As we bid a farewell to Twitter’s beloved “Larry the Bird,” it is difficult not to think about the platform’s new face. When Twitter’s buying plans were making the rounds in town, it was unclear whether Elon Musk would make his everything app “X” from scratch or turn Twitter into “X.” It is safe to answer that part: Twitter has ceased to exist as X has taken its place. Musk had previously expressed, while the acquisition was in the works, that he wanted to build a platform where people could speak more freely.
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In October 2022, Musk expressed in a tweet that he wanted to create X, the everything app. Eventually, the Twitter deal was sealed for $44 billion, and Musk became its new head.
The making of X
The richest man in the world and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, initially did not provide many specifics on what an “everything app” would look like. However, he had indicated a desire to create a global social media platform based on Tencent’s WeChat.
WeChat, a social media, instant messaging, and mobile payment software all in one, is used by more than a billion people in China. It is woven into the fabric of daily life and is used to place food orders, call cabs, and locate news. According to Musk, if enough people used similar software to converse on a global scale, a payment mechanism might also be established.
Back in 2020, a Twitter user suggested to Musk that the latter should establish X “to ensure human survival and progress.” The user proposed that this company would serve as the parent corporation of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, which is Musk’s brain computer startup, and the tunnel construction company known as “The Boring Company.” The concept was described by Musk as a “good idea.” However, it continues to be unclear whether X is intended to be a collection of Musk’s businesses, a worldwide WeChat, or something entirely different.
X is the name of the three holding corporations that Elon Musk set up in Delaware in order to purchase Twitter. According to regulatory filings, Twitter’s sale went through a 3-tier setup where X Holdings I served as Twitter’s parent company, X Holdings II purchased Twitter, and X Holdings III provided the funding for the deal.
In order to make it easier for him to purchase Twitter, Musk set up X Holdings I, II, and III in Delaware in April 2022. As per the deal, notwithstanding the merger, Twitter will continue to be governed by Delaware law and retain its name and basic organisational structure. The merged entity’s parent firm would then be X Holdings I, while X Holdings III would assume responsibility for the $13 billion loan that Musk received from a group of major banks to assist pay for the $44 billion acquisition.
Twitter Inc. got merged with X Corp., which means that Twitter Inc. ceased to exist as a Delaware-based company. Musk had basically registered two new businesses, X Holdings Corp. and X Corp., and then applied to merge these with two of his existing companies, where X Holdings Corp. got merged with X Holdings I. Twitter Inc. is part of X Corp., whose parent company is the $2 million X Holdings Corp.
Significance of X
Elon Musk clearly has an extreme fondness for the letter “X.” Musk even named his child with Claire Boucher (known as Grimes) X Æ A-12 and refers to his child by the letter “X.” But his “obsession” with this letter did not erupt with his child and rather goes back to 1999, when he founded the online bank named X.com.
A rival software firm, Confinity, and X.com merged in 2000. In 2001, Musk was replaced as CEO of X.com by Peter Thiel, one of Confinity’s founders, and the business was renamed PayPal.
However, in 2017, Musk purchased the X.com domain from PayPal. Now, when one visits the page, there is a black letter “x” in the upper left corner of a blank white page. Then there is a page, X.com/x, which directs to another page that shows a lowercase “y,” which is the nickname of Musk’s child with Grimes.
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Now that the logo of Twitter has been replaced by X, the official Twitter handle on the platform has also ceased to exist, and users can now see the X handle instead. Reports suggest that the “@X” handle was taken up without informing or compensating the original user, Gene X Hwang, who owned the account for over 16 years. Further, the Twitter support page is also nowhere to be found on the platform.
Clearly, Musk’s likings are taking over the world, and since X is taking over the blues of which seems to be one of the largest online spaces, is this the end of the era of “tweet” and the beginning of “X-ed”?
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