Elon Musk is at it again…
He’s formally rebranded Twitter to now be called “X.” Right now, X hasn’t changed much from the platform formerly known as Twitter except for sporting a different logo. But it seems like Musk and leadership now see X as one piece of a much broader entity.
In a somewhat cryptic set of tweets, CEO Linda Yaccarino shared more.
Why it matters: Regardless of what exactly X ends up looking like, AI is clearly going to be a big part of it going by Yaccarino’s tweet. Not to mention, just a few weeks before the change, Musk also announced xAI, an AI company that is intended to build “good” artificial general intelligence (AGI) and compete with OpenAI.
Connecting the dots: On Episode 56 of the Marketing AI Show, I spoke with Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO Paul Roetzer about what the heck is going on with X.
- The rollout wasn’t exactly…well-planned. You might even call it chaotic. It seemed like the rebrand occurred nearly overnight. At one point, Musk was crowdsourcing logo designs on Twitter the weekend before the rebrand. And the communications (tweets) coming from Musk and Yaccarino seem vague and unhelpful. Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen with X, the communications strategy behind the rollout has been haphazard at best.
- Yet the idea of X has been around a long time. X.com was actually the name of an online financial services company Musk owned in 1999. That company merged with another to form PayPal. So, X as a concept has been around for awhile in Elon Musk’s world…even though the rebrand happened seemingly overnight with little planning.
- Musk sees X becoming an ‘everything app.’ “He is literally obsessed with this idea of X.com being the ‘everything app,’” says Roetzer. By everything app, we mean something that might look similar to WeChat in China, which is a highly popular all-in-one social media, messaging, and payments app. The site formerly known as Twitter may become the main vehicle to make this vision happen.
- And AI is likely key to that vision. It’s obvious that AI will be infused into anything the company does moving forward. But there may be even more going on here. Musk also owns other companies that rely on highly advanced AI to function (SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink). It’s possible all the data those companies have collected and fed to AI systems may power the overarching aims of X, Roetzer speculates.
What to do about it: If you’re not a regular Twitter user, the rebrand to X likely doesn’t affect you much. But, if you are, you may want to prepare to see very rapid, very significant changes to a platform you or your brand rely on, if the sudden rebranding is any indication of what’s to come.
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