new york
CNN
—
Elon Musk's move over the weekend to rebrand Twitter, replacing the iconic bird logo with an X, is just the latest step in his efforts to remake his long-time platform in his own image.
When Musk bought Twitter late last year, he Showed a vision Ahead of the Twitter acquisition, Musk told Twitter employees that the platform should be like China's WeChat, saying that users “basically live on the app” because “it's so easy to use and it helps them in their daily lives.”
The idea of rebranding may date back to when Musk created the original X.com in 1999, which he wanted to become an all-in-one financial platform that eventually became PayPal.
Despite Musk's longstanding ambitions, and the rising stakes since he spent $44 billion to buy the social network, ditching the Twitter brand for a future super app carries big risks.
If Musk wants to build out the services WeChat is known for, from ordering groceries and booking yoga classes to paying bills and chatting with friends, Twitter still has a long way to go — not to mention the financial and competitive challenges the company faces just existing in its current form, let alone launching a major expansion. It's also unclear how much demand there is for such a super app outside of China, given that other platforms have struggled to get off the ground simply selling users on adding shopping features.
“Musk's vision is for 'X' to become an 'everything app,' but that takes time, money and people — three things the company no longer has,” Mike Proulx, research director and vice president at Forrester, said in a note to investors. By dropping the Twitter name, Musk “stands alone with over 15 years of time behind him,” Proulx added. The fresh start comes at a shaky time for the company, with “Selenium” synonymous with “a brand name that has cemented its place in our cultural vocabulary.”
X Brand has already started taking Twitter by storm.
Musk, who bought Twitter in partnership with a company called X Corp., tweeted on Sunday that X.com was now redirecting to Twitter. (Musk reportedly bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017.)
A new stylized X logo was projected onto the company's headquarters on Sunday night, and by Monday, the bird logo had been replaced with an X on Twitter's website. Musk even told his followers that tweets should be called “x.”
On Sunday, CEO Linda Yaccarino seemed to confirm Musk's vision for the company: “X is the future of limitless interactivity centered around audio, video, messaging and payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” Yaccarino said. Tweet.
Jonathan Brady/PA/AP
Elon Musk has officially renamed Twitter to “X” in an effort to turn it into an “everything” app.
Walter Isaacson, a legendary technology journalist who worked closely with Musk to write his biography, Tweeted On Sunday, Musk revealed that even before the Twitter acquisition, he had told Isaacson that he wanted to use the social platform to realize his decades-old vision for X.com. “I'm super excited to use Twitter as an accelerator to help bring X.com to life the way it was always meant to be!” Musk texted Isaacson at 3:30 a.m. last October, just before the acquisition, according to the reporter.
Musk commented on the move on Monday. Tweet “The name Twitter made sense when people sent 140-character messages like bird chirps, but now people can post almost anything, including hours of video.”
“Over the coming months, we'll add comprehensive communications and the ability to manage the entire financial world,” Musk said. “The name Twitter doesn't make sense in that context.”
(The rebranding also seems to be a continuation of a sort of obsession with the letter “X,” which is also used in the name of one of Tesla's cars, the Model X, his rocket company, SpaceX, his new artificial intelligence company, xAI, and the names of his two children, X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl.)
Twitter has quietly begun building out a payments business called Twitter Payments in recent weeks. The company received money-transmission licenses in four U.S. states, including Arizona and Michigan, last month. Musk has said he wants to promote longer videos on Twitter. He's also trying to shift Twitter's business model away from advertising by making users pay a verification fee, a strategy that has caused some confusion but has limited actual subscriber numbers.
Still, Musk faces obvious hurdles in transforming Twitter into a full-blown super app. Since buying Twitter, he's fired about 80% of its staff, alienated many of the advertisers that made up its core user base, and irritated many users with controversial policy decisions. And now Twitter faces stiff competition from Meta's rival app, Threads, which launched with incredible success but has seen a slight decline in usage in recent days.
Musk said last week that Twitter remains cash flow negative because advertising revenue has fallen by 50%.
Even as Musk adds new features to Twitter, many U.S. tech platforms have struggled to replicate WeChat. In a report last year, Deloitte said Western markets were “unlikely to see a single dominant super-app like WeChat emerge in the near future” because there are already “too many established players” in the services that an app like WeChat is trying to bring together, such as digital payments and ride-hailing.
The social media giant, then known as Facebook, said in 2019 it would build its own digital currency and payments system to make online shopping easier, but the plan officially failed last year after facing intense regulatory scrutiny. TikTok and Instagram also reportedly scaled back ambitions to incorporate e-commerce into their platforms after their shopping features failed to gain widespread traction among users.
And until Musk makes significant changes to the platform, ditching Twitter's well-known brand is a risky move, observers of the company say.
“Rebranding without any major new features seems like a desperate attempt to grab attention, especially on the heels of Meta's launch of Threads,” said Joshua White, an assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University. “It's like buying Coca-Cola and changing the bottle and name without changing the formula, which is probably a mistake.”
