Elon Musk to Revive Vine After Twitter Shut It Down in 2016 (Report)

Elon Musk is in the process of reviving Vine after assigning Twitter engineers to work on a reboot of the app that Twitter shut down in 2016, according to Axios.

The new Twitter boss instructed engineers to examine Vine’s old code base, according to the Monday report, in the hopes that the reboot could be ready by the end of the year. The potential reboot would give the video-looping app new life after Twitter, who acquired Vine in 2012, shut down the app in 2016.

Musk’s latest move aims to create a rival to TikTok after he launched a poll on his Twitter Sunday asking if the company should “bring back Vine.” At the time of this article, over 4 million users had answered the poll, which 69.5% confirmed they would like a Vine reboot.

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YouTube personality MrBeast responded to the poll by saying “If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that’d be hilarious,” to which Musk asked the creator, “What could we do to make it better than TikTok?”

In the press release announcing the billionaire’s potential acquisition earlier this year, Musk mentioned he would introduce “new features” to the app. Experts told TheWrap they suspect the Tesla CEO would like to adopt elements from the Chinese app WeChat, which rolls financial transactions and digital communication into one.

While it’s still possible the app may adopt some financial features, for now the new boss seems to be focused on keeping up with TikTok, whose algorithms function differently than the original format of Vine, that was solely guided by who a user followed.

Twitter did not reply to TheWrap’s request for comment.