That’s the name Elon Musk has rebranded /renamed Twitter to at the beginning of last week. It’s his latest hit in a slew of decisions and actions that has included : introducing Twitter Blue and simultaneously killing the value of verification on Twitter and other social media apps, getting into firing wars with huge swaths of Twitter staff that has led to more buggy performance across the platform, temporarily limiting the number of tweets users can see per day (while simultaneously promoting Twitter Blue since it views more tweets) & of course constantly fighting, trolling and outright starting drama with users on a constant basis. All these actions would make you forget Elon bought Twitter promising one thing: to save it, and essentially make it more profitable as a company. And well, I don’t think I need to even be a super genius or industry expert to spell out that’s the last thing Elon is doing right now.

To truly understand Elon’s so-called intentions with Twitter, we need to dial it all the way back mid-late 2022 when the whole drama over buying Twitter was ensuing. The back and fourth over buying it or not aside, Elon supposedly justified buying Twitter due to it being the “town square” of the internet, a place where people gathered to talk, share ideas, partake in different forms of intellectual discourse. Most importantly he thought Twitter had the potential to become much bigger and more successful than it currently is, having a much more diverse and active user base and growing into other use cases beyond just people arguing online. More importantly though, Elon promised to take the Twitter from being a successful product, to being a successful business, something it literally has failed to become since it’s inception. All this sounds great on paper and if this was where Elon stopped, I think Twitter would actually be a better place to hang out on the internet.

After all, Elon Musk at his core is an incredibly intelligent engineer, and his other successful companies like SpaceX and Tesla have been a result of that engineering prowess applied to a business model. And from the outset, dealing with things like Twitter bots and removing unnecessary aspects like the “tweeted from” feature have been good moves. Unfortunately, approaching Twitter the company and Twitter the social platform as an engineering problem has not had the same effects. Elon firing tons of staff throughout his entry as CEO only led to the platform itself having technical issues for months on end, while also showing how little he knew of how the company actually worked. But that’s still nothing compared to the effects his approach has had on Twitter the social media platform itself.

You see, Elon seems to either outright miss, or purposefully ignore that social media apps at their core, are essentially a social acceptance and tolerance exercise, they live and die based off public opinion, and how people respond to them. This is why while Twitter never reached the profits or size of Meta’s Facebook or Instagram, it always had a keen and engaged audience that created their own social culture around Twitter. It became the home of the media and celebrities including Musk himself. And as The Verge’s Nilay Patel stated, Elon buying Twitter was like “the nicotine addict buying the cigarette factory”. Because it seems just like every addict, he thinks Twitter’s value is in how it affects him and makes him feel, rather than the value it provides everyone else. Simply put, Elon sees how much time he spends on Twitter and thinks “hey, I could totally make people pay for this but with more features, or a check mark. Better yet, why not do my banking here?!”.

Elon wants to turn Twitter into X: The everything App. A place that serves you audio, video, news and trade. It’s… Ambitious to say the least. But also.. Kinda dumb. Think about it, when have you looked at Twitter and thought” Banking is the thing I’m missing here”. Even Instagram with its shopping features is a better fit for that and you don’t see Instagram integrating that everywhere. More importantly however, all these big changes have been doing the one thing Elon shouldn’t do with Twitter, which is kill it’s social value. The blue checkmark has become a joke, something that ironically people with means did apparently try to pay for behind the scenes in the past, but now you have celebrities outright telling Elon to remove their checkmark because they don’t want to seem like “they paid for it”. The rate limit fiasco some weeks ago was what literally allowed Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, to be released successfully in the first place. Sure people are now logging off threads due to how it’s clearly a product in beta, but do you think it could have even reached its peak of around 300 million users if Twitter wasn’t the current mess it was? And Elon’s constant trolling and public fighting with users about these changes on a public platform just makes it all so much worse. At this point, changing the name to X arguably seems like the smallest sin Musk has committed in comparison. But it still adds to Twitter’s social value being diminished, and thus making the platform itself start to lose its lustre.

This all brings up one very key phrase people have been saying for a while now : Elon wants to kill Twitter. And as outrageous as it sounds, let’s face it, it sounds far more believable after all the drastic moves I’ve mentioned. But all facts considered, of course not. Even Elon Musk wouldn’t pay $44 billion for a company just to outright murder it. That being said, Elone definitely wants to murder a lot of aspects of the Twitter you knew and loved. In fact, that version of Twitter might as well be dead to him already, and his new “everything app” version is the one he’s focused on building right now. Of course the irony is trying to build this new version of Twitter will probably rub a lot, if not most users the wrong way, and that might just end up killing both versions of Twitter outright. Heck, if anything, it’s surprising Threads and friends haven’t outright aped every single Twitter feature (especially being able to migrate follower graphs) so that they outright steal as many people as possible. But I’m sure they have their reasons for that and either way I’m not sure I want to move to Threads or Mastodon just yet. Either As the bird died last week, you should probably pour one out for the Twitter you used to know as well, because that’s probably on it’s way out. Now we just have to decide if that’s enough for us to kill X as well. Because Elon definitely isn’t making it seem like that’s a place worth staying on.

PS: If you hoped Mark Zuckerberg would become the vessel of our frustration and beat up Elon in that proposed fight of theirs, unfortunately that’s not going to happen, so you’ll just have to settle for Threads.

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