This was originally posted 3 years ago. Opinions, facts and reality may have changed.
This is how you play the long game.
In 1999, a young South African entrepreneur by the name of Elon Musk started an online bank with some business chums. They called it X.com, a year later it merged with its biggest competitor, and two years after that the now re-named PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5bn.
Such was the plucky South African’s sentimental attachment to the name, that in July 2017, he bought the domain name X.com from PayPal. And then sat on it. And waited.
He then busied himself with excursions into space travel, electric cars and digging huge tunnels but X.com was never far from his thoughts.
Then, in October 2022, this shy and retiring entrepreneur found himself the owner of the world’s largest soap box, the social networking formerly (currently?) known as Twitter. After fighting through court not to have to buy it let us not forget.
Buying Twitter was, he said, “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”. It would become “the most valuable financial institution in the world,” he later added.
The model is presumably WeChat, a Chinese app which allows users to do everything from chat and call friends, pay bills, play video games and – allegedly – be spied upon by the government.
It’s unclear if Musk intends to follow this model completely.
So now, Mr Musk has renamed Twitter as X. The unknown quantity. The kiss. The adults only classification. The… well, who knows. Actually, perhaps it’s named after his son X AE A-XII Musk?
Following the announcement Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino Tweeted: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”
Which is vague enough to cover a variety of different plans which very definitely exist and haven’t been made up by Musk over the weekend.
So now, X Corp is the successor to Twitter Inc, which is owned by X Holdings Corp which is wholly-owned by Elon Musk.
Is the Musk brand strong enough to carry this change going forward? When Facebook renamed its parent company Meta, it made sense as the company also owned Instagram and WhatsApp. But X only owns Twitter. And, like it or not, Twitter is a well-known (if not well-respected) brand and has been for more than 15 years.
The timing is interesting, as Twitter is in existential danger from the launch of Meta’s new Threads app which – this is not a legal opinion and merely said for ease of explanation – is a carbon copy of the (in)famous Twitter timeline and associated services.
Perhaps not the best time to completely change your product’s name one might suggest?
Or is the last roll of the dice for Twitter, which it’s generally believed Musk overpaid for and has lost 50 per cent of its advertising revenue since the takeover?
This is the point in the blog post where you’d typically expect a vague sales message but it feels churlish to recommend that the world’s (occasionally) richest man might require some help. But, just in case you do… give us a call Elon.