The Bird has Flown: Meet Musk’s ‘X Factor’
By Greg Kahn
Emerging Tech Exchange
Founder & CEO
Published on July 25, 2023
It has to be the rebrand of the decade: nearly nine months since taking Twitter private for $44 billion, Elon Musk has made good on his intention to rename Twitter to “X.”
So what does “X” mean?
It means Twitter is going from a social media platform dependent on ad dollars to, as Musk previously outlined, “The Everything App.”
The concept of a “super app” as a hub for consumers’ digital payments, banking, and e-commerce, as well as messaging and video chatting, access to media content, gaming, food delivery, and anything else that can be done interactively. As Musk prepares his own generative artificial challenge to ChatGPT, I would expect an AI tool would be part of X’s offerings as well.
To users of China’s all-in-one communications and shopping app WeChat, the idea is hardly revolutionary. In fact, it probably looks like catching up to the rest of the world.
The move takes Twitter’s foundation as a social media platform and uses it as a jumping off point for these other use cases. For traditional Twitter users, X represents too much change. But ultimately, I believe Musk’s bet — and CEO Linda Yaccarino’s experience as a marketing and sales steward — will prove his many detractors wrong.
Gaining the approval of U.S. regulators regarding digital payments and privacy, along with that of vocal, skeptical Twitter power users, will dominate the discussion and headlines about X in the short term.
But over time, Musk’s entrepreneurial vision and drive will turn X into something essential — something much larger and far more valuable than Twitter itself ever was.
For those focused primarily on the U.S. tech and media worlds, it’s easy to believe Twitter’s outsized influence extended to every corner of society. But as stats from the Pew Research Center noted in May 2022 (aka “Twitter’s good old-days pre-Musk”), just 23% of Americans used it — about the same as Snapchat.
Drilling down to look at the U.S. Twitter users, the top 25% most active participants on the platform produced 97% of all tweets, while the bottom 75% of users produce just 3%, according to a Pew analysis conducted over a three-month period in 2021.
Breaking a 15-year-old brand is difficult and painful. That’s particularly true for people who have identified with it, fought over it, and used it so aggressively. But Twitter’s business was declining for years. Simply appealing to more brands wasn’t going to solve its deep challenges. Staying the same was never an option. Rather, using Twitter’s value to create something much larger, with more services, more innovative and competitive is the only way forward. It was not going to survive otherwise.
While Musk’s driving ambition appears chaotic and risky, there’s no question that he not only knows how to develop a brand, he knows how to galvanize a motivated community. To create the “Everything App” that provides the seamless, open interaction between people and the tech tools they value, is where he and Yaccarino are headed.
A decade feels like a long time away. But in 2033, we’ll cease to be as tethered to our mobile phones as immersive technologies become widely adopted. By that time, Musk’s X will likely be ensconced as a leading platform continuing to push the boundaries of technology, commerce, and media. But for now, this is the beginning of a major transition that will move the global tech landscape forward.
Greg Kahn
Emerging Tech Exchange
Founder & CEO
