By Elena Siniscalco
[Re: Musk’s Twitter u-turn is the beginning rather than the end, October 5]
So, after 6 months of throwing his toys out the pram, publicly criticising Twitter, and accusing the company of deliberately misleading their shareholders, Elon Musk has… bought Twitter. He appears unphased by public humiliation, and claims the acquisition will be an “accelerant” to creating the mysterious X, “the everything app”.
Assuming this is more than just bluster, this appears to put Musk on a collision course with Meta, Google, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who is in the process of setting up his own “super app”: Block. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s “Truth” app has been a flop, as has Jeremy Renner’s app, and Rio Ferdinand-backed WeAre8.
Twitter has always punched slightly below its weight in terms of monthly users and financial success, it is undoubtedly of enormous cultural and political relevance with millions of devoted users. Musk has suggested he intends it to be the foundation in developing a much larger platform.
But Silicon Valley has been plagued by huge layoffs and valuation drops.
Meta, in particular, may feel vulnerable. Facebook may still top the charts in terms of monthly users but it’s impossible to ignore how increasingly irrelevant it feels to younger people.
Setting up a successful app is obviously not as easy as it sounds and Elon Musk is far from infallible. But it would be foolish to write X off with Twitter as a powerful starting point.
Olivia Wedderburn
TMW Unlimited
The post Letters: We need to talk about Elon appeared first on CityAM.
