Musk risks even more damage to Twitter’s business as the messaging app changes name to X

Published

2 years ago

July 25, 2023

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Elon Musk has long been enamored of the letter X.

Now, he’s killing off the Twitter brand and the iconic blue bird in favor of X as part of an effort to turn his $44 billion acquisition into something that’s genuinely his.

Musk’s vision for X is something akin to China’s WeChat, a super app that people can use for entertainment and buying goods and services online, in addition to posting updates and messaging their friends. But the rebrand comes after months of erratic behavior by the world’s richest person turned off users and pushed away advertisers, leaving Twitter in a troubled financial position and increasingly vulnerable to competition.

Killing an iconic internet brand is “extremely risky” at a time when rival apps such as the new Instagram Threads and smaller upstarts such as Bluesky are luring users, said Mike Proulx, an analyst at Forrester.

Musk has “singlehandedly wiped out over fifteen years of a brand name that has secured its place in our cultural lexicon,” Proulx said in an email.

A company spokesperson didn’t provide a comment for this story.

It’s not entirely a surprising move. Musk had already converted Twitter’s corporate name to X Corp, which itself is a subsidiary of X Holding Corp, as revealed in an April court filing. Musk said last October, just prior to buying Twitter, that he viewed the $44 billion deal as “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”

The letter X features prominently in the name of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. And over two decades ago, X.com was the name of Musk’s payments company that eventually became PayPal through a merger with a rival at the time.

Name changes have become fairly commonplace among storied web companies. Facebook became Meta in late 2021, and Google adopted the Alphabet moniker six years earlier. However, in those cases the newly named parent companies kept the branding of their core services, so Facebook users and Google searchers could keep doing their thing without disruption.

Musk appears to be betting he can get rid of Twitter altogether. Over the weekend, he introduced the new X logo and said in a tweet that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

Linda Yaccarino, who Musk hired as CEO in May, said in an email to employees Monday that the company will “continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

Succeeding in that mission is easier said than done.

Musk’s desire to turn X into a super app requires “time, money and people,” which Twitter “no longer has,” said Proulx. Earlier this month, Musk said that Twitter has suffered a 50% drop in advertising revenue and that it needs “to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”

Some advertisers had grown concerned about promoting their products on Twitter because of reports showing a rise of hate speech and racist and offensive comments on the platform as documented by multiple civil rights groups and researchers.

Musk has tried to offset some decline in advertising with a premium subscription service. But at $8 a month, the company would need tens of millions of subscribers to make up for the losses.

Those advertisers remaining on the platform now have to adopt a new lingo. People and businesses around the world know Twitter messages as “tweets.” Like Kleenex, Twitter was able to develop a recognizable brand that was instantly familiar with consumers, a feat that any corporate marketing team would celebrate.

Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair, told CNBC last week that his team of analysts “didn’t pick anything up” from advertisers they polled as part of a recent survey on the digital advertising market that would indicate that these businesses had upped their spending on Twitter. Meanwhile, there are signs that the overall digital ad market could be improving, according to the William Blair survey.

Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an emailed statement that the name change marks “a gloomy day for many Twitter users and advertisers” and a “clear signal that the Twitter of the past 17 years is gone and not coming back.”

“Twitter’s rebrand is a reminder that Elon Musk, not Threads or any other app, is and has always been the most likely ‘Twitter killer,'” Enberg wrote.

WATCH: Elon Musk wouldn’t be who he is without ‘demon mode’ and his drive, says biographer Isaacson

Technology

Oracle stock jumps after $30 billion annual cloud deal revealed in filing

Published

3 hours ago

June 30, 2025

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Oracle stock jumps after billion annual cloud deal revealed in filing

Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.

CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.

“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”

The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.

Trump says he has group of ‘very wealthy people’ ready to buy TikTok

Published

13 hours ago

June 30, 2025

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Trump says he has group of ‘very wealthy people’ ready to buy TikTok

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on April 4 that he would again postpone enforcement of a law banning TikTok unless its Chinese owner ByteDance divests from the platform.

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview aired on Sunday that he has a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy TikTok, whose identities he can reveal in about two weeks.

Trump added that the deal will probably need Beijing’s approval to move forward, but said “I think President Xi will probably do it,” in reference to China’s leader Xi Jinping.

The president made the off-the-cuff remarks while discussing the possibility of another pause of his “reciprocal” tariffs on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”

Tiktok’s fate in the U.S. has been in doubt since the approval of a law in 2024 that sought to ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. The legislation was driven by concerns that the Chinese government could manipulate content and access sensitive data from American users.

Earlier this month, Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest from the platform’s U.S. business. It was his third extension since the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok law just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January. The new deadline is Sept. 17.

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, of PAFACA, had originally been set to take effect on Jan. 19, after which app store operators and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

TikTok went dark in the U.S. ahead of the original deadline, but was restored after Trump provided it with assurances on the extension.

Trump, who credited the app with boosting his support among young voters in the last presidential election, has maintained that he would like to see the platform stay afloat under new ownership.

Potential buyers that have voiced interest in the app include Trump insiders such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison to firms like AppLovin and Perplexity AI.

Most of the potential bidders for TikTok don't fit both Washington and Beijing's requirements

However, it’s unclear if ByteDance would be willing to sell the company. Any potential divestiture is likely to require approval from the Chinese government.

A deal that would have spun off TikTok’s U.S. operations and allowed ByteDance to retain a minority position had been in the works in April, but was derailed by the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, Reuters reported that month.

The president previously floated a proposal for American stakeholders to buy the company and then sell a 50% stake to the U.S. government as part of a joint venture.

Experts have previously told CNBC that any potential deal could face legal challenges in the U.S., depending on whether it complies with PAFACA.

Technology

Nvidia insiders dump more than $1 billion in stock, according to report

Published

1 day ago

June 29, 2025

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Nvidia insiders dump more than billion in stock, according to report

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Mustafa Yalcin | Anadolu | Getty Images

Insiders at artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia have dumped more than $1 billion in stock over the last year, according to a report from the Financial Times.

About $500 million worth of sales occurred over the last month as the market notched new highs and shook off geopolitical tensions that had rattled investors, according to the report. The stock is up more than 17% this year despite concerns over curbs limiting AI chip sales overseas and 44% over the last three months.

Securities filings revealed that the tech titan recently unloaded about $15 million worth of shares as part of his more than $900 million plan announced in March to sell up to 6 million shares through the end of the year. Huang’s net worth totals about $138 billion, placing him as 11th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Last week, the chipmaking giant hit a fresh record and rallied for five straight days following the stock sales and an annual shareholder meeting, where the CEO called robotics the biggest opportunity for the company after AI. That helped the chipmaker regain its seat as the most valuable company ahead Microsoft and Apple.

The FT article cited a report from VerityData, which noted that the jump in shares above $150 prompted the stock dump.

Last year, Huang unloaded more than $700 million in Nvidia shares as part of a prearranged plan.

A Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Read the complete Financial Times report here.