Elon Musk's Latest X-ceptionally Bad Idea
Elon Musk's Latest X-ceptionally Bad Idea
Musk has killed Twitter's last and greatest value—its strong, globally recognized brand worth as much as $20 billion—by renaming it X. As in, fill in whatever the heck it is now.
RIP, little blue bird, the social media icon known the world over for nearly twenty years. Elon Musk has finally killed what’s left of Twitter by rebranding it as promised to X.
Just…X.
What X means is left up in the air, in addition to:
missing a question on a quiz
someone or something “cancelled”
something poisonous or forbidden
being deleted
a fascist/Nazi club sign
porn images
a signature by an illiterate person
a great fishing spot
the flayed man sigil of House Bolton.
I could go on, of course, and that’s the problem. If X can mean anything or everything, it effectively means nothing—exactly the wrong idea for a global brand.
Twitter’s intricately entwined identity had become indelible within the very market it helped define over the past 15 years. Only Twitter had tweets, and everyone, even nonusers, knew what that meant.
Presidents tweeted. Governments tweeted. World changing events were announced by tweet. Twitter changed the way news was reported.
By comparison, one doesn’t “facebook” or “tiktok” or “instagram.” One posts on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or some other interchangeable social media platform.
Twitter’s mystique made it a pure gold unicorn in a crowded marketplace of players trying to sell essentially the same thing. Its brand equity was just the only valuable asset Twitter had left given how quickly and thoroughly Musk destroyed Twitter’s business and prospects (see Twitter Equity Worth $20 Billion? Guess Again).
Twitter’s brand was estimated to be worth between $4 billion and $20 billion. Otherwise, I have estimated Twitter’s current enterprise value at far less than its $13
billion in LBO debt which its banks still are unable to sell off to wary investors nearly a year after Musk bought the company. That pegs its equity value at zero.
That’s because Musk has effectively bankrupted the company by gutting its intrinsic assets and boosting its worst flaws. As a result, Musk has driven away most of Twitter’s vital advertising revenue, stripped its ability to run reliably and safely with its now skeleton crew, run up scores of millions in unpaid bills, and created growing legal jeopardy with regulators and plaintiffs in nearly every country where it operates (see Elon Is "Saving" Twitter To Death and Elon Musk Doesn't Want You To Get Too Attached To Twitter's New CEO).
Twitter is left bleeding cash it doesn’t have and every idea Musk has floated to boost revenue has failed badly. His latest cunning scheme is to offer discounted rates to lure advertisers while also bullying them by threatening to strip their verified status which protects their brands unless they meet minimum spending thresholds. At the same time Musk’s Twitter is now paying for and promoting content from the very bigots, fascists, and sexual predators that keep advertisers spooked and all but far-right users—like Musk himself—disgusted.
What’s left of the company’s dire financial condition and prospects doesn’t solve for X billions of investment dollars Musk will need to even keep it afloat, much less turn it into the “everything app” he long has promised to compete with China’s WeChat.
In truth, the old Twitter users loved, warts and all, was killed last fall when Musk bought it. Now that he’s buried the bleeding shell, we’re left with X.
Or not, since Musk’s latest bumble has triggered even more angst for its already shrinking base of users who already have been fleeing to a growing crop of new rivals like Facebook Threads, which attracted 100 million new users within the first five days after launch.
True to form, Musk doesn’t get it and doesn’t care (see Twitter Equity Worth $20 Billion? Guess Again and Elon Musk Doesn't Want You To Get Too Attached To Twitter's New CEO).
Musk wants what he wants and he’s been fixated on X most all his life, for whatever reason, attaching it to company names, a Tesla model, and even his one of his sons. Never mind that his obsession got him tossed out from the early Paypal iteration which had bought his tiny company. That plus his being such a terrible manager with ”no cohesive business model”—which, as I have observed many times, has continued to describe him ever since:
Others suggest investors and spooked potential Tesla buyers have been shocked and disgusted as Musk revealed himself to be a cruel and surprisingly inept manager with the impulse control of a spoiled toddler who can’t stop tweeting hate speech and right wing conspiracy theories long enough to actually do his job.
All true, but the only surprise, really, is how much Musk has gotten by with for years, as I detailed again in Dear Elon: There's Nothing Funny About Hitler, 2/17/22—roughly two months before he purchased his initial 9% stake in Twitter.
Tesla Q4: Elon's Burning It All Down
So it was hardly surprising when Musk announced he intended to fold Twitter into his idea for an “X-everything app” when he created the X Corp shell company to buy Twitter last fall.
What is surprising is that after all these years of worshipping at the Altar of X Musk has never bother to secure the trademark rights to it.
Silly, Elon. It turns out hundreds of companies already own multiple forms of claims to X, including his arch enemy Mark Zuckerberg via Meta META 0.00%↑ (Facebook) and Microsoft MCFT 0.00%↑.
Musk doesn’t even own the font to the X logo he just launched. He described it as “art deco,” but it looks like an off the shelf offering from fonts.com or even the Unicode Character for “𝕏” (U+1D54F).
The new X-verse has mercilessly mocked the new name and logo, with one comic cleverly lining it up with so many porn web sites called X.
Which seems about right for a man who blew a bloated $44 billion to buy Twitter on impulse as one might wine-shop in the middle of the night on Amazon—except he was stuck with it after buyers remorse kicked in the next morning.
Stay tuned.
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