Elon Musk's Twitter rebrand is more ambitious than just the letter X

When Twitter CEO CTO and owner Elon Musk announced that he was rebranding the popular microblogging social network as "X", the move was met with plenty of skepticism. But his plans for the service and his long-prized X.com domain go beyond just branding. Musk's ambitions are far grander, and far more difficult: he wants to build Twitter X into "the everything app".

Companies update their branding all the time, even Apple has periodically revised the appearance of their bitten-fruit logo. But a complete change of branding and name, that's rare — especially for a multi-billion-dollar company. Sometimes the company name will change, but the public-facing product doesn't, as Google did when it changed the umbrella company's name to "Alphabet", or Facebook changed to "Meta". The search engine is still called Google, the world's largest social network is still named Facebook. And though it happened quietly, that's also Twitter: earlier this month it was merged into an X Corp. parent company.

But changing the name of your flagship, nay, your only product? That's a big move. And while sure it may be in part because Elon really likes the letter X (See: rocket company SpaceX, electric vehicle Tesla Model X), it's also to position Twitter to be more than just a social network.

Musk has talked about this repeatedly in the past: he's fascinated by the idea of building an equivalent of WeChat in the west. Most of you probably aren't familiar with WeChat, and you have no reason to be. Even though at 1.3 billion users WeChat is the #6 most popular social network in the world (well ahead of Twitter at 400 million monthly active users), almost 80% of WeChat's users are in China, with most of the remaining users in other Asian nations like Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. If you're reading this, statistically speaking you're almost certain to be in North America or Europe, and your exposure to China-centric apps like WeChat is minimal at best.

But WeChat's strong popularity in Asia is unmatched and unlike anything in the West. It hinges in part on the fact that WeChat is more than just "chat". It's often described as an "app for everything" in China, or a "superapp". It started out as just a chat platform, and then added push-to-talk voice chat, broadcast messaging, and video calls. But all of that's just communications. It's also a place to post and share photos and videos, play games, share locations, and more.

The biggest "everything" aspect of WeChat, though, is WeChat Business, which allows WeChat to act as a storefront for all sorts of other businesses. Users can order food delivery and pay for it through WeChat. They can book flights and buy an iPhone direct from Apple in WeChat. Heck they can even use WeChat Pay in more than 1 million retail stores. Much of a person's digital life in China can happen exclusively inside WeChat.

WeChat's rise as the everything app for China was unique because it coincided with the rise of social media and later online shopping in China. Good timing, and strong government support, ensure that WeChat's parent company Tencent was well-positioned to take advantage of these trends as the Chinese government allowed them to happen. The government's insulation of the Chinese culture from outside influences paved the way for homegrown apps like WeChat to lead the way domestically.

WeChat also very smartly opened up their platform rather early on for developers to build "mini programs" that plugged into WeChat and gave them access to the millions and then billions of WeChat users. This openness meant that a lot of what made WeChat popular wasn't even made by WeChat, but if you could get to everything through WeChat then that made it an attractive proposition. And as WeChat added support for transactions in-app through WeChat pay, they also made buckets of money from their fees levied on every transaction — up to 2% depending on the merchant, which is comparable most credit card transaction fees and made accepting WeChat payments an attractive proposition for stores.

All of that is what Musk wants to build on top of Twitter X. And that will be a very tall order. Firstly, Twitter's just not built to do anything like that. It's a short-form text sharing service that has been updated to allow the sharing of images and video, had a live audio chat broadcast system tacked onto it, and only accepts payments for advertising and the subscription Twitter Blue service.

To become a western everything app, X has a lot of needs. It partnered with stock- and cryptocurrency-trading company eToro in April to add the first finance features to Twitter, but right now it's just a "View on eToro" button on pages with $STOCK tags. Building a financial services backbone into X will be essential, and without the government greasing the skids as China did for WeChat that will be much more difficult and expensive for X.

Additionally, X will need some way for outside developers to plug into the platform to offer additional services. That framework will need to be robust and extensive to enable a broad range of interactions and transactions. More importantly, enticing businesses to list their products and services through X will require the kind of stability that Twitter has not recently been known for — both on a technical and public relations front. Many advertisers have taken a step back from Twitter as Musk has made some questionable and controversial decisions, and that's hurt Twitter's revenue.

Additionally, the dramatic culling of Twitter's workforce has left X with a much smaller team of engineers. While there's absolutely something to be said for a lean and focused team, several times under Musk's leadership major changes have resulted in a buggy Twitter experience, if not the site going completely offline for hours at a time. No major tech company is immune to bugs and every single one has gone down at some point, but Twitter in 2023 has been notably less stable than any other site of its stature.

Meanwhile, Meta launched Threads — an overt clone and competitor to Twitter — and has seen a lot of early excitement and rapid adoption. While Musk tries to build X into more than just Twitter, Facebook is trying to consume the core of the Twitter business.

What Musk wants to build X into will not just require technical stability and a rock-solid foundation that I doubt Twitter has, but many new hires. And that's not just developers and engineers — X will need to fill many new jobs in departments like customer support, accounting, and legal where they are very lean. That's not to say that Musk doesn't have experience in leading companies with large workforces. Tesla employs more than 120,000 people around the globe in manufacturing, sales, repair shops, charger installation, and more.

The biggest challenge Musk faces in making X into an app for everything is just the online environment that it exists in. To do this requires going up against massive entrenched players that have no incentive to partner with X. Amazon dominates online shopping and doesn't need access to X or Google or anybody else to make money — millions of Americans open Amazon every day and shop right there. We're used to and comfortable with ordering food on DoorDash, sending money to each other with apps like Venmo, Cash, and PayPal, and chatting on all sorts of platforms from Instagram to Snapchat to Telegram to regular old text messages.

That's a lot of inertia that X will need to overcome, and to do so it has to offer a compelling product that's more than just "you can do it all in one app." The appeal of WeChat isn't that it's all in one app. That's not a big deal to modern phone users. WeChat is popular in China because it is the option to do all of this and it was very popular for chat before it even started adding in shopping. Twitter is not in such a position.

Musk has at least worked with finance before. He was briefly CEO of PayPal in 2000 after a merger with an online banking company he and co-founded. Musk's tenure was brief, though, after he tried hard to rebrand PayPal as X.com (the name and domain of his merged banking company) with ambitions to… expand it beyond just payments processing. He was soon forced out by a board vote orchestrated by PayPal cofounder Peter Theil. (Seventeen years later, he bought the X.com domain back from Paypal for an unknown sum and has sat on it until this week.)

That scenario won't play out again as Musk pivots Twitter into X and tries to build it into his desired app for everything. Musk has thrown himself fully into Twitter after being forced to go through with his $44 billion acquisition, and cemented his control over the company by firing the entire board of directors and executive leadership team. While Musk hired NBCUniversal advertising sales chief Linda Yaccarino as CEO and appointed himself as Chief Technical Officer, by all visible measures he's actually still the one in charge. There's no opportunity for anybody to force Musk out or block him from pursuing his ambitions for X, only however much money and effort he's willing to ply into this.