The neatest perception and evaluation, from all views, rounded up from across the internet:
Farewell, Twitter, stated Oliver Darcy at CNN. This week, “the text-based social media platform that performed an outsize position in society by serving as a digital city sq. was killed by its unhinged proprietor, Elon Musk.” Musk formally modified the corporate’s iconic hen emblem to an “X” as a part of a sweeping rebrand. “X would possibly resemble Twitter,” at the least initially, however “it isn’t the identical platform it was” earlier than Musk purchased it for $44 billion final October and “rapidly decapitated the previous management and threw the corporate into chaos and turmoil.” Regardless of the rebrand, X will nonetheless inherit all of Twitter’s issues, together with fleeing advertisers and new competitors from Mark Zuckerberg and Threads. Possibly we will discover closure now that we will “separate Twitter from what Musk has reworked it into.”
Certainly, Twitter as we knew it’s useless, stated Mike Allen in Axios. The brand new identify is step one in Musk’s bet-the-house gamble of “remodeling the platform right into a merger of a moneyless market + public sq. + video content material manufacturing facility — his the whole lot imaginative and prescient for an the whole lot app.” Assume Twitter + Substack + YouTube + PayPal + Amazon + TikTok + WeChat + Baidu, all rolled into one. Based on biographer Walter Isaacson, who’s writing a ebook about Musk, he has been “plotting the Twitter rebranding for 9 months.” Really, “X” has been “a constant presence within the billionaire’s enterprise brandings and private life for many years,” stated Rachel Shin in Fortune. In 1999, Musk based X.com, an internet banking startup, which merged with PayPal. He later repurchased the area X.com from PayPal in 2017, seemingly “for purely nostalgic functions.” Now we all know he had a plan for all of it alongside.
The hen needed to go, stated Peter Franklin in UnHerd. Twitter might be “the proper launchpad” for an the whole lot app if it isn’t tied to its fame as a microblogging web site. It has “a whole lot of thousands and thousands of customers in a number of international locations, a super-accessible person interface, and a public profile that, in contrast to most social networks, doesn’t restrict its attraction to slender demographics.” These are sturdy “the whole lot app” credentials. Besides that plan hasn’t labored for different “corporations larger, richer, and smarter than X,” stated Dave Lee in Bloomberg. The situations that make tremendous apps work in Asia do not apply within the U.S. market, the place “shoppers aren’t (for essentially the most half) un- or under-banked, or missing in credit score choices.” And “even corporations that dominate in lots of areas — like Google — have discovered that buyers don’t desire the whole lot locked” into one place, due partly to the straightforward proven fact that “apps that attempt to do an excessive amount of grow to be cluttered and gradual.”
“I suppose my query is, what was he paying for?” stated Matt Levine, additionally in Bloomberg. “Thus far, Musk has accomplished lots to make Twitter much less helpful however nothing, so far as I can see, to make it extra helpful.” Including a fintech aspect to Twitter’s messaging functionality is attention-grabbing, in idea. However all his strikes recommend Musk wished one thing utterly totally different from Twitter, and he may have constructed that for much lower than $44 billion.
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