ELON Musk is at it again. Equal parts charismatic and controversial, the serial techpreneur, who last year bought Twitter for a whopping $44bn, has started erasing the social media platform’s iconic blue identity to replace it with a starker, more futuristic ‘X’. The rebranding exercise is part of his vision to reconfigure Twitter as an ‘everything app’, with features that will let users browse and consume multimedia content as well as make purchases and complete peer-to-peer transactions from the same platform. It sounds like an interesting plan — it’s a shame the Twitter bird had to fall victim to it. This major repositioning comes at a turbulent time for Twitter. The sharks have been circling, sensing weakness as the company’s new CTO upsets users with his frequent, sometimes whimsical changes to the platform, which have proved too jarring for more dedicated users. Competition has recently started cropping up, with major industry players like Meta and TikTok offering new features or services to rival what Twitter has on offer in a bid to pull disgruntled users away from it.

It doesn’t seem to be bothering Mr Musk much. The jury is still out on whether he is a villain or a genius, but if his past is anything to go by, he has achieved much that would have seemed impossible at one time. From manufacturing the wildly popular Tesla electric vehicles to making spaceships with SpaceX to revolutionising online payments with PayPal, he has changed the world in more ways than one. His turning Twitter into ‘X’ may seem eccentric, but it is an attempt to turn the struggling company financially viable by pivoting its product into an integrated platform that can help users make lifestyle choices with greater ease. Will the big bet pay off? Time will tell. Meanwhile, Mr Musk is living up to his reputation for venturing into the unknown and risking it all for his dreams.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2023