The platform known as Twitter for the past 17 years will now be called “X” – and its billionaire owner Elon Musk expects us all to play along. The sudden change may seem like it came out of nowhere, but there’s a deeper history to this plan and Musk’s obsession with the letter X.
In October, when Musk was on the verge of taking over the social media platform, he was open about the fact that the $44bn acquisition would serve as an “accelerant” for his plans to build “X, the everything app”. In his view, X will not just be a place for us to exchange short posts about whatever we want to talk about; it will also become an online bank and payments platform, a place to shop, and surely whatever else Musk decides should be added to it. And given the hype of the moment, the firm’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, says it will all be “powered by AI” – because why not?
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