Elon Musk decided on a complete rebranding of Twitter. Can "X" save a dying social media?
The "Musk revolution" of the social media platform Twitter might be completed tomorrow as the world’s richest man decided on a total re-brand. Elon Musk, also Tesla and SpaceX CEO, purchased the social network last October for $44 billion.
Since then, Elon Musk has enacted a series of fundamental changes to Twitter. He charged a monthly fee for the blue verification checkmark, he charged businesses for Twitter’s API and, most recently, he limited the number of tweets users could read.
All of these changes severely impact user experience and platform usability. According to some estimates, Twitter has lost 90% of its value since Musk purchased it. Twitter is no longer a public company, so a precise assessment of its value is difficult to make.
Elon Musk himself admitted that ad revenues declined by at least 50% since October.
Competition has swiftly reacted to Twitter’s downfall. Meta, the social media conglomerate owner of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, founded a new Twitter-like social media.
Threads, the new app, gained 44 million daily active users at launch. Since then, however, it has lost 70% of its user base, dropping to 13 million with an average daily use of 4 minutes. By comparison, Twitter currently has 200 million active daily users and 30 minutes of average daily use.
Nevertheless, Musk decided on a complete rebranding of the app.
"X"
Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday that "X" would be part of the rebranding. There is uncertainty about whether Twitter will be called "X" or whether "X" will just be part of the name.
In any case, he asked for suggestions and advice, tweeting constantly all day about the matter. In the evening, he joined a Twitter Space session called "No one talk until we summon Elon Musk", where he confirmed the name change will happen soon.
In fact, Musk said Twitter’s logo will change tomorrow, adding: “We’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”
However, these statements took place in the evening on an informal call as Musk was reportedly playing Diablo IV. Therefore, anything he said must be taken with a pinch of salt.
"X" is a notable trademark of Musk’s companies. It was Paypal’s original name (Musk still retains the web domain), his new AI company is called XAI, the letter appears in SpaceX, and one Tesla model is named after it.
The old Paypal domain could be re-used for Twitter. It is unclear if the whole interface will change as well.
Anything is possible on Elon Musk’s Twitter, including the complete destruction and resurrection of a dying social media platform.
