Musk takes a divergent path (again)

Elon Musk just replaced the Twitter brand name with X, leading many experts to fume.  My feed is full of disdain for the move, particularly from Marketing and Brand experts calling out his grave "mistake". How could he kill the bird, the “tweets”, the brand, with an odd symbol of dark negativity?

One article put it this way: “Twitter is only just getting back on the straight and narrow, and not forgetting that he obliterated the workforce, "X, the everything app" looks set to remain but a twinkle in a flaky entrepreneur's eye, not to mention that it's in all likelihood completely unworkable.”

As “flaky entrepreneurs” go, Musk’s record for the past two decades has been nothing short of extraordinary, with PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and more.  Often the moves are contrarian – easy payments that don’t require a bank, early mover advantage on electric cars (with dedicated charging points), space rockets that can be re-used, global internet connectivity that does not require a local ISP.

The ‘X’ itself (long cherished by Musk since he registered “X.com” twenty years ago, even naming one of his children!?) is the clue: a deliberate contrarian play – visually an intersection of divergent points.   That divergence was always the plan for Twitter.

In 2022 Musk paid $44billion for a social media platform, full of anger and discord, saying “let that sink in”, but his real reason was acquiring 200 million active subscribers, not its brand or dematerialising advertising revenues. At the time, he was transparent enough: "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app", he said.

His ambition is to  build a WeChat for the rest of the world.  When I was in China you could not rent a flat, buy an ice-cream, or travel cross-country without WeChat.  His new CEO  Linda Yaccarino (once in Advertising herself) certainly shares that ambition, so "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities” she tweeted.

Maybe some befuddled marketers and brand experts will follow those who hated Musk’s libertarianism, and quit the platform.  But somehow, I doubt it. Threads unravelled pretty quickly, so people it seems will continue to Tweet or 'Xeet" [a real thing] in their millions.

In a decade Musk may well have built an 'everything' platform that manages half the world's regular day to day spending/transacting – like a behemoth Monzo or Revolut, ubiquitous on a billion phones.  Or maybe not. Many are predicting Musk’s move is doomed to fail and the future can have divergent paths – even with a maverick billionaire at the helm.

As Banquo said in Macbeth "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.”