What Xactly is Elon Musk up to?

Elon Musk’s recent decision to do away with one of the world’s best-known brands and icons, Twitter and its blue bird, and replace them with the letter X, has, as was to be expected, made the headlines around the world.

As a rule, destroying an asset as universally recognized as the Twitter brand makes no sense, and usually only happens when it has become toxic, such as Marc Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook as Meta: the former’s name was mud after years of a “move fast and break things” philosophy that saw it used for rigging elections and genocide; but name change or not, we all know it’s business as usual at Menlo Park.

Why are so many people are baffled by Musk’s move? Despite the wear and tear the brand has suffered over the last 17 years, it was still generally held in high regard, what’s more, it has gifted us a host of household words such as tweet (verb and noun), the twittersphere, the twitterati, and of course twitterstorm, all of which will now presumably fall into disuse.

So why give up such an asset? It may not seem to make much sense, but to put things in context, let’s not forget that this an acquisition he tried to pull out of when he realized what he was really buying, but which he was ultimately forced to complete. Once the deal was inked, he unleashed a scorched-earth strategy, knowing that if he wanted to turn…