X, but why?

Why would Elon Musk disregard every possible rule of branding and turn Twitter into “X”? And why now?

Sure, he’s been sitting on the X.com domain for decades, but this idea of turning Twitter into a WeChat-style everything “X” app is a pretty recent ambition.

Moreover, he hasn’t bought Twitter for that reason, rather he happened to find a good candidate in Twitter for his latest ego-fueled ambition.

Regardless of all that, I strongly believe that the timing here is telling of Musk’s deranged approach to business. This operation sounds like it was shoddily and hastily prepared.?Everything, from the logo the the actual conceptual framework behind it, looks like it’s held together with duct tape.?

Now, copying WeChat’s model has been the longtime semi-hidden, most private desire of Musk’s current arch-enemy: Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuck, being the somewhat more considerate businessman he is, has never really fully embarked on a project that - by all indicators - can’t really work in the West today the way WeChat works in China. Tencent’s WeChat became an everything super-app that covers it all from chats to payments, because of the geopolitical and social setting of China at the time of its inception and development.

Zuckerberg knows he could have pulled off a WeChat plan had he tried way earlier, maybe around the turn of the previous decade. You know, when Facebook still had trust and a reputation. Before it facilitated a genocide in Myanmar. Before Cambridge analytica. Before the failure of Zuck’s supernational shitcoin Libra. Etc. Mark Zuckerberg knows he missed that opportunity forever.?

You know who’s also aware of that? Elon Musk. After the Threads affront, Musk needed to hit back. A stable business man without a debilitating survival bias would have taken time, developed a plan, tried to strategise. Instead, Musk went for a wobbly, unstable jab. With “X” he clearly wants to stick it to “Zuck the cuck”, as he called him on Twitter.

This is not tech, this is not business. We in the media would all be better off treating and covering these skirmishes dissimulated as bold announcements for what they really are: high school drama.