Elon Musk made his case Monday evening for tossing the Twitter brand aside to chase his vision for a superapp called X. His lofty goal is to make the site a finance hub as well as a social platform.
“In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context,” Musk wrote on Monday.
Musk hasn’t been shy about his ambitions, like colonizing mars. Walter Isaacson, who is publishing a Musk biography in September, said in a recent post that X originates from a 1999 vision for an app that combines a web of consumer finance, interaction, and entertainment features. Isaacson said Musk planned to make the change even before he took over control of Twitter.
“He said that he would turn [Twitter] into the combination of financial platform and social network he had envisioned twenty-four years earlier for X.com, and he added that he planned to rebrand it with that name, which he loved,” Isaacson wrote in an excerpt from the upcoming book that he shared on Twitter.
The planned expansion of X into a one-stop-shop mobile app follows the footsteps of superapps in Asia such as WeChat . Such apps took off as users in many areas in China accessed the internet for the first time with the advent of mobile phones.
“What happened in a lot of Asian markets is that the mobile web was synonymous with the rise of the web for many people,” Brian Wieser, founder of the strategic advisory firm Madison and Wall, told Barron’s.
American consumers have turned toward a wider variety of apps that each specialize in a specific service. X will face a steep competition if it wants to attract users away from other tech and finance platforms.
“I have been impressed with how Google and Amazon over time have become super-companies, successfully offering services in several different verticals/industries—advertising, commerce, payments, cloud,” Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney told Barron’s earlier this week. “But I wouldn’t describe either one as a super-app company.”
In the U.S., Meta Platforms has dabbled with superapp concepts with payments and Messager features, but its recent release of microblogging platformThreads as a separate app from Instagram suggests a single integrated superapp is not a priority for the firm. Uber Technologies has talked about superapps and built out its features so that users can turn to its app for food, rides, and other transportation services.
The ultimate question for fans of the Twitter brand is why Musk felt the need to acquire the firm, rather than build his own thing.
“If Musk had started with $40 billion, or more, in a little over a year, I think he could have gotten a lot further just building something from scratch,” Wieser said. “And it’s kind of what he’s doing. If you’re really trying to separate yourself from what came before, it all really begs the question, what exactly was he buying?”
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