The final time Elon Musk flipped the chook at his customers, it was to modify Twitter’s emblem to a grinning Shiba Inu—a hilarious inside joke that pumped the worth of the dogecoin cryptocurrency, through which Musk was an investor, by 30 p.c. A category motion is still pending.

Over the weekend, the previous richest man on this planet crowdsourced a emblem for the platform, which by this morning had been rebranded to X. Twitter—sorry, X—CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted—sorry, x’ed—that the corporate was being radically reimagined to grow to be a platform “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI.”

The new model—which customers have identified seems to be rather a lot like the usual unicode X—is the newest iteration of an idea that Musk has been pushing for the reason that late Nineteen Nineties. First, he tried to construct a web-based financial institution at x.com till he was ousted from the corporate, which renamed itself after its solely profitable service, PayPal. Since shopping for the x.com area in 2017, Musk has added to the imaginative and prescient: messaging, ecommerce, video, and now AI, all on a single platform.

“There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation,” Yaccarino wrote. “X will be the platform that can deliver, well … everything.”

It received’t be. To create an excellent app, X must construct an entire new monetary know-how infrastructure, win over regulators by overt and diligent compliance with the principles, and earn the belief of customers and advertisers that have abandoned Twitter since Musk took over.

“If you’ve got decreasing brand equity and decreasing user experience, you’re already starting three laps behind in the race,” says David Shrier, professor of apply in AI and innovation at Imperial College Business School. “This is a 23-year-old business plan that didn’t work then, and is now being implemented in a worse market position,” he says of Twitter’s rebrand to X.

The primary underpinning of any tremendous app can be funds—permitting individuals to pay each other, pay companies for items and companies, and obtain cash for a similar. In January, Twitter began making use of for licenses to course of transactions within the US, in an initiative reportedly spearheaded by Esther Crawford, whose startup Squad was purchased by Twitter in 2020. Crawford, who famously posted an image of herself bedding down on the ground of the Twitter workplace within the early days of Musk’s tenure, was laid off in February.

On Sunday, Crawford tweeted what seemed like a veiled dig on the rebrand. “Corporate seppuku: destroying your own product or brand,” she wrote. “Usually committed by new management in pursuit of cost-savings due to a lack of understanding about the core business or disregard for the customer experience.”

Tech firms have usually tried to get into fintech as a technique to squeeze extra income from their customers and to show platforms into broader ecosystems of services and products. Ride-hail firms like Uber and Southeast Asia’s Grab and Go-Jek have launched finance merchandise, which they will use to pay drivers and take funds from customers. Meta has made a number of makes an attempt to construct funds into its profitable marketplaces, with restricted influence. In April, Meta rolled out payments over WhatsApp in Brazil. Apple has began constructing on Apple Pay with Apple Card and Apple Savings.