Bid Larry the Bird goodbye. On July 31, 2023, Elon Musk rebranded famous social media platform, Twitter, into “X.” Users find what’s left of the app is unrecognizable.
The Tesla CEO’s long battle to seize control of Twitter officially ended once he acquired the company Oct. 27, 2022. After trying to back out of it due to spam concerns, the court issued his follow through, and he purchased the platform for $44 billion. He expressed in a BBC interview that controlling Twitter since then has been grueling.
“The pain level has been extremely high, this hasn’t been some kind of party,” Musk said. What could’ve instigated this reaction? For one, X has not been profitable. According to the BBC, almost half of their ad revenue plummeted since the rebrand and without sufficient advertising, a social media site simply cannot make money.
As ad revenue decreased, so did the number of workers. To change the entire identity of the company and ensure profit, the SpaceX CEO laid off “just under 8,000” employees, as stated in the BBC interview.
“The company’s going to go bankrupt if we do not cut costs immediately,” Musk said. The rebrand not only dissatisfied fired employees, but the general public as well. Many found the change to be an unintelligent brand tactic that will propel them into bankruptcy, seeing as Twitter and its terminology have become staples in pop culture. User @ManyATrueNerd is one of the many who reacted poorly to the rebrand.
“Twitter is ludicrously successful as a brand. Even people who aren’t that active online know roughly what it is, and what a tweet is,” one of the user’s tweets read. “To throw that level of brand ubiquity away is staggeringly dumb.” The logo is now an edgy and forbidding X. The url reads, “X.com” which some claim to be sketchy, and the announcement videos with their fast-paced, glitchy editing style are seen as tacky.
“Add some dubstep and it will make a great youtube gaming intro,” @grandayy tweeted in response to the official trailer.
Alongside profit, employee and terminology changes, the verification system shifted to become a last grab for users’ money. To acquire a blue checkmark, one must pay for “X Premium.” Previously called Twitter Blue, the subscription offers extra features such as Post editing, which provides a one-hour grace period to change a published post, Half ads, to see approximately 50% fewer ads, and Text formatting, which grants the ability to bold and italicize text. It costs $8 per month or $84 per year in available countries.Before Musk’s rebranding, the blue checkmark was only awarded to important personalities and content creators.
That being said, the rushed, money-grabbing technicalities of X’s rebrand distract from its ultimate goal. Surprisingly, its purpose is not only to serve as an outlet for the owner’s hyperfixation with the letter X, as shown by naming two of his ten children X Æ A-Xii and Exa. Musk wants X to serve as the internet’s hub and super app, where users can discuss ideas of all topics and viewpoints.
“We will add [communications] and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” Musk said.
Mainly, Musk wants it to be a center for free speech, with the “Community Notes” present for users themselves to combat misinformation by adding context to public posts.
“So the goal is to have Twitter be the best source of truth,” Musk said.
Whether this works out is up in the air. So far, X’s future looks quite dim. The rebranding eliminated an audience of both avid Twitter users and interested advertisers. Twitter, with all of its controversies, cemented itself into pop culture. If not enough people are eager to say “xeet” over “tweet,” X will certainly mark the spot for a futile app.
