Usually when you rebrand, it's because you've run your brand name into the ground. Elon did it just because the letter X is very cool or something?
Sometimes leadership just feels the need to put their stamp on things so everyone knows they're there.
(And when the answer is "someone knows how to pull his strings and push his buttons", that makes me more worried about prompt injection in organic intelligence than the same attack in artificial intelligence).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTc77PTLVI&t=101s
Interviewer: Did you [buy Twitter] because you thought a court would make you do that?
Musk: Yes.
he spent half a year in court trying to get out the deal, and lost. so you probably shouldn't assume actually buying twitter was really his plan.
he bought a smaller stake first to get some influence and then offered to buy the rest when it didn't buy him the influence he hoped it would, presumably with no intention of following through. then the board called his bluff.
He also wants to make X into an "everything" app where you'll do shopping, calls, chat with friends, send payments, etc. And if that was pulled off successfully it doesn't seem like the craziest thing to distance from the Twitter brand which has long been associated as an app primarily for news and shitposting? But he has a long way to go to get people to think of it as anything other than what it was before. Everyone on the platform is still calling it Twitter and refers to posts as tweets.
I feel like the way to go there would have been closer to the Meta/Facebook brand hierarchy.
X is the platform / super app and Twitter is the first app within X. Twitter accounts become X accounts but you still use them to Tweet on Twitter.
The destruction of the Twitter branding seems more out of spite than business development goals. Really the whole follow through of the Twitter purchase reeks of spite and destruction rather than building something new of value.
But I'm not a successful billionaire so I'm probably wrong.
If X became the first in America it would be quite powerful, but IMHO is very unlikely.
Google kills and relaunches products so often that I'm genuinely surprised Google Photos still exists and that my old data from when I had a Nexus 5 is still there, but I guess that's fair, I did forget them.
Microsoft doesn't have mobile payments but they do provide photo sharing via OneDrive.
FB/Whatsapp ofc is a massive one, and is the goto everything app globally outside of China and North America.
Most of these platforms are targeting developing countries now because any growth in market share that could be extracted in the west has been extracted.
This is why most ads made by Google, Meta, MS, etc tend to target the Indian, ASEAN, or Brazil markets now, and a lot of investment in localization is happening (eg. Meta/FB/Whatsapp partners with local telcos to install it's apps by default and integrate with telco platforms, Google has constantly massive ad campaigns in India, etc)
Meta is truly a behemoth
Specifically, Skoda — and when they did the transition, their adverts were very much aware of the need for an image change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTJ_TPraLQ
"Have you heard about the new 16-valve Skoda? It's got eight valves in the engine and eight in the radio."
"How do you double the value of a Skoda? Fill the fuel tank."
Etc.
Or just incompetence. Plenty of that. Assuming just because he is billionaire that he's competent at everything related to any company and the reason for failure is something else is silly.
He had no idea what the fuck he is doing and he fucked up.
Oh there is likely plenty of that too. But I think there was at least some malice in being forced to follow through on his overvalued purchase offer, in the treatment of "blue check" verified accounts, in the treatment of laid-off employees and those who remained or tried to stick it out, and in the destruction of the Twitter brand.
> Assuming just because he is billionaire that he's competent at everything related to any company and the reason for failure is something else is silly.
Yes, that part was tongue-in-cheek.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...
This makes no sense. The court forced him to pay the shareholders the agreed upon price. Consequently, the shareholders were paid, and now they're no longer shareholders. Why would they regret that?
(I'm grasping at straws, mostly because Elon's ability to spite the shareholders is fairly limited.)
That is assuming Muskbis doing this purposely.
Man, I swear media literacy is trash anymore.
Dorsey was not part of the lawsuit and in fact rolled over his Twitter shares with the acquisition instead of taking the payout, so again the "Revenge for being forced to honor his word at buying Twitter" theory makes no sense.
Nobody has yet made sense of that nonsensical theory.
And even then it usually doesn't work. It's _very_ unusual for full-scale rebrands of consumer-facing companies, where the original brand is utterly expunged, to stick.
Musks multiple unforced fumbles might be the biggest boneheaded blunders in corporate history
I do believe he's just been obsessed with having x.com since he got it in the 90s and had a chance to use it and jumped at it just to put his own imprinter on the site.