Why has Twitter become X? Inside Elon Musk's master plan for a 'super app'

On Monday, netizens said goodbye to the Blue Bird of Twitter after the Tesla CEO introduced a radical rebranding of his social media platform. While Musk has made several erratic changes to the social networking site in the past, the change in the logo was a long time coming. With the new logo, Musk is planning to create an “everything app”, an ambition he had way before he formally took over Twitter in October 2022. 

Musk’s association with the letter “X” has been a known fact for a while. The billionaire has a penchant for the letter “X”. He named his aerospace company SpaceX, and even his son with singer Grimes’ actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X”. Hence, changing the Twitter logo can be touted as Musk’s plan to create one uniform entity. The company’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, threw light on this ambition in one of her tweets. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” she wrote on Twitter. “Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” she added. According to The Independent, prior to his announcement, Musk informed his employees about the recent change. He notified his peers that the domain X.com will turn into Twitter.com. In one of his series of tweets, the business mogul made it clear that the famous Blue Bird logo would be taken out in a phased manner. 

What is X Holdings Corp.? What companies are part of it? 

In 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that Musk has formed three corporate entities in Delaware. All of them were under the name of “X Holdings”. Initially, the X group of companies included Musk’s SpaceX, Neuralink and Tesla. In March 2023, Musk registered X Corp. in Nevada. According to The Verge, it registered an artificial intelligence (AI) company called X.AI. Later that month Musk merged both X Corp. and X Holdings Corp. and eventually incorporated Twitter Inc. into the conglomerate. 

Since last year, the Tesla CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of a “super app”. He envisioned an app similar to China’s WeChat - a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments — for the rest of the world. However, the ambition is not a novel one. Tech giants like Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber and others have also tried to jump on the super app bandwagon, expanding their offerings in an effort to become indispensable to people as they go about their day. But none of them made a substantial mark. Hence, it will be interesting to see how the world would react to Musk’s new ambition.