Volume 146: Corporate Seppuku.
Volume 146: Corporate Seppuku.
July 27th, 2023
Corporate Seppuku.
tl;dr: Time to X-it.
It’s become pretty clear in the past few days that anyone who knows anything about this branding stuff thinks changing the name of Twitter to X is deeply and utterly daft. I concur. It’s literally insane.
So why do it?
My guess is that Twitter is in much worse shape than anyone realizes.
To understand why, look no further than the historic behavior of Twitter owner Elon Musk.
One of his defining characteristics is his narcissism and publicity-seeking. Understanding from a very early point in his career that personal fame could be extremely valuable as a corporate competence because staying top of mind in the current media landscape directly translates into value. This is why he doesn’t seem to have minded his own perception shift from innovator to infamy. Understanding that fame is fame and that infamy is valuable too.
What isn’t valuable is irrelevance.
At Tesla, his carnival barker routine proved game-changing. It single-handedly allowed the company to pour its resources into product development and the experience rather than being forced to go toe to toe with the automobile industry in the advertising stakes. Because of the sheer cost this would’ve incurred, it’s almost certain that Tesla could not have succeeded the way it did had it not had a carnival barker like Musk at the helm.
What’s most interesting about this is that whenever doubts emerged and Tesla stock started to flag, Musk would pop up with a new announcement designed to seize the narrative, like Autopilot (2014), blasting a crash test dummy into space in a roadster (2018), Cybertruck (2019), and robotaxis(2019). In other words, he’s proven adept at opportunistically manipulating media narratives in his favor when he needs to the most.
First, why do this at all? Second, why do this so shambolically? Third, why do this with nothing but a never, never promise of “everything” as the reason?
Why, the existential dread of irrelevance, of course. The thing Musk fears most of all.
Clearly, many forces are intersecting to put a crimp on Twitter: increased competition - Threads, Mastodon, Post, Bluesky, Spoutible, to name just a few. Advertisers bailing, rampant bots and conspiracy theorists, Elon stansand their blue checks, bits and pieces breaking and not being repaired, and other self-inflicted wounds such as DDOS-ing itself and then claiming it a feature. Not to mention the sword of Damocles that hangs over the whole thing, its debt.
Add it all up, and almost certainly, time spent on the app has declined, subscribers have declined, advertising revenue has collapsed, and for the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, Space Karen is staring straight down the barrel of irrelevance.
So, he reacted the only way he knew how—as a media opportunist, firing off a big statement without anything meaningful to back it up. In this case, announcing the shift to X.
Will the “everything” app work? Well, the product would need to change fundamentally, gatekeepers like Apple would need to get on board, regulators would need to be happy, and consumers would have to suddenly start trusting an app that’s barely capable of handling posts…with their financial information while simultaneously overcoming their worry that X sounds like p0rn. So, no. Probably not.
But here’s the thing. When we look at rebrands like the shift from Twitter to X, we can’t view it through anything approaching a normal lens. Because it’s entirely possible, indeed it may even be probable, that in a couple of days, weeks, or months when he needs another hit of publicity, Musk will simply turn around and hype the return of Twitter and retiring of X.
And, as for the continued irrelevance of Twitter/X? It’s tough to see a future that offers anything else. So watch for further braying from Musk. Because the deeper X slides into irrelevance, the louder and more outrageous his oh-so-very-public existential crisis will become.
Until eventually, he gives up, bails out, and moves on.
Or…as some people believe, he tanks the business to the point where he can buy the debt for pennies on the dollar, then rebuild it like a phoenix from its ashes.
Me, I’m not buying it. I think this is nothing more sophisticated than an unbelievably rich man experiencing a very public midlife crisis as he wrecks his way through a business he desperately tried not to buy in the first place.