Twitter has been subsumed by billionaire Elon Musk in more ways than one. Now, however, the company itself is officially no longer its own entity, having been officially gobbled up by Musk’s X Corp. It stands as the blue bird app owner’s first official move to reinvent Twitter into a twisted version of its former self, though still keeping past baggage along for the ride.
Of course, neither Musk nor Twitter has made this clear. The news actually stems from far right anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer. She previously sued Twitter and its former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for kicking her account off their platforms. According to an April 4 court filing in that ongoing suit, Twitter, Inc. “has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists.” Loomer tweeted about the change Monday.
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X Corp is further owned by holding company X Holdings Corp. According to another ongoing lawsuit against the company filed by two Florida attorneys who were also banned on Twitter, X Corp is incorporated in Nevada and is based in San Francisco, California.
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted “X” as if to confirm what the court documents officially spell out. Musk’s “X” brand has long been his attempt to create a so-called everything app. In his previous tweets, Musk has said Twitter was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He added that buying the platform accelerates the creation of X by “3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong.’
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The billionaire owner of Twitter has talked up WeChat as an example. Last October, after he officially came on as CEO, he told staff during an internal town hall that the China-centric app is “actually a great, great app, but there’s no WeChat movement outside of China. And I think there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful.”
Of course, WeChat is an example of a monopolizing walled garden app that has pushed competition out of China due to its all consuming nature. Tencent, the owner of WeChat, has also been criticized in the west for kowtowing to the Beijing government’s censorship and surveillance apparatus.
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