Years before Elon Musk wound up purchasing Twitter (TWTR), the tech billionaire tweeted his plans to create a website designed to track the truth and credibility of each article, journalist, editor, and publication that was on the platform. He said in 2018 he was thinking of calling this proposed website ‘Pravda’ – the Russian word for truth – which is also, incidentally, the name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1918 until 1991.
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Musk even went so far as to officially incorporate the business, called Pravda Corp, in California, according to CNN. But that was before he bought Twitter.
Musk retweeted the four-year-old Pravda tweet on April 24, saying simply: “Or maybe just X.”
This is not the first time Musk has talked about ‘X.’
“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk tweeted, not long after purchasing Twitter for that whopping $44 billion in October, 2022.
In 2022, Musk also spoke about the opportunity of a ‘super app’ in the US, citing Chinese super app WeChat – a messaging app where users can call taxis, order food, and game – as the model he’d like to follow.
“I think of, like, WeChat in China, which is actually a great, great app, but there’s no WeChat movement outside of China. And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that,” he said in a 2022 Town Hall with Twitter employees. “You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”
In addition to his X-corp-related filings, Musk, according to the Financial Times, is working on building a payment system within Twitter. He also partnered with eToro – a stock and crypto trading company – earlier in the month in a move that has allowed Twitter users access to buy and sell stock through ‘cashtags’.
And on April 11, Bloomberg reported that Twitter had merged with a shell company called “X Corp,” a move that seemingly furthered Musk’s plans to create an “everything app.”
As of April 18, Twitter Inc. ceased to exist.
