Musk Should End Twitter’s Misery and Bring on Brand ‘X’

Last week Fidelity reported that Twitter was worth just 33% of what Elon Musk paid for the social media platform. Various forces have contributed to this collapse, including: advertisers fleeing from extreme content; brands and celebrities quitting the site; and the risible failure of the Twitter Blue subscription, which transformed the “coveted” blue check into a mark of comic derision.

Yet the red thread of Twitter’s plight is Musk’s hate-love obsession with his new toy.

The reason why Musk seems so ill at ease with Twitter (and vice versa) is because he is an invasive species — specifically the “xenomorph” from Ridley Scott’s Alien. After many excruciating months “facehugging” his acquisition” — tainting its brand, sacking its talent, spilling its secrets — Musk needs now to “chest-burst” from his moribund host and test the market value of his contrarian vision.

Musk has hinted at Twitter 2.0 on several occasions, most recently during a puffball manspread with right-wing satire bros, The Babylon Bee:

“I think we need to broaden the branding. Like Twitter made sense as a name … if people are sending, you know, texts — basically group texts at 140 characters apiece between each other. That’s kind of a short thing, a Tweet, not a long thing. But the point at which you’ve got not just text but pictures, video, live interaction, a full array of financial services, a full array of communications, encrypted communications, voice, video, everything — Twitter, I think, is the wrong branding for that.”

Musk went on to give some indication of how he might rebrand the platform as X — wrapping it into the x.com domain which he has long envisioned as an “all-encompassing financial services provider.”