So Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, has changed the name of his favourite toy. Henceforth, Twitter is to be known as X. Strangely, though, you can still log on to twitter.com and be invited to tweet. This is a missed comic opportunity. Instead of the chancellor being able to say, for example, that he had tweeted his concern about the public sector borrowing requirement to the prime minister, he could be saying that he had “X’d Rishi” on the matter. Sigh.
So what is it about Musk and X? Well, it goes back quite a way – to 1999, when Musk set up X.com as an early online bank. For “early”, read “weird”. Customers were not charged fees or overdraft penalties. New users got $20 for free just by opening an account and a $10 bonus for every one of their contacts who signed up. As for the venerable banking convention that you should know your customer, Musk demurred. According to Max Chafkin, the biographer of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Musk bragged to CBS News that it was easier to get a line of credit at X.com than it was to sign up for an email account. “You can fill out the whole thing, be done in two minutes, be in your account and have it funded already.” Not surprisingly, within two months, X.com had more than 200,000 users, some of whom who had given fake addresses and immediately set to writing cheques that bounced.
So Musk has been in the, er, banking business for quite a while. In March 2000, X.com took over Thiel’s smaller startup Confinity, which had launched PayPal as a way to send money electronically. The new company was called X.com and had Musk as its chief executive. But in September 2000, when he was in Australia on his honeymoon, the board fired him and installed Thiel in his place. And in June 2001, X.com was renamed PayPal.
So perhaps rebranding Twitter as X is a subliminal way of getting back at Thiel for his perfidy 23 years ago. Revenge, after all, is a dish best served cold. But in this case it’s looking expensive. After all, Musk paid $44bn for Twitter (of which maybe $20bn was his own money) and since then has proceeded as if his desire was to reduce it to a smoking ruin. What was he paying for, then, asks Matt Levine, Bloomberg’s veteran observer of these things. “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. Surely he could have built that for less than $44bn? Mark Zuckerberg did!”
Quite so. But on the cautionary principle that someone who has built two formidable companies (Tesla and SpaceX) might know what he’s doing, it’s worth asking what that might be in relation to Twitter. The most persuasive idea goes back to his early days in online banking. For example, the Wall Street Journal the other day picked up on Twitter’s recently appointed chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, talking about X as “including audio, video, messaging and banking capabilities”. The paper also recalled things Musk has said in the past about X.com, what he called an “everything app” and about a vision he has that his new plaything may “become the biggest financial institution in the world”. Like WeChat in China, in other words – an app that is used for everything from messaging to mobile payments to business services.
As usual, the close to 150 million-strong legion of Musk worshippers think that this is further evidence of their hero’s genius. More detached observers wonder what he’s been smoking. The US technology and media analyst Ben Thompson (of the famed Stratechery, his tech business strategy platform), for example, regards the WeChat dream as ridiculous. He points out in his newsletter that “WeChat arose in a country that was digitising for the first time, almost exclusively via the smartphone, which meant no incumbent competition from traditional websites, banking rails like credit cards, or alternative social networks; Twitter/X exists in a particular context that makes the WeChat idea inaccessible to anyone, much less a company that has to expend the limited resources it still has just to keep the lights on.”
If that’s an accurate assessment, then Musk is engaged in magical thinking – the delusion that things will happen if you want them badly enough. What he may be in the process of discovering, though, is that even he cannot destroy Twitter, for the simple reason that the world needs something like it. And Meta’s Threads isn’t it. That famously surged in the beginning but, according to the Wall Street Journal, daily active users are down by nearly 70% (from 44 million to 13 million). And the average daily time spent on the platform has dwindled to four minutes from 19 minutes on launch day. Twitter still has more than 200 million daily active users, who spend an average of 30 minutes each day on the platform. As my dear departed mother used to say: “It’s hard to kill a bad thing.” It is – even if you’re Elon Musk.
What I’ve been reading
Dangerous messages
The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids is an astonishing – and deeply troubling – essay by Jill Escher on the Free Press platform.
Silicon implant
The Curse of the Long Boom is a sharp Substack post by Dave Karpf on the delusions of the Silicon Valley ideology.
Dirty tricks
Why They’re Smearing Lina Khan is a terrific, no-holds-barred polemic about the legal scholar and Federal Trade Commission chair by Cory Doctorow on his Pluralistic site.
