they know to prevent you from leaving their walled garden". It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, Twitter, Ashlee Vance.
- Article page
- X
- Mention count
- 6
- Issue count
- 6
- First seen
- September 13, 2023
- Last seen
- April 06, 2026
Outbound links
- http://amazon.com/Bayesian-Probability-Babies-Chris-Ferrie/dp/1492680796
- http://astralcodexten.substack.com/932d293e
- http://datacolada.org/36
- http://donquixote.fun/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_marriage_in_Judaism
- http://foresightexchange.com
- http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LJwGdex4nn76iA8xy/some-blindspots-in-rationality-and-effective-altruism
- http://gusevlab.org/projects/hsq/#h.eujbeu4ca5ot
- http://meetup.com/acx_toledo
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/EP085647/full
- http://perspicacity.xyz
- http://prismatext.com
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Definitely no. For one thing, he usually ends up in an industry by coincidence. He went into aerospace because he wanted to pull a publicity stunt with mice on Mars, tried to buy a rocket from the Russians, they were going to rip him off, and he decided to build a better rocket to spite them. He went into cars because the founders of Tesla asked him for an investment, he liked the company, and then he thought they were doing a bad job and he needed to take over. He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.
I think this level of intensity - combined with a high-even-if-not-unprecedently-high level of engineering ability - is enough to explain why he succeeds despite his flaws. Do you think Elon will succeed at X/Twitter? I lean towards yes.
On the other hand, this time Ashlee Vance himself is skeptical. He says:
Inline links: Ashlee Vance himself is skeptical
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience 2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence 3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health 4: ...About Tesla 5: ...About The Boring Company 6: ...About X/Twitter 7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan 8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures 9: Other Comments 10: Updates
I’ve heard via my personal network (which I trust more than this Ashlee Vance book) that Musk did used to drill down into engineering level decisions at SpaceX. Whether he’s actually extremely technically proficient, I don’t know. I’ve also heard this has slowed down a lot in the last few years since he’s focused on Twitter. (Note that the above is hearsay, I’ve never met the man myself or worked for any of his companies).
heliotropic on Twitter writes:
Inline links: writes
You see his face from a different angle, and something snaps into place. “Hey, aren’t you @DanielC35801 from Twitter?”
“Like links, but not deboosted on social media. X and the rest are pulling every trick they know to prevent you from leaving their walled garden. Now the customer is getting some tricks of their own to fight back. Next we’re working on implanting QR codes in videos, so your links can get maximal algorithmic boosting.”
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“Lots of people are tripped up by not condemning enough things. Imagine that you want to express discontent with the Trump administration restricting food stamps, but someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn food insecurity for white people but you didn’t condemn the famine in Gaza equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Gaza, and someone points out that it’s pretty suspicious that you condemn starvation when it makes Jews look like the bad guys, but you didn’t condemn the famine in Ethiopia equally hard. So you try condemning the famine in Ethiopia, but then people tell you that’s ‘telescopic altruism’, because you didn’t condemn a murder that happened in your own city. So you try condemning a murder in your own city, but it was a black-on-white murder, and people say that it’s pretty suspicious that you didn’t condemn the latest white-on-black murder equally hard. The only solution is to monitor the news 24-7, condemning each thing as soon as it happens, in exact proportion to how bad it is. But nobody has time for that. So you give us access to your Twitter account and we do it for you. We promise not only to condemn all bad things within one business day of them happening, but to use all the appropriate words. You know those politicians who get in trouble because they condemned “the recent massacre” in vague terms but didn’t use the words “terrorism” or “radical Islam”, or because they said “killed” instead of “murdered”? If they’d used Condemnr, we could have tweeted “We condemn the recent radical Islamic terrorist massacre in Fairtown that murdered nine people #terrorism #radicalislam #murder”, and their PR would be immaculate.”
“Yeah,” says Vinaya. “I think I might be the only one. The thing is - it feels like profanity ought to mean something. There ought to be words where if you say them, people will audibly gasp. Mothers will pull back their children and say ‘No, no, don’t interact with that person, they use profanity!’ But you can’t do that anymore. People like to imagine they become some sort of dangerous motorcycle gangster when they say ‘fuck’. But the least cool person you know says ‘fuck’ all the time. They have a Twitter account that consists entirely of statements like ‘The orange fuckface is up to his usual fuckcrustable chumpfuckery’. The sort of people who the thinkpiece writers imagine using ‘heckin’ actually have a brand of mustard in their fridge called something like ‘Dan’s Fucking Awesome Spicy Mustard’ and never miss an opportunity to point it out to visitors. Something’s got to give. So I asked myself - what word will genuinely make strangers gasp? What makes your friends take you aside privately and tell you that you really shouldn’t be saying words like that? What do the self-appointed guardians of good taste treat as totally beyond the pale, as so radically Other that it automatically makes you one of the outcasts of society? And the only answer that made sense was ‘heckin’. Which is obvious in retrospect. It’s the Barberpole Model Of Fashion all over again. In 1960, the most rebellious and dangerous thing imaginable was a socialist who wore bandanas and supported equal rights for black people. Gradually more and more people who wanted to look cool and dangerous took this identity, until it became the cringiest and most try-hard thing imaginable, and now the really rebellious and dangerous youth are differentiating themselves by dressing in fancy pressed shirts and being racist. It’s a generational cycle. In the same way, once every last milligram of edginess has been squeezed out of the word fuck, the age of heckin will begin anew.”
“Nishin, have you been using Twitter again?”
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