X Marks The Branding Hubris

Enter the Branding of the Billionaire Genius Myth

Elon Musk is not a genius, no matter what the media has told us.

This “genius” is destroying Twitter because greedy stockholders held him to his bluff to buy the company.

As you probably know by now, Twitter is kind of being transformed into X (the announcement could be have been created via ChatGPT?), a company name that Musk has wanted since PayPal.

I say kind of for a few reasons.

1. When Musk tried to take down the Twitter signage on the San Francisco office, the SFPD shut it down.
2. X as a trademark is owned by Meta, Microsoft, and many other companies. Close to 900 active trademarks are held in the US Patent and Trademark Office.
3. The Twitter handle X is taken by someone else. Very interesting times indeed.

These do not look like the branding moves of a genius.

What’s in a Name? Billions of Dollars!

The media propped this man up as some genius, but clearly he doesn’t know the value of the Twitter brand.

Brand agencies and analysts estimate that Twitter’s brand value ranges from $4 billion to $20 billion. Twitter was created in April 2006, so to flush down all that value, starting from the iconic logo to some already copied, poorly conceptualized, inaccessible font.

Inside Twitter HQ in San Francisco, it was down with the bird and up with the X:

The co. is projecting the X logo in the cafeteria and changed conference room names to words and phrases with the letter X in them. Those new names include “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy.”

s3Xy. Apparently we’re still using l33t-speak from the early aughts? (It’d be 53xy anyway).

Stupid or Evil?

So why the recent chaos at Twitter? On top of the chaos of firing most of Twitter staff and the rate limiting earlier this month and TweetDeck being a Twitter Blue only app soon?

There are at least two reasons.

The first, as a long time Twitter user is hard to swallow because I rather would lean toward Hanlon’s law: something goes wrong because someone is stupid not evil.

Still, let’s start with the evil, because it is uncomfortable, even though I’ve dealt with it as an American citizen under the previous president’s reign.

Platformer’s Casey Newton, who has been observing Musk’s villainy for a while, had this to say:

Here’s my answer: this framing [this is an unwise way to make more money!] misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings; and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns; so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.

All of this has been clear since at least November, when Musk gleefully mocked a stack of Black Lives Matter T-shirts that he found in a company closet.

Musk is no genius, but he can recognize collective power.

The Collective Power of Twitter

Twitter is a robust place because you can talk about anything and everyone all in one place. And that is powerful, especially to marginalized people.

Over the years, we’ve been able to see protests, like protests against police brutality and extrajudicial murders in Ferguson, Missouri to the Arab Spring in the Middle East to the Yellow Jackets protests in Paris, France.

Twitter has helped disabled people to create community and help each other.

And then there’s Black Twitter, which has been a robust and vital part of Twitter — a part that Musk probably doesn’t like, due to his reaction to those BLM t-shirts he found at Twitter HQ.

And then there’s just knowing what’s going on in the world and in popular culture. Any TV show or movie you’re watching, someone else is there who is or has watched it. It’s instant connectivity. Granted, with streaming shows and movies taking more prominence recently, it’s happening more asynchronously, but it’s still happening.

Seriously, what’s with this guy?

So yes, that’s the evil part. Well, most of it. There’s the racism, sexism, and transphobia. Not the type of person you want running an alleged public square.

From my observation as a Twittizen, Musk seems to be someone who desperately wants to be liked and to be seen as cool (because why accept a logo idea from a random person on Twitter?) — and fails at it miserably.

The media is still giving him the benefit of the doubt (via implicit biases), as Newton was saying. But it’s clear that this man has always been in places he has no business being in.

Is it about branding or short-term gains?

So let’s address the stupid part, which I somewhat already have.

Obviously, this is one of the most reactionary, half-baked re-brands in modern history.

• Because X is owned by so many people, there will be lawsuits that will only make IP attorneys rich.
• I haven’t checked to see if the Twitter sign has been fully taken down yet.
• Someone else owns the X handle on Twitter.

All of these are signs that Musk didn’t really think any of this through, with all the resources he has.

And yes, this brand shift, which is currently stalled, is cultural denigration, which isn’t anything new. We’re dealing with a similar re-brand now.

The WGA and SAG-AFRTA strikes are partly about losing our cultural history of art and media, as streamers shelf and cancel shows for tax write-offs (e.g., will Westworld ever see the light of day again?) and to avoid paying residuals, pay abysmal residuals, and ask for more work for less pay.

HBO Max just went through a similar bewildering brand name change, flushing down HBO’s even stronger brand name so it can be more “family friendly,” when really, the Discovery+ catalog is pretty fluffy (and I am putting that mildly) compared to HBO Max’s catalog of prestige television.

Another Infamous Branding Failure

The Gap clothing company in 2010 decided to change its brand logo. Gap has been around since 1969 and the logo it was pivoting from had been there since 1986. In 2010, they decided to take their blue box with serif font label and make it into a Helvetica with a light blue box logo.

It last less than a week.

And the estimated cost? Around $100 million!

Gap created that new logo without customer input and tried to make it hip, when what customers really wanted was reliability. Gap’s current logo is similar to the 1986 version.

So suffice it to say: branding matters because customers need to know that you’ll stick by them, that you’ll be true, that you’ll be reliable. If you’re going to make big changes, it helps to have them included in those changes. Or it can cost you big money and customer trust.

The Swan Song of the Bird App

Since Musk has come on as owner of Twitter, a lot of my good friends have left the app or tweet very infrequently. Some communities have fractured and broken for good. To re-form an online community elsewhere brings new challenges around accessibility…and the fact that people just may not want to come along.

Even though Meta came out with Threads a few days after Twitter’s floundering earlier this month, and some people really like it, it’s just not the same.

I’m on Bluesky and the same issues of anti-Blackness and bigotry exist there and on Threads (and on Twitter).

Interestingly, TikTok, the video social media app, announced yesterday that it will have text posts.

(So much for that pivot to video.)

As someone who has been on social media for basically all of my adulthood, it’s been strange to be on an app that has lasted so long. So many apps have come and gone.

Friendster. Hi5. sixdegrees. MySpace. ello.

For better and for worse, Twitter (and Facebook and Instagram) has lasted a long time.

X = WeChat?

But Musk wants Twitter to become WeChat, an all-in-one app for messaging, social media, and mobile payments. WeChat, created in China, is the world’s largest standalone app with over a billion active users. Twitter has around 450 million active users.

Seeing how heavily regulated banking is in the US, Musk has a tough row to hoe if he thinks X will become anything good, if anything at all. X will most likely remain undefined as he continues to try to make this profitable and a hangout for his sycophantic fans.

Twitter Is Dead. Long Live Twitter!

Whatever Twitter is evolving to, it’s not the Twitter that I joined near its start. And as angry and frustrated as I am, I am ultimately sad that there will probably be no replacing the diverse, smart, lively, fun community I’ve created over the years.

As I grieve the loss of this unique vibrant community and public square, as it’s being ravaged by a wildfire of hubris, I’m remind of this simple poem by Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Twitter was golden because of its users. We made Twitter was it is today. Without us, there is no Twitter. And any company that creates a free app should remember this and act accordingly.

As you can see, branding can be tricky. But I can help you figure out your brand voice so you can be uniquely you in the marketplace. Let’s talk about how we can work together soon