Twitter Inc. has been incorporated into X Corp., a company owned by X Holdings through which Elon Musk acquired the social platform last autumn. It is, therefore, an internal change of ownership, which, however, decrees the end of a cycle – that of Twitter Inc. – and the birth of a new, increasingly Musk-dependent era. On blog.twitter.com and other pages of the social platform, the wording Twitter, Inc. still appears at the bottom of the page, but the novelty has been spotted in a document filed with a US court concerning a lawsuit between a journalist and Twitter itself. It reads:

“[…] the undersigned attorney for defendant X Corp. as successor in interest to the named defendant Twitter, Inc. states that Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists. […] X Corp. is a privately held company. Its parent company is X Holdings Corp. No publicly traded company owns more than 10% of the shares of X Corp. or X Holdings Corp”.

X PLAINTIFF LETTER

At the moment, no official statement has been issued, nor is it clear why the company that owns the platform has changed its name. The X, however, is a recurring letter in Elon Musk’s ecosystem: apart from SpaceX and Model X, last year he founded X Holdings I, II and III, three companies set up ad hoc for the acquisition of Twitter. X.com is the bank created in 1999 that later gave birth to PayPal. And X is also the name of the perfect app Musk has in mind.

Now, with this double move last March, we have the registration of X Holdings Corp and X Corp, the merger of X Holdings I with X Holdings Corp and Twitter Inc with X Corp. Thus, the new organisation desired by ownership is completed. In fact, Twitter is now the sole name of the social network and no longer the company. On 11 April, Musk tweeted simply ”X”, leaving little doubt about its purpose.

From Twitter to everything app

According to some analysts, this rebranding would be the first step in turning the social into its CEO’s true dream: an app to do everything from booking tickets to sending messages to mobile payments. The ”everything apps” provide a wide range of services, from instant messaging to digital payments, and meet social media needs. In China, they are an established reality, as in the case of WeChat, an app used by 1.2 billion people worldwide; users can order food, exchange messages, apply for a mortgage, rent a bike share and access their home banking. The app was founded in 2011 and is owned by Tencent. As are the Chinese apps Weibo and WeChat.

The X app

To those who have followed its entrepreneurial affairs more closely, the news that Twitter has changed its name to X Corp. cannot help but recall the precedent of X.com, the financial startup later sold to eBay and became PayPal. Invited to speak at a Morgan Stanley conference in March 2023, Elon Musk reportedly reiterated his desire to transform Twitter into a peer-to-peer mobile payments platform on which users have the opportunity to earn from each transition. The idea of an “X” company active in multiple sectors, including finance, would seem to have been present even in Elon Musk’s early days as an entrepreneur.

Among the new “daughter” companies of X Holding Corp., there would also be, as some sources have pointed out, an X.AI about which not much is yet known but which, because of its name, suggests a new entrepreneurial project in the field of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk’s interest in this field has been around for a while. Although he has been very critical of generative AI over time, going so far as to call a few weeks ago for a six-month halt to research in the field to arrive at more suitable security standards, the entrepreneur was among the co-founders of OpenAI.

This company developed ChatGPT: he left the company in 2018 to pursue something else, but ChatGPT’s recent success may have once again convinced Elon Musk to try his hand at artificial intelligence and develop his version of a multimodal, AI-based chatbot and reinforcement learning to be made available to users of the X super app. These are, however, long-term projects.