If the tech industry has to describe the archetypal serial entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk, one will fall short on words. Like the Midas touch, Musk is privy to a longstanding history of success whenever he has decided to make overtures with his companies SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.
The recent developments at SpaceX with the permissible orbital launch of Starship have exhilarated people who are curious about Musk’s dream of building life on Mars.
And yet again, Musk’s ever-growing popularity is in the perpetual echelon of the limelight as tidings indicate that social media microblogging site Twitter, is no longer an independent company but merged with Musk’s other firm called X Corp, according to a court filing in California. Eagle-eyed sources caught the new name on a lawsuit document filed by activist Laura Loomer who is suing Twitter and former founder Jack Dorsey for flouting laws after her account was taken down in 2019.
“Twitter Inc. has merged into X Corp. and no longer exists. X Corp is a privately held corporation under its parent X Holdings Corp. No publicly traded corporation owns 10 percent or more of X Corp’s or X Holding’s stock ”
While Twitter’s new legal status now doesn’t need to publicly report changes like the name updates to the SEC, even after the Twitter and X Corp merger, the platform will remain functional as a social media site.
The Reason Behind Twitter-X Corp Merger: Everything App
Other recent developments at Twitter included its recent logo tryst with cryptocurrency DogeCoin, which became an unending pit of trolls and memes albeit Elon Musk started it. After restoring the blue birdie logo to Twitter, Dogecoin once again plummeted.
On the threshold of a ginormous controversy, when Musk was purchasing Twitter for a staggering sum of $44 billion last year, he had betokened of this acquisition being an ‘accelerant’ to his impassioned pet project of creating “X, the everything app”. The proposed app covets the myriad of services of China’s WeChat, with the name reminiscent of Musk’s former financial services startup X.com which was renamed to PayPal.
In the past, Musk has lauded Chinese giant Tencent’s WeChat, an almost super-app with 1 billion users, which supports messaging, ridesharing, payments, food delivery and other utilities. Whilst Musk remains allured to the unique aspects of WeChat, its dominance could be fixated on China, making it quite impossible to replicate outside the populous country.
X
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2023
Musk’s one-letter tweet attracted more than 43 million views within hours.
The mogul’s move to merge Twitter and X Corp seems a quite deliberate step in the direction of the ‘X: the everything app’, displaying Musk’s well-played vertical integration skills. But, with Twitter already being riddled with a slimming crew of people working to revitalize revenues with the Twitter Blue subscription, the proposed ‘X, everything app’ seems like all of the innumerable non-follow-ups of Elon Musk.
How Elon Musk’s Twitter Turned X Corp May Never Become The Everything App
With more than 134.4 million followers on Twitter, Musk’s time at the helm of its C-suite has been more tumultuous than the fate of the latest turbulent tech stocks.
Ever since Musk took over Twitter, several advertisers withdrew from the platform, plunging Twitter’s revenue and adjusted earnings by 40 percent. Industry analysts cited concerns for Twitter’s operations when Musk fired more than half of the company’s employees. The Tesla CEO has been accused of manipulating Twitter’s algorithm to gain traction for his own tweets.
WeChat’s Edge Over Everything App
The West has long celebrated WeChat as one of the greatest inventions of China.
The virtual success of Tencent-owned messenger WeChat in the past decade is owed to its plethora of features that people love such as reading news, booking appointments, paying taxes and galore.
The social networking king of China, Tencent, has helped the messaging app thrive in the country. WeChat’s role as the ubiquitous messenger with over 1.3 billion users became omnipotent over time. Its core function is being a social messaging app, fundamentally different from the social media platform Twitter. WeChat’s internal ecosystem is hard to duplicate in the United States with the stronghold popularity of tech businesses like Amazon, Uber, and Facebook.
While it seems unlikely for people to accept Musk’s intentions for the Twitter X Corp merger, it is evident that with ‘Everything app’, he will be setting himself up against unparalleled tech giants of the US.
On a final note, Robert Downey Jr had tuned to Musk’s personality for his role as Tony Stark in the Marvel Universe by the virtue of Musk’s embrace and desire to push the limits of technology. But is it possible that Musk is living life nothing less than a real-life Marvel superhero and not considering himself just analogous to the character?
