Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is making moves to increase people’s reliance on the Twitter platform. In a recent BBC interview, Musk shared his mental journey last year when he sold a large amount of Tesla stock to buy Twitter.
“I sold the stock not because I lost confidence in Tesla, but because Twitter desperately needed it,” Musk said. Twitter has struggled in recent years, with layoffs reducing its employee count from 7,800 to just 1,500, an 81% reduction, related news Elon Musk Launches Major AI Project on Twitter, Large Language Models at Based AI.
Musk’s interest in Twitter goes beyond just acquiring the struggling platform. On March 15, filings showed that X Holdings, a new shell company with an authorized capital of $2 million, had filed to merge with Twitter. Musk serves as president of X Holdings and its parent company, X Corp. After the merger, Twitter “ceases its existence,” according to a filing in a California court dated April 4.
Musk has previously stated that acquiring Twitter would be an “accelerator” to create X, which he calls an “everything app.” He has drawn inspiration from China’s WeChat platform and intends to emulate its one-stop service model, making X Corp. an all-encompassing multi-functional application collection platform.
“WeChat has a great model, equivalent to Twitter + PayPal. Outside of China, there is nothing like this. And I think such an app is very useful,” Musk said in a May 2022 interview with the “All-In Summit” podcast.
With Musk at the helm, it remains to be seen how Twitter will evolve after the merger with X Corp. and whether it will become the “everything app” that Musk envisions.