Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter as "X.com" is the billionaire's latest major overhaul as he contends with struggling finances and growing competition from Meta.
Musk announced on Sunday that he was pivoting the company's logo from its traditional bird to an "X" logo. The rebrand will transform the "global town square," Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said. The website, however, ran into a series of hiccups on Monday when X.com failed to redirect to Twitter for several hours.
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“Please don’t take this moment for granted,” Yaccarino wrote in a Monday memo to Twitter employees. “You’re writing history, and there’s no limit to our transformation. And everyone, is invited to build X with us.”
Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023
Musk has stated that X will be his intended vision for an "everything app" similar to that of China's WeChat. The company said in April that Twitter had been merged into a new parent company called X Corp.
The company has also begun incorporating an assortment of new features into the app. Twitter filed paperwork in November 2022 with the Treasury Department that would allow Twitter to incorporate the financial technology required to process online transactions.
If Musk intends to pivot Twitter toward his vision of an everything app, he will need to figure out how to improve its revenue stream soon. Musk confirmed last week that Twitter's ad revenue, considered to be its primary source of money, had dropped 50% in the last year. The company has "negative cash flow" as well as "heavy debt," Musk said.
The platform ran into technical difficulties when it limited the number of tweets users could view, drawing the ire of several of its users.
Yaccarino was hired in June to replace Musk as the company's CEO to allow the billionaire to focus on his other companies, which include Tesla and SpaceX. The newly appointed CEO turned her focus to winning advertisers back to the company's side as well as encouraging employees and convincing investors and lenders of Musk's vision for the social media outlet.
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The company is also facing multiple lawsuits that could cost it hundreds of millions of dollars. Former Twitter employees filed a class action lawsuit against the business last week, alleging that Musk's promise to pay a certain severance package violated the company's previous severance plan. Twitter's finance chief filed a similar suit in June, alleging the company did not pay "tens of millions of dollars" in promised bonus payments.
Twitter also faces competition from Meta's Threads, which had an explosive launch in its first two weeks of operation and reached more than 100 million users within a week. The Twitter clone could draw its competitor's former advertising contracts, according to some analysts. However, the activity levels on the app have significantly dropped, leading some to wonder if the app can keep up its steam or if it will end up among other purported "Twitter Killers" that have receded as threats, such as Mastodon and Blue Sky.