If you haven’t already heard, the social media news story that has got everyone talking is regarding Twitter now becoming X.
X.com now redirects to Twitter.com and the logo has been updated to a large white X with a black background, though there are still numerous elements of the old Twitter still present.
This includes the social media platform still inviting users to “tweet”, whilst the blue colour scheme is still present throughout the site, particularly on the Homepage.
The rebrand is the latest sign that there is plenty of work going on behind the scenes at Twitter (or should that now be X), as they continue to become an app that can do “everything,”
“Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app,” the company’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, posted onto his Twitter account regarding the rebrand.
“The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video. In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world.”
Why X?
Musk named his first firm X.com, suggesting that he has had a long-standing obsession with the letter X. (After a merger, the app changed its name to PayPal, but according to author Walter Isaacson, Musk apparently campaigned for it to retain the moniker X.) Musk allegedly texted Isaacson after purchasing Twitter to express his excitement at “finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!”
The letter X appears often in all of Musk’s other projects, including his space exploration business SpaceX, his recently released artificial intelligence programme xAI, and the Model X, one of the original models of Tesla’s electric cars. Musk even uses the moniker X to refer to his child.
Why Should We Care?
The rebrand from Twitter to X is likely to make or break the social media platform. If successful in creating an “everything app”, there is no guarantee that it will work. In fact, many users could find it confusing, or simply become overwrought by sheer scope of what the app can do.
Of course, expanding X’s reach to include shopping and paid subscription content should help to generate additional revenue streams. However, creating a social media platform with these capabilities would require a huge investment in staff and infrastructure.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, Mandeep Singh said that “The investment is a lot in terms of cloud infrastructure — we’re talking about $40 billion, $50 billion in upfront investments.” She continued, “Twitter as a standalone app doesn’t have the infrastructure to become an everything app.”
We also know that the company fired around three-quarters of its staff and has multiple lawsuits over unpaid bills hanging over its head, so it remains to be seen whether X has the finances to deliver on its desire to become the “everything app” that it aspires to be.
