X Isn’t a Super App. It’s Just Twitter | WIRED
The last time Elon Musk threw the bird to his users by turning the Twitter logo into a grinning Shiba Inu — a hilarious inside joke that boosted the value of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin Musk invested in by 30 percent. A class action is still pending.
Over the weekend, what used to be the world’s richest man crowdsourced a logo for the platform, which was renamed X this morning. Twitter – Sorry, X – CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted– Apologies, x’ed – for radically reimagining the company, creating a platform “focused on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities.” Powered by AI.”
The new mark — which users have pointed out — looks a lot like the standard Unicode X — is the latest iteration of a concept Musk has been pushing since the late 1990s. He first attempted to set up an online bank at x.com before being ousted from the company, which renamed itself PayPal after his only successful service. Since buying the x.com domain in 2017, Musk has expanded the vision: messaging, e-commerce, video, and now AI, all on a single platform.
“There are absolutely no limits to this transformation,” said Yaccarino. “X will be the platform that can, well… deliver anything.”
It won’t be. To build a super app, X would have to build a whole new financial technology infrastructure, convince regulators by openly and diligently following the rules, and win the trust of users Advertisers who have left Twitter since Musk took over.
“If you have decreasing brand value And by the time the user experience drops, you’re already three laps down the race,” says David Shrier, Professor of Practice in AI and Innovation at Imperial College Business School. “It’s a 23-year-old business plan that didn’t work then and is now being implemented in a worse market position,” he says of Twitter’s renaming as X.
The fundamental foundation of any super app would be payments – allowing people to pay each other, companies to pay for goods and services, and receive money in return. In January, Twitter began applying for licenses to process transactions in the United States. The initiative was reportedly spearheaded by Esther Crawford, whose startup squad was bought by Twitter in 2020. So was Crawford, who posted a picture of herself lying on the Twitter office floor early in Musk’s tenure released in February.
On Sunday, Crawford tweeted which looked like a veiled dig at the rebranding. “Corporate seppuku: destroying one’s own product or brand,” she wrote. “Typically committed by new management looking for cost savings due to a lack of understanding of core business or disregard for customer experience.”
Technology companies have often sought to get into fintech to extract more revenue from their users and transform platforms into broader ecosystems of products and services. Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Grab and Go-Jek of Southeast Asia have launched financial products that allow them to pay drivers and take payments from users. Meta has made several attempts to integrate payments into its successful marketplaces, with limited effect. In April, Meta has introduced payments via WhatsApp in Brazil. Apple has started expanding Apple Pay with Apple Card and Apple Savings.
