But at its core, Musk’s misadventure at Twitter has been reactionary: an ideological purge of the employees he saw as “woke” and entitled a gleeful inversion of industry standards around content moderation a hollowing out of the free product and a redistribution of the company’s attention and wealth toward right-wing users. Yes, Musk regularly issues grandiose pronouncements about how Twitter will someday become a WeChat-style “super app,” ensure the future of civilization, and so on. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.Īll of this has been clear since at least November, when Musk gleefully mocked a stack of Black Lives Matter T-shirts that he found in a company closet. Here’s my answer: this framing misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did! I guess my question is, what was he paying for? Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away) he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. “Why rebrand Twitter? It's an incredibly strong brand - even among those who do not use it,” journalist Tom Harwood noted, accurately.īloomberg’s Matt Levine had a similar curiosity : Nine months into Musk’s takeover of the platform, some observers still strive to understand it as a business transaction. In April, after the company’s landlord reportedly prevented it from changing the sign, Musk painted over its “W.” To countless passersby on Market Street, it has been Titter ever since. (“Through their investigation officers were able to determine that no crime was committed, and this incident was not a police matter,” a spokeswoman told me.)Įven those who still remain nostalgic for Twitter 1.0 had reason to be heartened by the demolition. The San Francisco Police Department briefly intervened to stop the work in progress, but eventually relented. The crane partially blocked the street, confusing passing robo-taxis. In keeping with Musk’s characteristic indifference to authority, none of this had been cleared beforehand with the city. The plan was to remove the sign from the historic building’s facade, putting a symbolic end to the company that owner Elon Musk had over the weekend re-branded to X. On Monday afternoon, a crane rolled up to Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street. Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. "Giving an app your bank account information, purchase history, and a record of your medicines is a whole lot different than everyone making 'Barbie' and 'Oppenheimer' jokes and posting memes," he said. "If he pulls it off, an app that’s Twitter, TikTok, and Amazon, that would be a very valuable company," said Joshua White, professor of finance at Vanderbilt University.īut Musk’s rocky takeover of Twitter and his erratic leadership style have left White and others skeptical of the ambitious plans to turn Twitter into a whole new experience of life-encompassing software. To Musk and his supporters, though, the financial upside and influence of a super app could be enormous. Vásquez)Įmily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, went even further, equating Musk’s moves to alter a crucial communications platform as "the destruction of civic infrastructure." In Musk’s vision for a super app, offering "the ability to conduct your entire financial world," there aren’t yet new products or service announcements, but rather the promise of things to come, and most importantly, the end of Twitter.Ī workman removes a character from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building in San Francisco, Monday, July 24, 2023. In a move that experts say will vaporize billions of dollars in value, Musk has said goodbye to Twitter and the visuals and verbiage people have long used to describe it. In Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter, however, the destruction of the old, valuable identity seems to be the point. While the rebrands drew criticisms - a strategic misstep or management’s confusion over what appeals to the public - both kept the old, valuable brands intact. And when the streaming service HBO Max ( WBD) ditched the HBO name and became Max, the move was seen as a way to broaden the platform’s appeal beyond the flagship network. When Mark Zuckerberg introduced the world to Meta ( META), he shared a corporate vision that went beyond Facebook and into the metaverse.
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