Elon Musk has taken a wrecking ball to Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, first gutting the foundation and now demolishing the façade.
But according to Dorsey, the cofounder and longtime chief executive of Twitter, Musk’s latest idea to scrap the site’s blue bird logo and rename the platform to X as an “accelerant” for creating an everything app—an earthquake in the corporate branding world—is nothing to get excited about.
“Keep calm and just x through it,” Dorsey posted late on Sunday on his former platform.
Dorsey has been accused of letting the fox into the henhouse when he actively campaigned within the Twitter board for Elon Musk to acquire the company. Yet he has since increasingly distanced himself from the polarizing entrepreneur, who later accused him of doing nothing against child exploitation.
Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023
Musk’s “infatuation” with the letter X goes way back, and his Twitter deal would help him fulfill his original vision from 1999, according to official biographer Walter Isaacson on Sunday.
Recounting a message received from the tycoon last October, he wrote: “‘I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant,’ he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning.” (The month was no coincidence: A Delaware court compelled him under specific performance to honor his acquisition deal at the time.)
Unusual decision
Many, if not most, management and business experts would normally advise against ditching an instantly recognizable brand that built a user base of 215 million worldwide. Twitter’s reputation and unique positioning in the social media landscape helped make it worth $44 billion to Musk in the first place, since the underlying business threw off relatively little cash even in the best of times.
But chances are experts also wouldn’t have recommended Musk change Twitter Blue into a pay-to-play subscription system, eliminate legacy verified accounts under the guise of combatting harmful spam, or lose not one but two heads of safety after little more than half a year.
In the process, imposter accounts surged, half his advertisers departed the platform, and post-Musk Twitter earned a reputation for not honoring its bills or paying its rent.
keep calm and just x through it
— jack (@jack) July 24, 2023
Under fire, the tycoon stepped down as CEO to allegedly focus on the site’s engineering and technology. Yet Sunday’s announcement is the latest example after unveiling his revenue-sharing model where he inserted himself into commercial decisions; a corporate rebranding falls under marketing, not product.
Leading from behind is titular CEO Linda Yaccarino, an ad exec hired with great fanfare from NBCUniversal. Headlines like “Yaccarino breaks silence on Twitter’s rate limits” only serve to highlight that her role may be more about sweeping up the shattered pieces Musk leaves behind.
The CEO chimed in later Sunday that the X rebranding gave the 17-year old company a “second chance to make another big impression.”
Jack Dorsey may however profit from the root-and-branch repurposing of the company he helped found. He is trying to launch a new Twitter competitor of his own called BlueSky that takes a decentralized approach to social media, just like Mastodon.
