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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand, Elon has owned the x.com domain for a long time and in the past wanted to rebrand PayPal to X the same way he did Twitter. Seemingly at that point in his career there were still people around to tell him no.

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.

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He started X.com which merged with PayPal, but lost control of the domain over 20 years ago and didn't buy it back until 2017 [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...

> 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.

There are similar "everything" brands that are very successful in other countries, notably WeChat which is chat, text, photo sharing, gaming and mobile payments.

If X became the first in America it would be quite powerful, but IMHO is very unlikely.

I thought facebook already had all of those?

You're forgetting the biggest ones - Google and Microsoft

I didn't even know MS had photo sharing or mobile payments.

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.

Google platforms like Google Pay, Google Photos, etc are very common across the developing world (India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc).

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)

WeChat does a lot more. You basically can't function in China without it

Apple are closer to that than X in the USA.

We have those in the US, they're called "Android" and "iOS", not to mention every other OS and/or app platform, including the web itself.

Also "Facebook"

Everyone seems to forget WhatsApp. It's the goto everything app globally, and IG is increasingly becoming a similar one in the US.

Meta is truly a behemoth

The only times I can think of where a re-branding exercise has worked well, have been where the brand started off in the mud and they fixed their image rather than the name.

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

It was before most of our times, but I don't think the Esso brand was "in the mud" when they rebranded to Exxon and that seems to have worked out ok for them.

Skoda did not have that bad an image, their pre-VW cars were very sucessful at rallying.

That ad is from them, by them, and about them. And it matches what everyone in the 90s was telling me about them.

"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.

> The destruction of the Twitter branding seems more out of spite than business development goals

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.

> Or just incompetence.

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.

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