Last Elon Musk turned the tables on his users, turning Twitter’s logo into a grinning Shiba Inu — a hilarious inside joke that pumped the value of the dogecoin cryptocurrency, in which Musk is an investor, up 30%. A class action lawsuit still working.
Over the weekend, the former richest man in the world rented a logo for the platform, which this morning has been renamed X. Twitter—sorry, X—CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted—sorry, x’ed—that the company is being completely reimagined, creating a platform “focused on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI.”
The new brand—which users have pointed out looks a lot like standard unicode X—is the latest version of a concept Musk has been pushing since the late 1990s. First, he tried to build an online bank at x.com until he was kicked out of the company, which changed its name to PayPal after its only successful service. Since acquiring the x.com domain in 2017, Musk has added to his vision: messaging, e-commerce, video, and now AI, all on a single platform.
“There is absolutely no limit to this transformation,” says Yaccarino. “X will be the platform that can provide, well… everything.”
It won’t be. To create a super app, X will have to build an entirely new financial technology infrastructure, win over regulators by strictly and openly following the rules, and win the trust of users and advertisers have abandoned Twitter since Musk took over.
“If you have reduce brand equity and reduce user experience, you’re already three laps behind in the race,” said David Shrier, professor of practice in AI and innovation at Imperial College Business School. “This was a business plan that was 23 years old but didn’t work at the time and is currently being executed in a worse market position,” he said of Twitter’s rebranding to X.
The foundation of any superapp will be payments—allowing people to pay each other, pay businesses for goods and services, and receive money for the like. In January, Twitter began applying for a license to process transactions in the US, in an initiative allegedly led by Esther Crawford, whose startup Squad was acquired by Twitter in 2020. Crawford, who famously posted a photo of herself lying on the Twitter office floor during the early days of Musk’s tenure, is fired in february.
On Sunday, Crawford tweeted what looks like a brand-shading dig. “Dissect the company: destroy your own product or brand,” she writes. “Often committed by new management in pursuit of cost savings due to a lack of understanding of the core business or disregard for the customer experience.”
Tech companies often try to break into fintech as a way to get more revenue from their users and turn platforms into broader ecosystems of products and services. Ride-hailing companies, such as Uber, Grab and Go-Jek of Southeast Asia, have launched financial products that they can use to pay drivers and receive payments from users. Meta has made multiple attempts to bring payouts into its successful markets, with limited impact. In April, Meta Implement payments via WhatsApp in Brazil. Apple has begun building on Apple Pay with Apple Card and Apple Savings.
