In a massive weekend bombshell – Twitter as we know it is about to get an even bigger shakeup… According to owner Elon Musk, he’s officially changing the name of the app from ‘Twitter’ to ‘X’, as part of his broader vision for an ‘everything app’ which will eventually facilitate a much broader range of functions, and ideally make X a key interactive component in billions of users’ lives.

Musk has already previewed the interim X branding, which he chose from a range of user-submitted concepts.

Musk has also flagged changing the app’s default colour from blue to black, while tweets themselves will no longer be called such. Musk says they’ll be called an ‘x’.

The X name has been part of Musk’s grand plan since the late 90s, when he first started to make a name for himself in online payments. Musk had founded a payments company, which he envisioned would become ‘X.com’, a new platform that would facilitate not only instant, fee-free payments, but also loans, and other banking elements, all in one simplified, streamlined offering.

When his company merged with PayPal, however, his new partners didn’t agree with the X concept, and Musk eventually had to abandon his plan, and move into other ventures. But the idea, and name, has stayed with him, and Musk remains convinced that he can create a disruptive, game-changing app, which would use payments as its backbone to then facilitate all sorts of transactional activity, in addition to social media and entertainment elements.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that buying Twitter is ‘an accelerant to X’, but despite Musk’s long-standing hopes, actually making X happen is not going to be easy.

Because every other social platform has already tried the same. Meta, for example, has been working for years to make in-stream payments a thing, with limited success.

X is about to become the new Twitter, clearly derailing the next era for the platform, and distancing itself from its past.

Is this a flawed approach? Will it see the app lose more traction? Maybe Musk and Yaccarino have some new tricks up their sleeves, beyond pushing old Twitter concepts, that will make this fresh new angle something more than a billionaire’s pipe dream, but let’s see, with the X era now underway at the app…