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> 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.

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.

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