Elon Musk’s Influence Was Misjudged
Musk is taking advantage of the generational shift in how we consume news to put his thumb on the news scale to suit his own (political) interests.
The past few years have been a whirlwind in social media land. Our experiences online pre-pandemic feel like a generation ago. The rise of short-form video has not only transformed the social media giants (Instagram, YouTube), but also pushed video on what had been text-first platforms. Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase in 2022, which many predicted to not pan out, continues to be misjudged based on its subsequent influence. It is not an understatement to say X was the pivotal factor in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The defining driver behind this development: Elon Musk.
One reason why Tesla is such a difficult company to analyze is that one ends up needing to analyze Elon Musk. It’s not an easy task. While I am keenly aware of the key man / woman risk being overstated, there is no denying that Musk is single-handily determining Tesla’s key strategic decisions and direction. As it pertains to X, formerly Twitter, a similarly overpowering presence by Musk is apparent. Partly out of necessity as large advertisers moved away from the platform, X embraced paid subscriptions. The company also dropped what had been Twitter’s highly controversial content moderation policies that followed partisan lines. As someone who used Twitter during the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections, the most recent campaign felt and looked different on X. Not only was President Trump’s account reinstated, but a wide selection of accounts that had been banned in the years leading up to Musk’s takeover were reinstated and active. From my vantage point, both sides of the political aisle were adequately represented on X, which was not the case pre-Musk, although the claim is somewhat subjective given the X algorithm.
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Musk’s X Rebranding Is On Brand
Out of all the changes Elon Musk has pushed through at Twitter, rebranding the company to X fits him best. It’s not a business model change, such as pushing paid subscriptions, or a new product feature like allowing longer tweets. Instead, it’s the most outward example of Musk putting his stamp on the company.
In coming up with rationale for the rebranding, Musk put forth an argument of Twitter evolving into something very different than what the name initially referred to (“short bursts of inconsequential information”). Of course, it wouldn’t be difficult for one to argue the opposite and stick with the Twitter brand despite product evolution. The more important message that Musk is going for with the rebranding is to denote where he wants to bring the platform in the future. It’s a move that had shades of familiarity with Mark Zuckerberg embracing the Meta rebranding to denote where he wanted to take Facebook (although he didn’t change Facebook/Instagram product branding).
Musk was clear to his 150 million X followers: the platform will evolve into a more general-purpose service. Details of such evolution aren’t available as they likely haven’t been determined yet. Based on Twitter’s continued struggles with advertising, we can assume Musk and company will put more features behind a paywall to further pull the paid subscriptions lever. Looking out further, it is natural to assume other paid services will be on the X table as well. Musk has talked about adding payment services, which isn’t surprising given his history.
We can debate the likelihood of success for such items. I tend to be more optimistic on video-related endeavors while pessimistic on payments and other features that resemble more of an all-in-one platform. The more interesting takeaway from the X rebranding is found with Musk’s lack of risk aversion.
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