Musk wants to talk to Cook again, for X.
At the end of November last year, shortly after Musk took over Twitter for $44 billion, he criticized Apple online. Musk said that Apple has not only stopped advertising on Twitter, but also threatened to remove Twitter from the app store.
At that time, Mark Zuckerberg also actively followed up, responded to Musk in the interview, and “mouthed” Apple together. Unexpectedly, Musk changed his face in a Sichuan opera in less than 48 hours, visited Apple headquarters, and talked and laughed with CEO Tim Cook. This “misunderstanding” was resolved.
On Wednesday, August 2 local time, Twitter has been renamed X, and Musk once again mentioned Cook. He called on everyone to actively subscribe to the accounts of creators he likes, and said that X will not draw any commission within 12 months, and will not start to charge 10% until the total amount exceeds 100,000 US dollars.
But the Apple tax — the 30 percent Apple takes on the money Apple users pay — is still there, and Musk said he would “talk to Tim Cook.”
This is Musk’s intention to promote the creator ecology of the X platform, and it is also the first important decision since Twitter changed its name and logo. Corresponding to this is the Creator Advertising Revenue Sharing Plan launched in mid-July.
On July 24, local time, Musk suddenly announced that Twitter was renamed X, and the classic blue bird logo was replaced by a cool new logo. “X is a platform for everything,” says X CEO Linda Jarricno. It seems that Musk is finally moving towards the long-conceived “super application”.
However, in the 10 days since then, X’s situation has been no different from Twitter in the past-little progress, a lot of fantastic news, and chaos.
The new X signboard outside the office building received complaints from citizens, and it was demolished within a few days after it was erected; CEO Jarricno changed his X account to “LindayaX”, and the old username was taken immediately and became a spoof account Musk admitted that X’s advertising revenue was halved, and immediately took the well-known anti-hate speech organization to court, saying that the latter’s previous report on Twitter scared away advertisers…
Changing the name does not seem to change the fate. Although holding high the banner of “super application”, what Musk has to face is still the injured bird. And he doesn’t seem to have found any magic trick yet.
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The most symbolic event in the 10 days of X was the demolition of the new logo on the X San Francisco headquarters building.
The original Twitter logo is at the bottom of one side of the office building. The blue bird and the word Twitter in English are arranged vertically. After the official announcement of “killing the bird”, Musk couldn’t wait to remove the old logo. The night before, a huge “X” was projected on the outer wall. Soon, an X sign was officially erected on the roof.
However, this X sign is too exaggerated. People in San Francisco keep uploading videos, that X glows brightly at night and flashes in different forms. But because it is too bright, and sometimes flickers too fast, the X sign is not so much an introduction to itself, it is more like a grumpy old man who sticks his name on someone’s face until the other person remembers it. “Imagine you live across the street,” said one netizen who shared the video.
In one weekend, 24 people complained about the sign, and the San Francisco city government issued a notice of violation. Company X has demolished this grumpy old X that did not obtain permission in advance.
Up to now, Musk’s X account still has the video of this sign on top.
Also eager to support the new brand X is the CEO Yari Ke Nuo. After initiating the X vote, Jarricno changed his username to @LindayaX, having previously briefly used “lindayacs”. Unexpectedly, the name of lindayacs was quickly used as a spoof account.
This account impersonated Yari Kno and launched a poll of “Let’s go back to Twitter! Who’s with me?” As a result, more than 800 people participated in the vote, and 88% of them said they wanted to restore the old name of the website “Twitter” special".
Adding an X after the user name was originally a move by Jarricno to express his determination as the CEO. However, just like the X sign that Musk couldn’t wait to erect and was quickly dismantled, it became a footnote to the criticism of this brand transformation.
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Even though Musk has been obsessed with “X” for many years, and now he has poured all kinds of expectations into it, users may not necessarily buy it.
Some users felt that after Twitter changed to X, it was no longer “cool” here. Dave Keating, a journalist with 50,000 followers, said in an interview: “Twitter has become an embarrassing place. It’s like a club is no longer cool under new management. It can feel like it’s going out of business. You and Friends make eye contact and say, ‘Why are we still here?’”
Twitter’s brand has been established since the company was founded in 2006, and it has become more popular after the introduction of the blue bird mascot in 2010. For a few years, Twitter was a social platform, Tweet became a verb, meaning to post here, and the employees here were called Tweeps.
“The app itself has become a cultural phenomenon. In one sweep, Musk essentially wiped out 15 years of Twitter’s brand value and is now starting from scratch,” said Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at Forrester. , when a brand becomes a verb, it becomes the Holy Grail.
Mike Carr, co-founder of the brand company NameStormers, said that “X” can easily be interpreted as an image of a technological overlord exuding an ominous atmosphere, which is completely different from the warm and lovely blue bird.
“X” does sound and look cool, but it has already made some creators start to be alert: Will the content they share on the platform be used by xAI to train large models?
xAI is an artificial intelligence company established by Musk, which was also officially announced recently. Earlier, Musk had revealed that he would develop a “TruthGPT (TruthGPT)”. Although xAI’s official website has stated that xAI is independent of X, Musk said in the live event: “We will use public tweets (obviously not any private information) for training, just like every other company does.”
At present, many creators (or artists) have made it clear that they will stop updating on the X platform. Nicole Rifkin, an illustrator who has worked with publications including The New Yorker, posted: “I love you all and thank you for your support over the years, but for this reason I will be deleting it in the next few weeks. My Twitter.”
Yingjue Chen, a production designer at Netflix, also forwarded the report titled “Musk will use your tweets to train AI”, and said: "Haha, no thanks. I will not post artwork or client work here again. "
Another interesting new change is that “paid verification” users of the X platform can now choose to hide their blue verification logo. Spend at least $8 per month on the prestigious logo, but you actually need to use hidden functions? X did not explain this, but some users speculated that this is because Musk has now “destroyed a decade-old symbol of trust and turned it into a symbol of shame.”
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Of course, this does not mean that the X platform will be abandoned. Since Musk took over, there have been constant criticisms, but the number of Twitter users has never seemed to have dropped significantly, and even Zuckerberg launched a competing product, Threads, which failed to replace it some time ago.
Just a few days ago, Musk posted that the number of monthly active users of X reached a new high of 540 million, and emphasized that “this is after deleting a large number of robot accounts.”
The problem for X seems to be how to advance, not how to defend. There is nothing to defend in this position. X is not a big platform. In comparison, whether it is TikTok or Meta’s Instagram, the number of global monthly active users is more than 1 billion.
In terms of commercialization, despite Musk’s drastic efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency, he also lost many advertisers due to various reasons. That’s deadly for X, which gets more than 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. In March of this year, Musk also said in an interview that X will achieve positive cash flow within 6 months. And said in April that most of the advertisers he bought and left had returned. In June, the new CEO of X, Jarricno, took office. She was in charge of the advertising business at NBC Universal before, and she is a veritable leader in the advertising industry.
However, in mid-July, Musk responded to a tweet proposing its recapitalization, saying that Twitter’s advertising revenue had dropped by 50%, and the interest burden on debt repayment was very heavy, and Twitter’s cash flow was still negative.
On Monday, July 31 local time, Musk found a “murderer”-the British Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
CCDH is a non-profit organization that regularly publishes reports on hate speech, extremism or harmful behavior on social media platforms such as X, TikTok or Facebook. Earlier, CCDH reported that since Musk acquired Twitter, hate speech and misinformation about it have increased, and that Musk has not taken effective measures to curb this situation. One of the reports, which tracked hate speech from several paid subscription accounts, found that about 99 percent of the content was never moderated and kept showing up on the platform.
Company X is suing CCDH, saying it “conducted a scare campaign” to drive away advertisers, alleging it “illegally” obtained data from Platform X and used it to conduct “flawed” research on the platform.
CCDH is currently in a standoff with Musk. Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s chief executive, insisted in a statement that “Center Against Digital Hate’s research has shown that hate and disinformation are spreading like wildfire on Musk’s platforms, and this lawsuit seeks to make These (research) efforts silenced,” he also criticized Musk for “trying to shoot the messenger instead of dealing with the toxic environment he created.”
The name and logo have changed, but Musk is still trapped in the birdcage.
