Twitter is Finally Dead
Elon Musk this week ended his destructive charade as the owner and operator of Twitter not by ceding operational control to someone more capable or by admitting his vision for the product is completely unworkable, but instead by just killing it entirely. The company formerly known as Twitter will now be branded as X.
It is no longer an ad-based social network. It’s … something else.
It has been a fascinating spectacle to watch the world's richest person light $44b on fire by turning the platform formerly known as Twitter into a haven of hate speech, harassment, and amplified disinformation while stiffing its employees, vendors, and contractors. But that really isn't the point of this column. I've been following Twitter's steady, predictable decline under Musk since day one, and there's no need to relitigate how and why it has become what it’s become. I don't have anything to say, really, to brands that still spend resources there.
Instead, I want to explore what the end of the Twitter platform as an ad-based social network means in the macro sense. To me, that's the question that’s bound to get less attention this week.
The rebranding is a straight-up admission that the company’s core business is undergoing a drastic pivot away from being an ad-based social network and towards being something else. This begs two questions: What is X, and which platform takes Twitter’s place in the public marketplace of ideas?
So, what is X? It is no secret that Musk aspires to create an “everything app,” one piece of software that becomes a ubiquitous part of daily life for consumers. Messaging friends, making payments, finding a date, ordering goods, doing your job, making investments—the idea behind an everything app is, well, that it does everything. That it is the one app people use for existing in the modern world.
WeChat is the everything app in China, and Grab is the everything app in Southeast Asia. Musk seemingly wants X to be the everything app in the United States.
Can it be? No, I don’t think X will become the everything app in the U.S. I doubt regulators would tolerate a true everything app, and even if they would, one would take time, money, and people to build. Musk runs other companies, overpaid for Twitter, and fired most everyone who knew what they were doing. While he still has the money to do literally whatever he wants to, he’s lacking in the “time” and “people” departments.
But I want to be crystal clear that there are dueling versions of what counts as success here. Because if we look at X not as an innovation but instead as potentially a well-publicized grift, then my analysis changes.
Musk could pretty easily layer payments on top of his app, ship new messaging formats and other easy-to-build features, and just start saying he’s built the everything app he’s always wanted to. He could forget about the only product that matters to advertisers—moderation—and instead focus on the features that matter to consumers.
He could then sell that business into the public market via IPO, perhaps while—and I'm just spitballing here, without making a specific accusation—an army of bots props up the value of the offering. It wouldn't be the first time that questions have been credibly raised about bot-related market manipulation that favors one of Musk’s companies.
The Twitter rebrand is, I think, both an official execution of Twitter as a platform and the launch of Musk’s everything app. And I think there’s some degree of relief to it, because we can all abandon the notion that the platform is a serious place for brands to advertise.
So, then, what takes Twitter’s place in the marketplace of ideas?
I’m tempted to say Threads, because I believe once it opens itself up to advertisers, there will be a ton of interest among large brands. But I’m going to say “nothing,” because Twitter wasn’t a unique innovation, per se. Its success was a product of the time in which it was launched and scaled.
Twitter’s primary impact on society was that it made the news cycle faster. When CNN launched in 1980, it created the 24-hour news cycle, and the norms and practices of journalism changed in response. When Twitter began to scale around 2007, it made more accessible real-time information shared and contextualized by peers, and the norms and practices of journalism changed in response.
Twitter’s political identity, formed in the context of a specific cultural need at a unique point in time, was always its defining feature. Moderation was just one of several ways that this identity was manifested. The decisions the company made to allow that identity to express itself and to evolve were not always right, but they were always honest.
However, just as opponents of truth and democracy figured out how to corrupt the 24-hour news cycle to consolidate their political power, opponents of truth and democracy figured out how to corrupt social networks to consolidate their political power. With CNN et al., the source of that corruption was propaganda masquerading as journalism. With Twitter et al., the source of that corruption is disinformation published and amplified at scale.
Meta’s Threads may become an approximation of Twitter for advertisers, but it will not be a Twitter replacement for people. Unfortunately, we’re living in a post-truth era, where facts do not matter in the same way as they did just as recently as 15 years ago, which means that no platform will replicate Twitter’s political identity, ever.
We were always headed towards this destination. Musk’s destruction of Twitter just got us there quicker.
