Elon Musk broke the internet. Feed readers throughout the land are clogged this week with outrage and schadenfreude over Twitter’s rebranding to “X.” This includes nostalgia for the iconic brand, disgust over its haphazard approach, and one of those vapid cultural moments you wish would dissipate sooner.
Fulfilling a move that Elon Musk has telegraphed for months (more on that in a bit), the Twitter brand is gone, and X now lives there. This includes questionable tactics such as an off-the-shelf Unicode logo, and an uncompensated imminent-domain seizure of an unsuspecting Twitter user’s “@X” handle.
But amidst the linkbait headlines and shouting matches of a free-for-all web where everyone has an opinion, the larger point is being missed: what does this signal for Twitter (ahem, X) as a company and a product? The TLDR version is that it’s Elon Musk’s latest step toward his “everything app” ambitions.
Promising Path
Using that as a starting point, the real question then becomes, can Twitter pull off an everything app strategy? Also known as a super app, the model is exemplified by companies like WeChat. They contain several functions including communications, social interaction, shopping, and payments (B2C and P2P).
As Scott Galloway often says, this is the holy grail of apps. The way we see it, it contains a mix of stickiness, scalability, and sustainability (recurring revenue). And as Galloway said on the latest Pivot episode, a super app is X’s clearest path to reclaim its former glory and reinvent itself in the Elon Era.
More obviously, this is a path that Musk himself has telegraphed (it’s not a grand insight from Galloway nor us). His interest in an app for everything – and using Twitter as a foundation for building it – was the primary reason for his $44 billion Twitter acquisition… not free-speech virtue signaling.
Back to the question of whether or not Musk and X can pull this off, their chances are decent. X has an installed base of users (albeit dwindling to some degree), a social graph, messaging, and – most importantly – payments potential. The latter stems from Musk’s competency and history with PayPal.
As a fun-fact sidenote, Localogy President Bill Dinan points out that Twitter’s new domain – X.com – was once owned by PayPal during Musk’s tenure. After branding disagreements, x.com languished until Musk bought it from PayPal in 2017. Now he puts it in play to host his super-app world domination plans.
Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back https://t.co/bOUOejO16Y! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2017
Master of None
Back to super-app prerequisites, despite X’s on-paper alignment, messy realities could tell a different story. For example, Musk’s brazen rock-the-boat approach at Twitter has degraded the platform’s position of strength. That weakens the momentum of a big pivot.. then again there’s less to lose/risk.
The other question is if, despite the above advantages, an everything app can fly. It requires excellence across the board or it risks becoming a “jack of all trades, master of none.” To prevent users from fleeing to other point solutions for a given super app’s features (payments, chat, etc.), it has to nail them all.
Yet another question is competition. Are others positioned better for super-app status? Snap is one company that’s been moving in this direction. It ticks some of the same checkboxes – engaged user base, communications infrastructure, and social dynamics. Sadly it’s missing payments.
That last part is key because payments is the hardest super-app component to pull off. It has the greatest barriers to entry and moving parts (e.g., regulatory). That’s why I always say that the best contenders for super-apps are payment apps like Venmo… they’ve already done the hard part.
That puts X somewhere in the middle… we’ll keep watching to see if Musk and his PayPal backgrounds can vault X into the next (and first) super app in the Western world.
