X Marks the Spot for Elon Musk’s Race to the Bottom | PRO Insight

Well, she’s done it. Defying all odds, former NBCUniversal ad chief and new Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino has tamped down Elon Musk’s increasingly basic instincts and impulses and steered the company on a saner course!

Nah, just kidding.

Musk, a self-proclaimed genius at all things, apparently now including corporate branding, has done it again. With little more than a tweet — or whatever it’s called now — out goes “Twitter” and in comes “X.” With the old name goes billions of dollars of brand equity that Twitter had built up over the years to the envy of the world.

It all happened so fast that you could practically hear the dollar bills crackle and watch the embers drift away. Hollywood depended on Twitter for marketing and featured its bird logo everywhere from websites to movie posters. And just like that, the ultimate media brand, one that other media brands freely elevated and promoted, is no more.

This all makes sense in Musk’s mind, of course, as he laid out his super app vision for X. (Which raises the question, if we’re not tweeting, are we on X now?) Meanwhile, Yaccarino, who purportedly joined his fast-derailing train to bring back mainstream advertisers, dutifully toed the Musk line. She cheered Musk’s super app, promising to “delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking.” She even changed her handle to @lindayaX.

But who is Yaccarino trying to kid? Certainly few in the media and entertainment community from whence she came.

Advertisers had already left in droves amid all the previous havoc Musk had unleashed, and many in the creative community joined the mass exodus. Musk gutted his content moderation team, leaving it a roll of the dice whether Hollywood ads and artist tweets would be paired with the vitriol of unsavory characters.

It was all in the name of Musk’s professed commitment to the First Amendment and “ensur[ing] freedom of speech,” of course, which in reality meant an increasingly unmoderated communications network that fueled society’s basest instincts. Welcome back, Kanye West! (Musk just reactivated his account, a wellspring of antisemitism.)

In the words of New York University professor Scott Galloway, a branding expert and tech’s brilliant resident curmudgeon, Musk placed his bets firmly in the business of “making our discourse increasingly coarse.” Society be damned!

Musk wrapping himself in the flag and Constitution as his new toy devolved is pretty rich. But this is a man who has made hypocrisy his personal brand. He rails against OpenAI, an entity he helped start, decrying it for fueling AI’s existential dangers to society. He’s a purported libertarian who gladly accepts government subsidies for Tesla. He mocks Mark Zuckerberg, then runs to court now that he feels the heat from Meta’s Threads, which has become the fastest-growing app in history. And oh yes, with respect to his “commitment” to free speech, he just threatened legal action against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech.

For Musk, Twitter’s brand “does not make sense” in the context of his super app that promises to provide banking, shopping and other functions far beyond communication. But that presupposes that a mass market will happily hand over their most sensitive financial data to X. Perhaps that is something that many of us would have done in a bygone era of Musk as beloved genius tech pioneer. But who among the mainstream in media and entertainment will trust him at this point?

With revenues expected — X-pected? — to drop 28% this year, Musk is nevertheless accelerating plans to integrate crypto payments into X. After all, his crypto bros at least will follow him no matter where he goes. The more indictments (against Musk and his Twitter business judgment), the stronger the faithful’s loyalty gets. Sounds a lot like “The Donald,” don’t you think? (So much for Musk’s claim that he was buying Twitter to save it from crypto spammers!)

This new version of Musk openly adopts a mean teen’s persona as he rips into anyone or anything that challenges his judgment or vision, and the Musk faithful dig that about him.

“So we must bid adieu to the bird,” said Musk as he signed off from his Twitter account and hoisted a giant flashing “X” onto his corporate headquarters.

The sign was short-lived, but the message will live on: He’s not getting rid of the bird, he’s simply flipping it to the rest of us.

For those of you interested in learning more, visit Peter’s firm Creative Media at creativemedia.biz and follow him on… guess it’s X now: @pcsathy. 

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