Elon Musk's X looks too far off the mark as a 'super app' shot

Rejigged Twitter could lose value without getting anywhere close

- DAVE LEE

I suppose you could say changing the Twitter bird logo to an ‘X’ makes complete sense. As the recognized icon for ‘make it go away,’ X just about sums up the achievements of Elon Musk’s social network so far. Gone are many of Twitter’s users, half of its advertisers, about 80% of its employees and its operational stability. Gone is its credibility as a leading platform for keeping track of news breaks, a forum for activism and change, or a place to simply get updates on whatever it is you care about. Next up—unless this is all one big ruse, which can’t be discounted—is the one thing that is still giving Musk’s $44 billion deal for the social media site some value: the Twitter brand itself. It will now be known as X, Musk decided over the weekend. The little blue bird, famous internationally, is destined to disappear.

In a series of bewildering corporate-speak tweets on Sunday, X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino explained Musk’s vision of an app offering audio, video, messaging, banking and “well… everything." She wrote that X would be the “future state of unlimited interactivity."

A generous take on this would be that the Twitter brand carries a lot of baggage, as co-founder Jack Dorsey himself acknowledged on Sunday, and so a fresh start might be the best way to draw a line between the old and the new.