Twitter will soon be gone. Twitter owner Elon Musk is officially renaming the app to ‘X’ as part of his broader vision for an ‘Everything App’. Musk’s ‘X’ rename will be a crucial component of billions of users’ lives. Check out this preview for an idea of X’s supposed branding.
Musk has also flagged the app’s coming color change. Twitter’s default blue color branding will be shifting to black for X.com. On top of that, ‘Tweets’ will also be called ‘an X’. We suspect that renaming Tweets, while logical, will inevitably raise a lot of eyebrows and cause a commotion. Is dissolving years of brand equity a good decision? Even if it was not, Musk has shown his capacity to create results from seemingly flawed approaches.
X Marks The Spot
The name ‘X’ has been part of Musk’s grand plan since the late 90s. Musk created a name for himself in the online payments space. Musk founded a payments company, which he envisioned would become ‘X.com’. X.com would be a new, centralized platform that facilitates loans, fee-free instant payments, and other banking elements.
When Musk’s payments company merged with Paypal, he had to abandon his plan, moving into other ventures instead. However, the idea and name stuck with him, and Musk continued to believe that he could create a game-changing app. X.com would use payments as a backbone to facilitate transactional activities and Social Media and entertainment elements.
Musk has repeatedly claimed that buying Twitter is ‘an accelerant to X’, but making it happen will not be easy. Many other platforms have attempted to do what Musk wanted X.com to do. For example, Meta has been trying to popularize in-stream payments for years, with limited success. One of the challenges with this comes from the hesitance of regulatory bodies to enable payments that side-step banking systems. At the same time, Western users have shown little interest in the concept of social commerce.
Things are different for Asian consumers. Asian Social Media users have shown a strong preference for using apps as simplified payment methods. Some Asian governments have used Social Media to track citizen activity for ID systems. Western governments do not have the same affinity for such, hence no Western version of WeChat. Saying that something is easy is vastly different from making it happen.
The Wrap
Despite having come up with the idea a little over two decades ago, Musk has remained dedicated to it. However, it is unlikely that his vision will come to pass, no matter how hard he tries. Regardless, ‘X’ will eventually replace Twitter, highlighting the app’s next era. It might sound like a flawed approach, but Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino might have some surprises prepared. Besides pushing old Twitter concepts, and on top of the ‘X’ rename, Musk is cooking something up. The X era is coming.
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