Twitter is soon to be no more. No, it hasn’t collapsed, although each day the platform feels increasingly rickety. Instead, the social media platform is being reborn under a new name: X.
Why shed its famous bird visage? The rebranding is the latest edict of Elon Musk, who has a long relationship with the letter. It’s the name of the online bank he co-founded in the 1990s that, after a merger, became PayPal (earning Musk his first $100 million). It’s part of SpaceX. It’s the name of one of his Tesla models. Musk even renamed Twitter’s parent company to X Corp.
The move is a signal that Musk continues to push the company towards his dream of transforming Twitter into “X, the everything app”. This is a plan to replicate China’s WeChat, an app that combines messaging with, among other features, payment services. You can do everything from chatting with your friends to paying your rent in WeChat. It’s ubiquitous and very profitable, everything that Twitter is not.
Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino used the moment to take the promise further: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” she wrote.
These futuristic pitches paint a bright future for the app that its leaders hope will blind people to the current state of things. Twitter has been in terminal decline since Musk took over. Now a fellow tech billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, has launched a competitor, Threads, which had more than 100 million sign-ups in less than a week (although not all these new users have stuck around). Just last week, Musk admitted the company is losing money because of a 50% drop in revenue and debt — both problems of his own creation.
It’s one thing to promise that his everything app could “become half of the global financial system”. It’s another to make this pledge while mismanaging a previously moderately successful app.
During Musk’s 10 months of ownership, drastic staff layoffs make it unlikely the company has the technical capability to add significant new features as planned. Plus who’s going to trust it even if it does? It’s hard to imagine many reasonable people are going to look at the erratic way Musk has managed the platform — remember the inexplicable changing of Twitter’s logo to the Dogecoin logo? — and decide to let the platform manage their finances.
Musk’s everything-app pitch is at best another example of his predilection towards moonshot “predictions” that feed the mythos of him as a futuristic inventor. At worst, it’s a cynical ploy to distract from the reality that Twitter has gone backwards under his reign. Realistically, it’s probably both.
This will be the last time that I write about “Twitter” if Musk is to be believed. But his track record suggests it’s unwise to believe this will be the case.
