The Good and Bad of X
More than a year into Elon Musk’s Twitter ownership, it’s safe to say it’s been an eventful journey. Last month, Musk generated another wave of controversy at an NYT conference by publicly going after former Twitter / X advertisers for pulling away from the platform. The saga brought a renewed look at what X is becoming. Enough time has passed with Musk at the helm that we are able to point out genuine improvements and problems found with X.
We will begin with the genuinely positive developments. We will then follow that with the bad and the mixed bag.
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The Uncomfortable Truth With Big Tech’s Expense Bloat
In the second half of the 2010s, Big Tech looked unstoppable from a financial perspective. Revenue growth rates were through the roof. The biggest problem found with hiring was finding enough office space. New headquarters were the rage. Under the hood, ambitions knew no limits with most of Big Tech looking well beyond their core competencies for future growth opportunities.
Then the pandemic hit. Instead of putting an end to the growth boon, the pandemic dialed everything up a few notches. With little to nothing to do outside the home, competition for our attention (and cash) plummeted, leading to even stronger revenue growth for Big Tech. The work from home movement then gave management teams a way around office space constraints, leading to even more hiring.
A trend that has begun to materialize over the past two to three earnings cycles in Big Tech is that expense bloat is a genuine problem.
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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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