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Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter X

10 months ago babelfish

Elon Musk's obsession with the letter X

“We will soon be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand and, gradually, to all birds.” Elon Musk changes the name and logo of his social network, reiterating his obsession with the X. Is the WeChat model super app ever closer?

It has been known for some time that Elon Musk was close to the Twitter logo, given that he had also enjoyed changing it from time to time. But no one could have imagined that the billionaire with assets of 187.6 billion dollars would change it with a meager X. Or maybe yes, given that the South African entrepreneur seems to have a sort of obsession with the letter? But let's go in order…

TWITTER BECOMES X CORP.

The name sounds like it came out of a comic with super-villains who want to dominate the world. We already knew that Twitter Inc. had merged into X Corp. thanks to an April 4 filing in California federal court. But then everything seemed to have ended there, in an operation that was more internal than aimed at the general public.

It's not the first time that Musk has toyed with the name of Twitter, the social network that cost him 44 billion dollars and which has been undergoing major restructuring since he took over the reins (also because it would currently be worth just half). Some time ago he replaced the bird with the logo of the DogeCoin cryptocurrency making its value fly , then whitewashed the "W" from the headquarters sign so that the word "Titter" was visible, which refers to … tit .

THE WECHAT-STYLE SUPER APP MUSK HAS IN MIND

In short, Elon Musk's humor is very… peculiar, but Musk's plans for Twitter, alias X, could be more concrete. In fact, rumors have been circulating for some time that the tycoon intends to put together a super app like the Chinese WeChat. Hence, therefore, the need to probably standardize names and logos.

Of course, the Chinese super app that has the government behind it has an easy life because it operates in a monopoly situation, in a democracy that is not exactly complete. And many believe that Beijing uses it to control the population. A western "twin" would have a much more difficult life, having to respect rules on antitrust, privacy, etc…

But it is almost certain that Musk aims to do something similar. Last month, for example, at a Morgan Stanley conference, he said he wants his app "to become the largest financial institution in the world."

And Twitter, although it is not clear why, would be crucial in the strategy of creating X, the app for everything. Musk himself said so on October 4th. A future in which everyone uses X for everything and the app is traced back to the mysterious X Corp. increasingly seems to come from a comic book or a science fiction novel, but at the same time it also seems ever closer.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT X BY MUSK

What is certain is that Musk is an excellent advertiser: without even resorting to agencies and consultants, it was enough for him to change the Twitter logo for the world to start wondering if we are at the dawn of a hi-tech revolution that bears his signature. And everyone has already forgotten that the social network is in trouble for Meta's Threads broadsides. But what do we know concretely about X?

Nothing, or almost. Musk had hinted that his app could one day include many services, including city transport and food deliveries. Much more recently, he claimed to be working on a peer-to-peer mobile payment platform, on which users could one day earn interest on their money like in a bank, with a head-to-head entry into one of the few sectors he still lacked.

MUSK'S OBSESSION WITH THE X

What is certain is that the histrionic former startupper really has an obsession with the X, so much so that it recurs everywhere in his life. There is a Tesla called Model X, then there is SpaceX, the new start-up on artificial intelligence xAI and to make matters worse he also tried to put it in the name of his children: from the late Nevada Alexander, who died prematurely a few days after giving birth to Xavier Alexander (who however wants to change his name and gender), passing through Saxon, X Æ A-XII and Exa Dark Sideræl, who is nicknamed Y in the family…

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/quellossessione-di-elon-musk-per-la-lettera-x/ on Mon, 24 Jul 2023 08:49:20 +0000.