Say farewell to Twitter as a singular corporate entity. The social media platform will now be a part of Elon Musk's umbrella company X.
“Twitter, Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists,” lawyers for the social media platform wrote in a legal filing last week, which Slate first spotted.
The filing was submitted as part of an ongoing court battle with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who sued Twitter last year after she was banned for using hate speech. X is now the defendant in the lawsuit, although Twitter reinstated Loomer’s account under Musk’s leadership.
Musk himself seemingly confirmed the news about the merger by simply tweeting the letter X.
Musk has repeatedly talked about transforming Twitter into a “Super” or “Everything” app,” akin to China’s WeChat, which can be used for payments and chatting, in addition to social media.
“You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” Musk reportedly told Twitter employees back in June.
Musk has also indicated X could become a parent company for all his various enterprises, including Tesla and SpaceX. A year ago, he officially formed a trio of “X Holding” companies as part of his bid to buy Twitter. In October, as he took over Twitter, he tweeted: "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app."
If X sounds familiar, Musk co-founded online bank X.com in 1999. It merged with Confinity a year later, and was later renamed PayPal. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Musk said last year that he is "going to execute the X.com game plan from 22 years ago [at Twitter] with some improvements." But given that few people have opted to part with $8 per month for Twitter Blue, getting people to hand over their cash to Twitter (and its barebones staff) is likely an uphill battle.
Musk has already laid off about two-thirds of the staff at the social media company in an effort to cut costs. At the same time, many advertisers have fled or hit pause on Twitter, citing Musk’s controversial changes to the verified badges and content moderation.