What changes will happen on Twitter under the new CEO – as Elon says app will be
A new Chief Twit has entered office.
Elon Musk confirmed that NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino will become Twitter‘s new CEO on Friday.
The tech mogul also heralded a transformation of the company into X, Musk’s long-cherished moniker for an ‘everything app’.
‘Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app,’ Musk tweeted.
But how much of everything will X be? And why ‘X’ exactly? Here’s what we know about Musk’s X plans.
Elon Musk was interviewed by Linda Yaccarino at a marketing conference on April 18 and it’s been speculated the meeting played an important role in her appointment
Musk announcement Yaccarino’s appointment on Friday morning with a tweet which said: ‘Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app’
Musk has been fixated on the brand potential of X.com since at least the late 1990s, when he launched the site as an online banking start-up with co-founder Greg Kouri, a real estate developer and friend of his parents.
But Musk lost control of X.com once the start-up merged with its fierce e-payments rival Confinity in 2000 — creating PayPal, and minting his fortune, in the process.
Back on July 5, 2017, Musk repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal, explaining it had ‘great sentimental value’ to him.
Clearly, of course, Musk also sees great monetary value in X, hoping the symbolic weight of the infinitely changeable mathematical variable will help him build the ultimate app for all modes of human interaction.
Payments
This time last year, at the All-in Summit, Musk waxed admiringly Tencent’s WeChat, a colossal Chinese social media app that offers messaging and video chatting, video games, photo sharing, ride services, food delivery, banking, and shopping.
‘If you’re in China, you kind of live on WeChat,’ Musk has said.
‘It does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. It’s really an excellent app, and we don’t have anything like that outside of China.’
With recent expansions to payment features on Twitter, it’s clear that Musk’s vision for X.com is sure to be an American rival to WeChat offering a similar buffet of internet services and features.
Phone and video calls
Earlier this week, Musk tweeted that new features enabling voice and video chat via users’ Twitter handles are currently in the works
Musk said Twitter users would soon be able to ‘talk to people anywhere in the world without giving them your phone number.’
The move could help Twitter compete with its social media rival Meta, which offers video chat services via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to its billions of users across the globe.
This week, the billionaire unveiled that video and voice chat functions were ‘coming soon’
Comparatively, Twitter had a reported 238 million monetizable daily users last July.
It’s clear that Musk has been gunning for WhatsApp’s market share, ever since the billionaire said the messaging service ‘cannot be trusted’ in response to claims by Foad Dabiri, Twitter’s current director of engineering.
Dabiri had tweeted that WhatsApp had accessed his phone’s microphone while he slept.
Broadcasting and newsletters
Under Musk, Twitter has already attempted to crowd into the paid newsletter space, sparring with market leader Substack and offering payment and subcription services to aspiring content creators.
But that’s only one step in Musk’s ambitions to expand Twitter as a media destination and not just a microblogging platform for discussing media elsewhere.
Although Musk has publicly stated that he did not ink a deal for former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to bring his show to Twitter, it’s clear that he had been encouraging media figures to do so on their own funding and initiative.
Musk tweeted at ousted CNN host Don Lemon: ‘Have you considered doing your show on this platform? Maybe worth a try. Audience is much bigger.’
Dating next?
Whether Musk was being serious or not, he has entertained his fans calls to add dating app features to the service, which YouTuber Steven Mark Ryan proposed as a solution to Musk’s concerns over declining birthrates.
‘Interesting idea,’ Musk responded, ‘maybe jobs too.’
The dating app pitch came from content creator Steven Mark Ryan, a YouTuber who posts videos on tech and finance news
The potential dating app, which the Twitter CEO deemed an ‘interesting idea,’ would use artificial intelligence to make matches instead of random swiping
Although other social sites, including Facebook, have taken a stab at entering the dating app space, none have made a dent in market behemoth Tinder, which boasts having created 55 billion matches within eight years.
By comparison, since launching in 2019, Facebook Dating claims it had created over 1.5 billion matches in 20 countries.
Arguably, there’s no loftier, more difficult ambition than delivering ‘everything.’
But that’s exactly what X would have to achieve to succeed, crowding out rivals in multiple spaces, like dating apps, where market dynamics are already mature.
Sentimental value is one thing, but for X.com to rise again it’ll have to be more than just a passion project.