Elon Musk says no more birds. Elon Musk’s X Factor:
Twitter owner and billionaire Elon Musk tweeted, “The bird is freed,” when he bought Twitter last year.
the bird is freed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022
It was assumed he was talking to freeing the platform from its metaphorical constraints. He has now kicked the brand out of the nest entirely.
Elon Musk’s statement on Sunday that he was rebranding Twitter as X is the latest in a series of dramatic shifts by the owner of the social media network. If Twitter isn’t worth the $44 billion Musk paid for it in October, it could be worth much less today if it abandons its well-known brand name and avian logo (Musk stated on Sunday that it would soon be time to say “adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”).
Regardless of how hurried Sunday’s events appeared, the birth of X had long been in the works, with the helter-skelter vibe of the rebranding exercise highlighted by the choice of a crowdsourced design based on an international encoding standard. The X brand has made a loud debut as a result of the resulting splash.
Last year, Elon Musk tweeted that “buying Twitter was an accelerator to creating X, the everything app”.
Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2022
The world’s richest man has suggested that the social networking platform be transformed into a product similar to WeChat, a massively popular Chinese app that allows users to do anything from texting to ordering a cab and paying bills.
“In China, you basically live on WeChat. “We’ll be a huge success if we can recreate that with Twitter,” he reportedly told Twitter employees last year. For a long time, the concept of X has hung over the company. Twitter as a firm has already been absorbed into X Corp, whose parent company is X Holdings Corp.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino sketched out what an X app may look like, tweeting that it would be “centered on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking.” Twitter has begun the regulatory process of becoming a payments processor, and Elon Musk, who co-founded online bank x.com in 1999, which subsequently became PayPal, has hinted that Twitter may provide debit cards and loans.
Advertising revenue, historically Twitter’s main source of revenue, has been severely harmed by an advertiser boycott caused by anticipates over the platform’s moderation standards – Musk admits it is down by 50%. The business requires new revenue streams.
According to one expert, Twitter, or X, does not have the time, money, or staff to carry out such a shift. The company is deeply indebted as a result of a $13 billion debt burden imposed upon Musk’s takeover, while most of the workforce has been laid off, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has created a clone “Twitter killer” product called Threads.
“While Musk’s vision is to turn X into a ‘everything app,’ this requires time, money, and people – three things that the company no longer has,” says Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester. “While Musk’s company continues to lose money, disenfranchised Twitter users will increasingly turn to Threads.” Simply put, X’s runway is going down.”
Shortly before announcing the X move, Musk stated that Twitter was still cashflow-negative, meaning it spent more to run the business than it took in, and that the company needed to achieve positive cashflow “before we have the luxury of anything else.” Even though the platform is controlled by the world’s richest man, this is a challenging environment to change the platform’s business strategy.
According to Farhad Divecha, general director of the UK digital marketing business Accuracast, changing the logo will not bring back advertisers, but developing a realistic “everything app” will. “The logo change marks the beginning of the transition to his vision of X.” We don’t recommend advertising spend on board just yet, but we are keeping a careful eye on the situation.”
Threads‘ popularity has dropped following a strong start, reducing the threat to Twitter’s major source of revenue, even though Meta has stated that it has no imminent plans to add adverts. However, the unveiling of the X rebranding demonstrates Musk’s determination to shift the business model elsewhere, wings or no wings.