Twitter’s ‘X’ Rebrand Is Elon Musk’s Most Desperate Gimmick Yet

Elon Musk has pulled some lousy marketing stunts in his time, but this one reeks of desperation.

As Twitter‘s owner has hinted in recent months — and announced more formally on Saturday — the social platform will rebrand as “X,” ditching the company’s original name and iconic bird logo as it (theoretically) adds features including banking and shopping services. The idea, as Musk has outlined before, is to create an “everything app,” with all possible conveniences at users’ fingertips. His handpicked successor as CEO, Linda Yaccarino, is leading the hype for X, posting word salad about how it will be “the future state of unlimited interactivity,” powered by artificial intelligence.

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These are big, vague promises, and it would be surprising if Twitter — sorry, X — could deliver on them with the skeleton crew remaining in the wake of mass layoffs, meanwhile dodging rent payments for office space and handling lawsuits alleging failure to pay half a billion dollars in severance packages. So far, the changes have been purely cosmetic: a Unicode “X” symbol to replace the Twitter bird design on the site, plus an updated sign, and renamed conference rooms at San Francisco headquarters, including “eXposure” and “s3Xy.” As a corny Elon gimmick, this barely surpasses adding the Doge meme to the homepage for a couple of days to temporarily boost the near-worthless cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Twitter did in April. But Musk has been trumpeting the switch all the same, even staking the ludicrous claim that what we’ve long called “a tweet” shall hereafter be referred to as “an X.” Good luck with that!

Twitter’s value has plummeted by two-thirds since Musk bought it for $44 billion last year, and he appears determined to jettison some of the most important assets it has left: the name and image. Public relations specialists are calling the move “brand suicide,” and it’s not as if folding Facebook into Meta or Google into Alphabet convinced the public to use those names for the respective tech giants. Likewise, “Twitter” is too deeply embedded in the culture — and that’s what people will continue to call it.

Of course, Musk’s vision isn’t based on the reality of the website he operates. It’s the meaningless resurrection of X.com, an online bank startup he and three partners founded in 1999. (The URL, which Musk repurchased in 2017, now redirects to Twitter, not that anyone will navigate to their feed that way.) The original X.com quickly merged with a chief rival, Cofinity, which had a money transfer system called PayPal. In late 2000, the board of the combined company voted to oust Musk as CEO in favor of Cofinity co-founder Peter Thiel. With Musk gone, leadership dropped all X.com branding and banking services, rebranding as PayPal, for the network that had emerged as its primary business.

Ever since, Musk has stamped anything and everything with an “X” — SpaceX, the Tesla Model X, his son X Æ A-12 — in a seeming attempt to merge an empire under the banner of a single letter. Turning Twitter into X is less about offering a new and improved experience (which he can’t) and more in line with a pattern of asserting his role as an innovator (see: Tesla, which he could legally claim to have “cofounded” only after settling a lawsuit brought by one of the original founders). It’s a clumsy stab at taking credit for what Twitter was before he acquired it.

Speaking of: Musk has barely kept the place operational as is. Casual users are restricted as “spam,” the company is in legal trouble for not removing hate speech, major livestream events are glitch-filled disasters, the ability to privately message is steadily eroding, tweets disappear for no reason, and during any given outage, you might be arbitrarily limited to viewing just a few hundred posts per day. If the site can’t even function as a public forum for breaking news and shitposts, how on earth is it supposed to serve as the totally integrated nexus of digital life? Who the hell would entrust their bank account info to an app so riddled with bots and scams, not to mention a guy once fined $20 million by the SEC in a fraud settlement? And why are we getting the hard sell on a product that, practically speaking, doesn’t exist?

Again, it would be shocking if Musk, Yaccarino, and the last engineers in their employ added a fraction of the capability they’re envisioning. By other indications — like forgetting to secure permission from their landlord to remove the Twitter HQ sign, resulting in a visit from the police, or potentially falling ass-backwards into “X” trademark disputes with a Japanese rock band and rival Meta — they are ill-prepared for any radical pivot or substantial growth. Repainting the hull of the Titanic is bound to be as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on it.

On the other hand, what else can Musk do? He ran out of fresh ideas for Twitter months ago. So he’s returned to his oldest pitch: a symbol that he hopes is striking and cool enough to convince the world of his genius. Problem is, you can’t succeed on X factor alone.

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