When Mark Zuckerberg introduced Meta META to the world, he shared a corporate vision that went beyond Facebook and into the metaverse. When the streaming service HBO Max WBD renamed the HBO name and became Max, the move was seen as a way to broaden the platform's appeal beyond the iconic network. While the rebrands drew criticisms - a strategic misstep, or management's confusion over what appeals to the public - both kept the old, valuable brands intact. However, in Elon Musk's rebrand of Twitter, the destruction of the old, valuable identity appears to be the primary reason for the move.
In a move which experts say will vaporize billions of dollars in value, Musk has said goodbye to Twitter, and the visuals and verbiage people have long used to describe it. In Musk's vision for a super app, offering the ability to conduct your entire financial world, there are not yet new products or service announcements but rather the promise of things to come, and most importantly the end of Twitter.
Going with the name X' and all of its anti-establishment innuendo is his way of giving the middle finger to a world that s just shown him theirs, said Steve Susi, director of brand communication at Siegel Gale. Where other rebrands have typically occurred to acknowledge weaknesses or commit to transparency in the wake of a crisis, Susi said, he is not convinced that contrition and self-effacement are in Musk's wheelhouse. The next step was to begin the gradual removal of all comparisons to the once-respected social network and just own it for better or worse. Estimates and methodologies differ on how to measure the worth of a brand, but experts say Musk's sudden move could erase $1 billion to as much as $13 billion in value. Susi said Musk has shown those numbers don t matter to him, so he s likely to spare no expense at winning back his ego.
While many people see attempts to make sense of the disappearance, others see attempts to make sense of it as nothing but a waste of time. But Newton said, Musk regularly issues grandiose pronouncements about how Twitter will someday become a WeChat-style'super app, ensure the future of civilization, and so on. At its core, Musk's misadventure at Twitter has been reactionary: an ideological purge of the employees he saw as 'woke' and entitled; a gleeful inversion of industry standards around content moderation, a hollowing out of the free product, and a redistribution of the company's attention and wealth toward right-wing users. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, went on to equating Musk's moves to alter a crucial communication platform as the destruction of civic infrastructure. However, for Musk and his supporters, the financial advantage and influence of a super app could be immense. If he pulls it off, an app that sat on Twitter, TikTok and Amazon would be a very valuable company, said Joshua White, professor of finance at Vanderbilt University.
But Musk's rocky leadership and his erratic leadership style have left White and others skeptical of the ambitious plans to turn Twitter into a whole new experience of life-encompassing software.
Telling an app your bank account information, purchase history, and a record of your medicines is a whole lot different than everyone making 'Barbie' and 'Oppenheimer' jokes and posting memes, he said.
Hamza Shaban, a Yahoo Finance reporter, covers markets and the economy.