Farewell, Twitter, said Oliver Darcy at CNN. This week, “the text-based social media platform that played an outsize role in society by serving as a digital town square was killed by its unhinged owner, Elon Musk.” Musk officially changed the companys iconic bird logo to an “X” as part of a sweeping rebrand. “X might resemble Twitter,” at least initially, but “it is not the same platform it was” before Musk bought it for $44 billion last October and “quickly decapitated the former leadership and threw the company into chaos and turmoil.” Despite the rebrand, X will still inherit all of Twitters problems, including fleeing advertisers and new competition from Mark Zuckerberg and Threads. Maybe we can find closure now that we can “separate Twitter from what Musk has transformed it into.”
Indeed, Twitter as we knew it is dead, said Mike Allen in Axios. The new name is the first step in Musks bet-the-house gamble of “transforming the platform into a merger of a moneyless marketplace + public square + video content factory — his everything vision for an everything app.” Think Twitter + Substack + YouTube + PayPal + Amazon + TikTok + WeChat + Baidu, all rolled into one. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, whos writing a book about Musk, he has been “plotting the Twitter rebranding for nine months.” Actually, “X” has been “a consistent presence in the billionaires business brandings and personal life for decades,” said Rachel Shin in Fortune. In 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online banking startup, which merged with PayPal. He later repurchased the domain X.com from PayPal in 2017, seemingly “for purely nostalgic purposes.” Now we know he had a plan for it all along.
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The bird had to go, said Peter Franklin in UnHerd. Twitter could be “the perfect launchpad” for an everything app if its not tied to its reputation as a microblogging site. It has “hundreds of millions of users in multiple countries, a super-accessible user interface, and a public profile that, unlike most social networks, does not limit its appeal to narrow demographics.” Those are strong “everything app” credentials. Except that plan hasnt worked for other “companies bigger, richer, and smarter than X,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The conditions that make super apps work in Asia dont apply in the U.S. market, where “consumers arent (for the most part) un- or under-banked, or lacking in credit options.” And “even companies that dominate in many areas — like Google — have learned that consumers dont want everything locked” into one place, due partly to the simple fact that “apps that try to do too much become cluttered and slow.”
“I guess my question is, what was he paying for?” said Matt Levine, also in Bloomberg. “So far, Musk has done a lot to make Twitter less useful but nothing, as far as I can see, to make it more useful.” Adding a fintech element to Twitters messaging capability is interesting, in theory. But all his moves suggest Musk wanted something completely different from Twitter, and he could have built that for far less than $44 billion.
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A WeChat clone is conceptually tiny compared to the projects that have allowed Musk to position himself as a savant: space exploration, rewiring the human brain, and revolutionizing transportation to save the planet, despite X’s desire to be large. The most cynical interpretation of X holds that those who continue to respect Musk are reactionaries who only get happy when their adversaries have been shamelessly trolling them. So long as Musk’s deconstruction of the social network causes misery for the appropriate people, maybe it’s a success. With little other choice, Musk has chosen to mortgage the Twitter brand in order to preserve his own. Even by his standards, it’s a risky bet.
Musk’s reputation depends on people thinking he can create new industries and see around corners to construct futuristic things. His $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was promoted using a lofty vision: Musk would fulfill Twitter’s aspirations to become a truly global town square and find large-scale solutions to the unsolvable issues surrounding free speech. Musk is essentially going back to basics with X after failing at that; it’s a chance for him to rewrite the internet in his own unique way.
It makes sense to question why the richest man in the world would devote his time to destroying one of the most well-known social media platforms in favor of an enigmatic super app that no one requested. Herein lies the third and most significant explanation for X: it is a line of credit for Musk’s reputation. He could, at any time, take off to a private island and sip bottomless piña coladas while laughing about Dogecoin!
With its declamatory urgency, this question has never been more pertinent to Twitter than it has been in the last 48 hours, since Musk decided to rename the thing and erase 17 years’ worth of brand awareness. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.
Not only do Musk and Yaccarino’s descriptions of X imply vaporware—an industry term for a highly anticipated product that never happens—but They feel like something else, too: I’d call it pseudoware. Pseudoware poses as something noteworthy, similar to a pseudo-event, but it is not The press release for this fictitious event is Yaccarino’s Mad Libs-esque tweetstorm, which is all talk of a pivot that has so far taken the form of ornamental changes. Musk’s first tasks have been to create a new logo and project it into the conference rooms at the corporate office. Yaccarino tweeted, “X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” and I believe her when she says that no one has given any of this much thought.
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