Elon Musk completed Twitter’s rebranding to "X" on Monday. Today, he revealed the purpose of this decision.
Despite confirming it while playing Diablo IV, Twitter owner Elon Musk enacted the "X" rebrand overnight. The site logo has been changed and the domain is now X.com (though it still appears as Twitter.com).
On Tuesday, Elon Musk confirmed that the rebranding is a strategy to completely revolutionize Twitter’s purpose. Not a social media platform anymore, but rather a financial service encompassing the entire world.
"In the months to come," Musk "x-ed", "we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."
"X" is a recurring trademark in Elon Musk’s companies. One Tesla model is named after the letter, his space company is called "SpaceX" and his new artificial intelligence research firm is named "XAI".
"X.com" used to be Paypal’s domain. Paypal, the online banking company founded by Elon Musk in 1999, retained its current name following a board decision. In 2017, Elon Musk purchased back the "X.com" domain.
Since Musk personally purchased the platform last October, he has turned the user experience upside down with absurd, often contradictory measures. He charged a fee for the blue verification checkmark, he limited the number of tweets users could read per day, he charged businesses for Twitter APIs...
With this rebranding, his vision becomes clearer. But will this revolution be successful?
Trial and error
The idea of "Fintwit" (finance on Twitter) is not new. Last April, Elon Musk announced a partnership with the trading platform eToro for trading Bitcoin directly on Twitter.
"There is very high-quality content, real-time content on financial analysis of companies and what’s happening around the world,” said eToro CEO Yoni Assia at the time. “We believe this partnership will enable us to reach those new audiences and connect better the brands of Twitter and eToro."
There has been no development of this partnership since then. Indeed, if "BTC" is searched on X, the eToro logo has disappeared. At the moment, only a small daily graph is visible on the platform, with a direct link to a trading view page for technical analysis.
How Elon Musk will turn X into a financial trading platform is unclear. However, he has repeatedly expressed his desire to make Twitter a "super app".
"Super apps" are Chinese applications where users can complete most online activities, from shopping to searching, from social networking to trading. They are heavily criticized in the West for data scraping by the Chinese central government, considered an unethical surveillance mechanism.
Will X become Musk’s personal surveillance tool? Will he succeed in changing Twitter’s face?
