Elon Musk took a wrecking ball to Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, first destroying the foundation and now demolishing the facade.
But according to Dorsey, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Twitter, Musk’s latest idea to scrap the Blue Bird logo for the site and rebrand the platform to X as an “accelerator” to create an app of everything — an earthquake in the world of corporate branding — isn’t anything to get excited about.
Dorsey wrote: “Keep calm and just x in it” late Sunday on him previous platform.
Dorsey was accused of letting the fox into the chicken house when he actively campaigned within the Twitter board of directors to get Elon Musk in the company. However, he increasingly distanced himself from the polarizing businessman, whom he later accused of doing nothing against him. Exploitation of children.
Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023
musk “infatuationWith the Letter X running back, his Twitter deal will help him fulfill his original vision from 1999, official biographer Walter Isaacson said Sunday.
Recounting a letter he received from the entrepreneur last October, he wrote, “I’m so excited to finally get X.com done as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerator,” he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning. (The month was no accident: a Delaware court forced him under certain performance to honor his acquisition deal at the time.)
Unusual decision
It is usually recommended by many, if not most, management and business experts not to give up on an instantly recognizable brand that has built a user base of 215 million users worldwide. Twitter’s reputation and unique position in the social media landscape helped make it worth $44 billion to Musk in the first place, as the core business churned out relatively little money even in the best of times.
But chances are, experts didn’t recommend that Musk change Twitter Blue to a pay-to-play subscription system, get rid of old verified accounts under the guise of fighting malicious spam, or lose not one but two safety heads after just over half a year.
In the process, scammers’ accounts skyrocketed, half of their advertisers left the platform, and Twitter Post-Musk earned a reputation for not honoring its bills or paying its rent.
Stay calm and just walk through it
– Jack (@jack) July 24, 2023
Under fire, the entrepreneur resigned as CEO to focus on site engineering and technology. However, Sunday’s announcement is the latest example after unveiling its revenue-sharing model as it inserted itself into business decisions. Rebranding falls under marketing, not product.
Leading from behind is CEO Emeritus Linda Iaccarino, an advertising executive hired with great fanfare from NBCUniversal. Headlines like “Yaccarino Breaks Silence on Twitter Rate Limits” only serve to highlight that its role may be more about sweeping up the shattering pieces Musk is leaving behind.
On Sunday, the CEO said later in the day that the X rebrand gave the 17-year-old company “a second chance to make another big impression.”
However, Jack Dorsey might benefit from rehiring roots and branches for the company he helped found. He’s trying to launch a new Twitter competitor of his own called BlueSky that takes a decentralized approach to social media, much like Mastodon.
