Yahoo Finance Twitter reborn: X may yet mark the spot where Elon Musk strikes gold
Another week, another eccentric pronouncement from Elon Musk about the future of Twitter. Or should that now be the future of X?
On Sunday afternoon, he revealed that henceforth, the site he bought for $44 billion last year would be known as X. He changed his own profile to X.com, and revealed a new logo, emblazoned on the walls of Twitter HQ in California: a narrow white parallelogram bisected by a single white line.
“Looking forward to working with Linda [Yaccarino, Twitter’s CEO] to transform this platform into X, the everything app,” he wrote, later adding, “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.
Musk left a more detailed breakdown to Yaccarino, who routinely finds herself in her boss’s chaotic wake. “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” she wrote.
“Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square. X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
This eccentric announcement did not come as a surprise to Musk-watchers. Since buying the social networking site last October, he has undertaken a series of radical and whimsical reforms including sacking a reported 80 per cent of the staff, and letting Donald Trump back on the platform.
Advertisers and users have been critical of the changes, particularly getting rid of the blue tick and announcing a paid-for tier. Meanwhile, Musk’s rival Mark Zuckerberg has introduced a competitor app, Threads.
Musk has also been obsessed with the letter X for at least a quarter of a century. The letter is a constant that recurs throughout his various activities. So what is its significance? In 1999, the then 27-year-old Musk founded X.com, a financial services and payments company. He reportedly liked the name, despite its innuendo.
According to Julie Anderson Ankenbrandt, a colleague who was present for a meeting in a Silicon Valley cafe where Musk was discussing possible names, a waitress had the final say over whether it should be called x,y or z.com.
X.com eventually merged with PayPal, a name his co-founders had always preferred, and which was eventually bought by eBay. In 2002, when Musk founded his space exploration company, he named it SpaceX.
“The X in SpaceX stands for Exploration,” says Eric Berger, the author of a history of SpaceX. “What it means at Twitter is far less clear to me.”
Most dramatically, in 2020 Musk announced that he and his girlfriend, the singer Grimes, had named their son X Æ A-12. Grimes said that the X stood for “the unknown variable”. As the name would have been illegal under Californian law, they later modified it to X Æ A-Xii Musk, with X as a first name. (X’s sister, born in 2022, was called Exa Dark Sideræl Musk but changed latterly to Y).
Writing about the rebranded business on Sunday, Musk said the X embodied “the imperfections in us all that make us unique”.
One gets the impression that X’s appeal to Musk might lie in what it does not mean. An X is an open-ended question; a business called Twitter, with a bird logo, is tied to its past. A business called X could be anything, or everything. Similarly, a child called Edward, say, or Elon, belongs to a fixed global population of people with that particular name. It means something. The child is rooted in a specific history.
A child called X Æ A-Xii comes with fewer associations, which may be a comfort to him when he is having his lunch money stolen. Musk’s grand plan is to help humanity leave Earth and live on Mars, the opposite of being rooted.
In 2017, he bought the rights to X.com back from PayPal. At the time, he wrote: “Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back X.com! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.” Soon after buying Twitter, he hinted at the company’s direction when he incorporated it into a holding company called X Corp. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk revealed last October.
Not everyone is convinced there is a grand theory at work. “The mistake we make is thinking he has a plan,” says Bruce Daisley, a workplace culture consultant who was a vice president at Twitter until 2020. “He has no plan, none of the site has been prepared for a change. It was a whim. From start to finish, Musk has been intent on burning down any evidence that someone was [at Twitter] before him, because it serves to remind people that someone other than him has helped form his product.”
By getting rid of the word Twitter, points out Daisley, Musk and co are doing away with one of the few company names that has become a verb: we refer to “tweeting” as we do “Hoovering”.
“It speaks to a fragile ego and an appalling instinct for branding,” he says. “Do you think news outlets are to say ‘on X someone sent a tweet’ or ‘parped an X’ (or whatever the clowns invent)? No, they’ll say ‘on social media someone posted’. The whole brand equity will be gone.”
The model for “everything apps” is mostly WeChat, in China, where customers can perform all sorts of actions – and transactions – through a single platform, where one app replaces what would be several. But it remains to be seen whether the rest of the world is ready for a one-app-does-everything model of business.
Nor is it unknown for tech companies to change their names as they grow and have more services under their umbrella.
“[This kind of rebrand] is hardly unknown in the tech world,” says Paul Armstrong, an emerging tech adviser and founder of TBD Group. “Facebook and Google did something similar when they became Meta and Alphabet. It’s not uncharted territory, but it’s the way Musk does things that people take issue with. It’s clear Twitter isn’t gaining momentum as it probably should do.”
Meta and Alphabet had a clear etymology: Meta reflected Zuckerberg’s belief in the future of the metaverse, while Alphabet had a link to the way that Google uses language to power its search. The change from Twitter to X, however, remains enigmatic.
While it might be confusing in the short term, the brand is another example of Musk’s vaulting ambition, according to Rory Sutherland, an author and vice-chairman at Ogilvy, the advertising agency.
“Whatever else you might criticise Musk for, you can’t say he has a lack of ambition, or desire to shake things up. I don’t know whether he’s using X as a variable or intends for it to be called the X App – he is undoubtedly highly whimsical. I agree with him that Twitter has more potential value than actual value. But rebrands have a very chequered history. A large part of the value of a brand is its familiarity.”
Now Musk has shot the bird and tried to defamiliarise his app – time will tell whether or not it works.
X may yet mark the spot where Musk strikes gold for the future of the business. Or it could be another milestone towards Twitter becoming an ex-business.
Either way, Musk has not ceased to be entertaining.
