Elon, X and That Sink-In Feeling

The one year anniversary of “let that sink in” day

Stephen Moore
9 min readNov 8, 2023

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Laughing at your own joke / Image: Badly edited by author

This article was originally published on my Substack, Trend Mill.

When Elon Musk stepped into Twitter X HQ as its new owner, he came armed with some high-brow humor in the form of a porcelain sink. It made him laugh. The rest of the company cringed and braced themselves. X was about to enter into a period of erratic disruption associated with Musk’s brand of entrepreneurship.

In that sense, he hasn’t failed to deliver.

A year from “let that sink in” day, there’s barely been a quiet moment in the so-called public town square. That’s an understatement — for much of the year, the platform has been buried in chaos, at times, barely hanging on by a thread. (Yes, that’s a Meta pun). While Musk’s spontaneous product strategy — i.e., making decisions at 3 am while sitting on the toilet scrolling X — has never failed to cause outrage among the user base, it has often failed to improve the product itself.

To mark the year, I thought it would be fun to pull out the biggest changes, features and decisions, marking each as a win or fail, to examine how the company has fared. (I’m sure you know the answer to that).

The problem is that when trying to do everything, you…

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Stephen Moore

Writer, editor, part-time furniture maker. Subscribe to Trend Mill for critical takes on our dystopian metaverse hellscape future - https://www.trend-mill.com