NeXt chapter
Twitter is dead, and an X marks the spot where its iconic blue bird once perched. While Elon Musk’s latest change may have taken some by surprise, with “X” users rushing to “X” their views about the “X” redesign, his preoccupation with (and plans around) the 24th letter actually go way back.
In 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity to become PayPal just a year later. Now, his biographer Walter Isaacson says, the Tesla CEO is ready to complete his original vision from nearly 25 years ago — turning X into a one-stop everything platform.
Everything, everywhere, all in one app
Everything apps, or “super-apps”, are platforms where the user can fulfill a variety of tasks from one centralized hub. That means playing minigames in the same place you message your loved ones, or reading the latest news on the app that you transfer a friend the $10 you owe them. Super-apps are huge in Asia and Musk’s goal will be to try and replicate the biggest of them all — WeChat.
Indeed, in a town hall event for Twitter employees back in June 2022, Musk explained that people in China “basically live on WeChat because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life”. The app’s 1.32 billion monthly active users — who can hail taxis, order food, pay their bills, read books, message people, post pictures, and much more — would likely agree with Musk on that point too.
Apparently, the mogul wants X to be even bigger, though. Axios observed that Musk’s tellings herald the app as “Twitter + Substack + YouTube + PayPal + Amazon + TikTok + WeChat + Baidu” rolled into one. The everything app for everything apps, then.
