Elon Musk has a new plan for Twitter Inc. after giving up a legal battle and agreeing to pay $44 billion for the company Tuesday.
That was Musk's first public statement Tuesday about the decision, which was revealed earlier in the day in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While the chief executive of Tesla Inc. TSLA has tossed off myriad ideas for improving Twitter TWTR, this is his first mention of creating a new app that includes Twitter, though he has previously cryptically tweeted a hint about plans for a social-media service under that name.
In a conversation with Twitter employees earlier in the acquisition process, Musk stated that he wanted to build a super app, a concept that has become ubiquitous in China, with offerings like WeChat, but has yet to find an equivalent in the U.S. Musk has a history with the letter before Tesla released the Model X, although the mention of turning X into its own app is new. One of Musk's first big wins as an entrepreneur was when his online bank, X.com merged with another company to create PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL, in 2000. When eBay Inc. EBAY bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk received millions of dollars in proceeds which he funneled to Tesla and his rocket startup SpaceX. He returned to X.com in 2017 and repossessed the domain, one of only three single-letter domains available, for an undetermined fee. Musk hasn't done much with X.com - the website currently exists with just a single X on a white background. He established a holding company that would swallow Twitter once the acquisition was completed, and he named it X Holdings when he agreed to acquire Twitter for $44 billion in May. After agreeing to acquire Twitter, Musk tried to call off the purchase, leading to a legal fight with Twitter. Musk sent a letter to Twitter executives to agree to go through with the transaction if they drop the legal proceedings, just two weeks before a trial was set to begin in Delaware Chancery Court. In a follow-up tweet Tuesday, Musk suggested that plans have been sped up by the acquisition of Twitter, although he has not previously provided his plans for an X app. Musk has dropped a hint about his plans for now, but X is the spot where his plans may be secret.