Elon Musk has a new plan for Twitter Inc. after giving up a legal battle and agreeing to pay $44 billion for the company on Tuesday.
““Buying Twitter is an accelerator to build X, the app of everything”“
That tweet it was Musk’s first public statement on Tuesday about the decision, which was revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier in the day. While Tesla Inc.’s TSLA,
The CEO has thrown out a myriad of ideas to improve Twitter’s TWTR,
this was his first mention of the creation of a new application that includes Twitter, although he has cryptically tweeted a hint before about plans for a social media service with that name.
In a discussion with Twitter employees early in the acquisition process, Musk raised the desire to create a “super app,” a concept that has become ubiquitous in China, with offerings like WeChat, but not yet has found an equivalent in the US.
While the mention of turning “X” into its own app is new, Musk has a history with the letter long before Tesla launched the Model X. 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 the year 2000.
When eBay Inc. EBAY,
bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk received millions in revenue, which he funneled into Tesla and his rocket startup, SpaceX. But it returned to X.com in 2017, reacquiring the domain, one of three single-letter domains available, for an undisclosed fee.
Musk hasn’t done much with X.com — the website currently exists as just an X on a white background. But when it agreed to acquire Twitter for $44 billion in May, it set up a holding company that would swallow Twitter after the acquisition was completed, calling it X Holdings.
After agreeing to acquire Twitter, Musk tried to cancel the purchase, leading to a legal fight with Twitter. Just two weeks before a trial in Delaware Court of Chancery began, Musk sent a letter to Twitter executives agreeing to go through with the transaction if they dropped the legal proceedings.
While he hasn’t previously provided his plans for an X app, in a follow-up tweet on Tuesday, Musk suggested those plans have accelerated with the Twitter acquisition.
While his plans may be secret for now, Musk has dropped at least one clue about them: X marks the spot.
