Twitter is rebranding to X, the app that does everything, despite the fact that it’s currently struggling to do anything
Of all the letters in the alphabet, ‘X’ is undeniably the coolest. ‘X’ is the letter that’s seen it all, that’s out of fucks to give, that laughs in the face of your rules and chuckles at your conventions. Alluring and dangerous in equal respect, ‘X’ is a siren song calling out to you from the dark side of the fair. ‘X’ is the unknown, the mysterious, the ambiguous: it represents life and death, good and evil, Jesus Christ and Satan. It is a kiss at the end of a text from your grandmother; it is a steamy night of pleasure, ecstasy, and furious wanking.
So is it any wonder that the coolest man on Earth – Elon Musk – would feel such a connection to it? In his latest attempt to revive Twitter’s flagging fortunes (since his take-over last year, advertising revenues have plummeted by over 50 per cent), Musk has decided to scrap the OG bird logo and rebrand the site as X – a move which, while it appears rash, has been over 20 years in the making.
Since starting out as an entrepreneur in the late 1990s, Musk has been infatuated with the letter ‘X’. In 2001, the second company he founded – an online banking service called x.com – merged with competitor Confinity, creating what was eventually to become PayPal. Musk pushed hard to keep ‘x.com’, but was rebuffed by his fellow executives (including Peter Thiel), who argued – not unreasonably – that the associations were too pornographic. He was outed from the board not long after but, like a middle-aged man still trying to make his high school rock band happen, he has never got over his favorite letter and the possibilities it represents.
Along with ‘X’, an enduring obsession of Musk has been the creation of an “everything app”, which combines social media, instant messaging, online finance, games, and services like booking flights or hailing a taxi. While this is ambitious, China’s ‘WeChat’ – the world’s most popular app – shows that such a model is possible. Following the announcement of Twitter’s rebrand yesterday, CEO Linda Yaccarino indicated that this is the direction the company is taking. She wrote, “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered 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.”
An app that does everything is all well and good but, as it stands, Twitter is struggling to do anything. In recent months the site has been plagued by technical difficulties and regular outages. At best, being on Twitter today is a frustrating experience filled with glitches and error messages; at worst, the site is flat-out unusable. In the wake of mass redundancies, the company feels like it’s hanging together by a thread – it’s hard to see why anyone would feel confident in using it for personal finance or carrying out important tasks. If I can’t reliably use Twitter to watch videos of funny raccoons or write lengthy threads about why Barbie is neoliberal, I’m not going to use it to pay my bills.
Elon Musk claims to be a fan of the letter ‘X’, but by attempting to harness it for profit, he has failed to respect its wildness, its mysticism, its essential unknowability. Let that be his downfall. Let ‘X’ mark the spot where the man’s reign of cringe finally comes to an end.
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