20. Elon Musk crosses out Twitter

Made with Midjourney.

I.

So, Twitter is now called X. Elon Musk has changed the name and wrung the neck of the blue bird, but the creature is still twitching. The app is now called X on your phone, but Twitter in the App Store. Posting something is still called tweeting (on most platforms). A subscription is still called Twitter Blue.

This week I spoke with two marketing experts to ask them about the possible effects of a rebranding like this. I got two people on the line who also couldn’t immediately understand why the name X was being pushed through so hastily.

Rebranding is commonplace, they said. Nuon became Vattenfall, Smiths became Lays. Usually such a change happens because of a push for efficiency, for instance. Or when a brand-new product arrives that no longer fits the name. But that is not the case here yet. “It is unusual to do this before you’ve changed the content”, said one of the experts. “But Musk has always been unusual.”

II.

That Twitter would eventually become X is no surprise. Elon Musk never made a secret at the time of the Twitter acquisition that his ultimate goal was to turn Twitter into “an app for everything”. A Western equivalent of the app WeChat, you might say. In China, WeChat is the gateway to pretty much everything you can do online, from sharing messages to banking and shopping.

That content change is very much in the pipeline, then. “The name Twitter made sense when it was a service for sending short messages back and forth, like the chirping of birds”, says Musk. “Now you can post almost anything, even hours of video footage. In the coming months, more extensive communication tools will follow, along with the ability to manage your finances. In that sense the name Twitter is illogical, so we need to say goodbye to the bird.”

By taking over Twitter, Musk didn’t have to start his all-in-one app from scratch. The millions of Twitter users form the foundation of his new platform. You come along or you drop out. But given the vibrancy of alternatives, Musk has a sizeable head start. Instagram is now making a promising push with Threads, but that app is still unusable in Europe. (And you’re switching from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg — is that a win?)

III.

Musk has been obsessed with the letter X for years. X.com now redirects to Twitter but was also the original name for Musk’s payment service PayPal. His car company Tesla has a Model X and his space company is called SpaceX. Even Musk’s son is named X.

Meanwhile the official Twitter account has been closed and transferred to the name X. That name was already taken, by the way. American Gene X Hwang had held @X since 2007 and told British newspaper The Telegraph that he was perfectly willing to sell the account to the company. X saw things differently. Hwang received an email from the company informing him that his account was being taken over. “They basically just took it from me”, he says.

The whole thing is going terribly clumsily. Even the removal of the Twitter letters from the headquarters didn’t go smoothly. And now the service itself has become a half-baked product where half carries the X brand name and the other half still bears traces of the Twitter identity. The app has its own verbs (tweeting, retweeting) that suddenly no longer align with Musk’s vision. Tweets should now simply be called ‘posts’.

The most bizarre thing? Those live audio conversations are still called Twitter Spaces. That seems like an open goal to me. SpaceX!

Made with Midjourney.

PS.

If you want to know even more after seeing Oppenheimer:

Zomergasten started with Theo Maassen as its new host. His first guest was cosmologist Thomas Hertog. He worked with Stephen Hawking for twenty years and speaks with great passion about that time, but also about black holes, the Big Bang, extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence. Wonderfully accessible and mind-bending at the same time. Oppenheimer also gets a brief mention.

And speaking of which: cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema is the guest this week. He made the film Oppenheimer with Christopher Nolan (and grew up in my hometown of Dinteloord!).

Arc, a new browser for Macs, is now available for everyone. It became my favourite browser because it solved my biggest problem: my tab-hoarding habit. It’s much more organised to stack websites vertically rather than side by side. Give it a try.

On NRC.nl there is a grippingly tense reconstruction of how in January 2022 a Kenyan stowaway was found at Schiphol in the landing gear of a just-landed plane. “Hypothermic and unconscious. Who is he, and why this act of desperation?”

Futurama is back after ten years with a new season. Each week an episode appears on Disney+. In the first one, the Futurama universe is literally switched off and back on. A wink, of course, at the reboot of the series. “We’re back baby!”, shouts Bender. The meta-jokes about the show’s return come thick and fast, while the TV world gets skewered. Pretty good!

What a nice piece by 15-year-old Montessori pupil Meike Fortuin in Het Parool. A look inside the head of a teenager who’s fed up with dead artists being put on a pedestal. “People also act as though Johnny Cash is better than Katy Perry, but let’s be honest, all his songs sound the same”, she writes. “But because he’s old and dead, everyone acts like he’s some kind of god.”

The column’s timing was a bit unfortunate. One day after its publication, the death of Sinead O’Connor was announced. I hope Fortuin has discovered that dead artists made beautiful things too. Like O’Connor’s version of Nothing Compares 2 U, performed below with strings in 2019.

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