Elon Musk Doesn’t Have a Plan For Twitter, Or Anything Really

In a ridiculous farce that now seems to occur regularly, Elon Musk has announced something, and members of the media are reporting on it as if he has any credibility whatsoever.

Musk’s latest attention-grab is rebranding Twitter as “X” after he paid $44 billion to run the social media platform into the ground, and it has generated everything one now expects of a typical Musk hype cycle. There was an absurd spectacle as contractors removed the sign from Twitter HQ. Logo ideas were floated via Musk’s favorite form of human interaction, random weird guys replying to his tweets. And just like with all his other ventures, many media outlets reported credulously on the pointless rebrand, despite Musk’s long track record of hyping up ideas he has no serious intention to help materialize.

Musk loves his portrayal in the media as a Big Ideas Guy, but one idea he doesn’t seem to have is what an app called X will actually do. Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino described a pie-in-the-sky “everything” app that will supposedly take the platform beyond its text-posting roots. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” Yaccarino wrote in a Tweet (Xeet?) on Monday. Naturally, this was followed by sterile “Here’s what it means” articles appearing across multiple mainstream outlets.

Musk has long alluded to creating an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, using the press to voice his usual litany of half-baked, nonsense ideas while seeming to have no clue how to execute them. In a recent interview, he wildly claimed—seemingly based on no actual information—that the new app could incorporate banking and encompass “half of the global financial system” and act as “the most efficient database for the thing that is money.” The idea that Twitter and its 17 year-old codebase could be modified to run the global economy, of course, has exactly zero basis in reality. 

Even among critics, the tendency to believe Musk has some kind of coherent plan for the platform—nefarious or otherwise—is consistently at odds with what his deranged actions have demonstrated.

Writing for Platformer, Casey Newton notes how Musk’s extremist right-wing views have dramatically reshaped Twitter, creating a chaotic campaign of defacement against what he and his reactionary simps see as an epidemic of corporate wokeness. 

“Yes, Musk regularly issues grandiose pronouncements about how Twitter will someday become a WeChat-style ‘super app,’ ensure the future of civilization, and so on,” writes Newton. “But at its core, Musk’s misadventure at Twitter has been reactionary: an ideological purge of the employees he saw as ‘woke’ and entitled; a gleeful inversion of industry standards around content moderation; a hollowing out of the free product; and a redistribution of the company’s attention and wealth toward right-wing users.”

It makes sense that such a purge would inevitably end with erasing Twitter’s name. But even this idea—which suggests that Musk’s platform is part of some larger right-wing political project—seems to give him too much credit.

If anything, Musk’s actions have consistently shown that he has little interest in anything beyond griefing whoever or whatever he is obsessed with at the moment—especially if doing so grants him external validation from his cult-army of online weirdos. His coddling of right-wing reactionaries, racists, and transphobes doesn’t seem to be based in a strong commitment to any coherent ideology or cause, but an insatiable need to play to his audience in exchange for temporary ego boosts. 

And speaking of ego boosts, that appears to be exactly what “X” is. Musk reportedly purchased the domain name X.com in his PayPal days in a hefty deal that included stock in the company, and tried to change the payment platform’s name to X despite being told it was a terrible idea. If he was anyone else, we might think he chose the name X after his child, whom he calls “X,” but since it’s Elon Musk we can safely assume that he just really thinks it’s cool and finally there is nobody to stop him. 

i’m sorry i can’t think of a joke funnier than twitter failing to get the necessary permits to change their building signage and the police shutting it down just in time for “er” to remain pic.twitter.com/2tzrBNK97K

— parker lyons (@tweetsbyparker) July 24, 2023

This is evident from the origin story of the platform’s purchase by Musk, who originally proposed the $44 billion deal in a Tweet, then repeatedly tried to get out of it when things went south. Many of the changes made to the site have been simply based on Musk’s own mercurial whims, or—worse yet—the ideas of the sewer-dwelling sycophants in his replies. Throughout all of this, many Musk fans and journalists were more willing to believe Musk was playing 4-D business chess than to see him simply as a bumbling fool who is rich enough to do whatever he wants and never face consequences.

This is not to understate the impact that Musk’s reactionary bent has had on Twitter users. In the months since Musk took over, he has axed the platform’s moderation staff, scared away advertisers, and reshaped its algorithms to explicitly amplify anyone who pays $8 for a verified checkmark, including white supremacists and transphobes. This not only destroyed the company’s value, which has plummeted to a fraction of the $44 billion Musk paid for it, but also single-handedly cratered a site that many people relied on for their livelihoods and forced them to seek greener pastures on competing platforms like Bluesky and Threads.

But going so far as to claim this is part of a large, coherent plan—whether benevolent or sinister—remains an enormous stretch. There is no evidence that Musk takes any of this seriously, because he simply doesn’t need to. His power and wealth as the son of a South African emerald tycoon who is now ensconced in the U.S. military-industrial complex have thus far ensured that he will only fail upward, unshaken by his own repeated incompetence.

If there’s any reasonable way to view Musk and the company formerly known as Twitter, it’s not as a serious business trying to make money, but as the vanity project of a deeply insecure rich guy who likes playing with expensive toys.