While the spurned press wallows in schadenfreude over what feels like a collapse of Twitter, owner Elon Musk is playing a long game.
His stated purpose is an “everything app” called X.
Clearly modeled after China’s WeChat (owned by Tencent, the app used by 1.2 billion Chinese people for buying tickets, making reservations, paying the rent, video games, social network and video calls), Musk hopes that X will become the first non-Asian “super app.” (Other “super apps” include China’s Alipay (owned by Alibaba Group) and Southeast Asia’s Grab (owned by a Southeast Asian multinational conglomerate called Grab Holdings).
Musk’s apparent plan is to roll out new features on Twitter and also acquire new companies and fold them into Twitter.
At some point, no doubt, Twitter will become just a sideshow in the new app, overshadowed by payments and other features. Musk recently formed the X company, of which Twitter is now a subsidiary.
In fact, the transition to X has already begun. Twitter today rolled out a feature that enables paid Twitter Blue subscribers to upload videos that can be as long as two hours. Twitter wants to compete with YouTube.
Earlier this week, Twitter acquired a job-matching tech startup called Laskie. Twitter wants to compete with Linkedin.
And last week, Musk announced the hiring of Linda Yaccarino, former head of NBCUniversal’s advertising sales department. (The hiring was extremely unpopular on Twitter, with left wing users complaining that she’s a fascist and rightwing users complaining that she’s “woke.”)
Three barriers exist for Musk to succeed with his “X” idea. The first is, people outside of Asia don’t like “super apps.”
Second, as I’ve detailed before, Musk is proving incompetent about media, both social and mainstream.
And third, Elon Musk is becoming too reviled a person to succeed with an app that works only if nearly everyone buys into it.
Musk seems to be embracing increasingly radical views — the kind one gets from trolls, shitposters and Russian disinformation agents on 4chan.
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