"X" Marks The Spot For Elon Musk's Race To The Bottom
After Eviscerating Twitter & Reactivating Kanye, Will We Really Hand Over Our Financial Information To His Super App?
Well, she’s done it! Defying all odds, former NBCUniversal ad chief and new Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino has tamped down Elon Musk’s increasingly basic instincts and impulses!
Nah, just kidding.
Musk, the self-proclaimed genius of all things – a label that apparently now includes corporate branding – has done it again. With little more than an advance final Tweet, out goes “Twitter” and in comes “X” – and with it, billions of dollars of brand equity that had built up over the years and that was the envy of the world. It all happened so fast that you could still hear the burning of the cash of a content platform upon which Hollywood depended for its marketing and a logo that it featured on all of its own. And just like that, the ultimate media brand that all other media brands elevated and promoted is no more.
This all makes sense in Musk’s mind, of course, as he laid out his Super App vision in his final tweets (which begs the question, are we all now taking “X”?). Meanwhile, Yaccarino – who purportedly joined his fast-derailing train to bring back mainstream advertisers – dutifully toed the Musk line. She cheered Musk’s Super App, promising to “delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking.” But who is Yaccarino trying to kid? Certainly few in the media and entertainment community from whence she came.
Advertisers had already left in droves amidst all the previous havoc Musk had unleashed, and many in the creative community joined the mass exodus. Musk had gutted his content moderation team after all, leaving it a roll of the dice whether Hollywood ads and artist tweets would be paired with the vitriol of unsavory characters.
It was all in the name of, well, Musk’s commitment to the First Amendment and “ensur[ing] freedom of speech”, which in reality meant an increasingly unmoderated communications platform that fueled society’s basest instincts. Welcome back Kanye indeed! (Musk just reactivated his account). In the words of branding and tech expert and resident curmudgeon Scott Galloway, Musk had placed his bets firmly in the business of “making our discourse increasingly coarse.” Society be damned!
All of Musk’s wrapping himself in the flag as his platform devolved is so rich coming from a man who now rails against OpenAI – a company he founded – about AI’s existential dangers to society. Musk is the quintessential pot calling the kettle black - a purported Libertarian who gladly accepts government subsidies for Tesla and seeks haven in the courts now that he feels the heat from Meta’s new Threads which had become the fasted growing app in history. And oh yes, with respect to his “commitment” to free speech, he just threatened legal action against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech.
For Musk, Twitter’s brand “does not make sense” in the context of a Super App that focuses on personal banking and other goodies. But that presupposes that a mass market will happily hand over their most sensitive financial data to X. Perhaps that is something that many of us would have trusted in a bygone era of Musk as beloved genius tech pioneer. But who amongst mainstreamers in media and entertainment will at this point?
Musk knows this of coarse (oops, I mean course), and he is cool with it. With revenues expected — X-pected? — to drop 28% this year, he is accelerating plans to integrate crypto payments and increasingly turning to his audience of crypto bros to support him. Much of crypto’s appeal is to operate in a virtual, anonymous world without rules. For those Musk acolytes on the darker side, it’s an “anything goes” environment that elevates their individual self-interest, as it accelerates the tearing down of the society within which that individual operates.
This Musk version 2.0 now openly adopts a mean teen’s persona as he rips into anyone or anything that challenges his vision, and the Musk faithful dig that about him. Much like Fox News turned to “the pillow guy” to prop up its head, Musk increasingly turns to the one constituency that he can never let down.
“So we must bid adieu to the bird,” said Musk as he signed off from his Twitter account and hoisted a giant flashing “X” onto his corporate headquarters.
But perhaps he’s simply flipping it to the rest of us.