The Mystique Behind Elon Musk’s ‘X’ Obsession: A Marketing Strategy or Something More?

Is it for a scientific, philosophical, marketing reason, or all three at the same time that Elon Musk slips “X” into all the names of his companies? The boss of Twitter changed, on Monday, the name and logo of the first social network in the world with a simple white “X” on a black background. No more little blue bird, Twitter – finally X – is now fully entering the Musk era. And this is not the first time that the billionaire has shown some interest in the 24th letter of the alphabet.

Elon Musk does recycling. In 1999, he created the first online bank, X.com, which became Paypal in 2001, after its merger with its competitor “Confinity”. During the sale of his shares, 250 million euros, he loses his rights associated with X.com. But on July 5, 2017, he bought this domain name which “has great sentimental value for him [moi]“, he confided in a… tweet, and places under his yoke his two new companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Twenty years later, it was around fire Twitter, owned by Elon Musk since October 2022, to be absorbed by X.com.

A marketing stunt to endorse its “everything app” project?

The meanings of the symbol “X” have their origins in various sources, from Ancient Egypt to the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), who was the first to use it to express the unknown in an algebraic problem. From the 80s, it was the turn of pop culture to seize these two crossed bars, to make the “X” the symbol of science fiction, of the paranormal, of all that is extra-terrestrial. X-files, X-men, xXx, X-Tro… The young Elon Musk, twenty years old in 1991, may have been strongly impregnated by the aura around this letter. Until calling her sixth child X AE A-XII, more affectionately nicknamed “X”.

However, for Jérôme Colin, managing director at Fifty-Five, this business genius has above all identified there the way to make “a marketing coup” by bringing consistency to his various entities: SpaceX, X AI, Tesla model X, X.com… “Elon Musk likes to create a mystique around him”, underlines Jérôme Colin, who sees in this stubbornness to attach an X everywhere, the “need to make the buzz regularly, because the advertising of his companies, it is him”.

The letter X therefore brings coherence to the empire of the billionaire, who for several years has not hidden his project of making Twitter an “everything app”, like the Chinese mobile application “Wechat”. “Of course, he bought Twitter and owns 79% of the capital, but he is not attached to the product itself or to the brand. It is a springboard for eventually trying to make it a more flexible ‘everything app’, without character limitation, which will be both an online payment service, messaging, data exchange, content creation… “Buying Twitter will accelerate the creation of X, the app that does everything”, Elon Musk had also declared on October 5, 2022, in a tweet.

“X”, a future still unknown

Less than a year after its acquisition, Twitter, which entered the Petit Larousse in 2012, gave way to “X”. This change of identity paves the way for other transformations, like the application’s business model, which until now relied on advertisers. “They (the advertisers, editor’s note) left very quickly, only half are left. Which must be worth to Twitter, already in a delicate situation, to lose a lot of money. But Elon Musk does not seem to worry about it, since he intends to offer more and more paid services, has launched twitters corners and promised content creators remuneration, charges official accounts… The company will most certainly take commissions on all transactions carried out via the social network”, develops Jérôme Colin, specialist in the digital and digital innovation industries.

Although Elon Musk “dreams of putting all his companies in ‘X’ something, it’s not yet for tomorrow”. Whoever wants to conquer Mars, must above all face more down to earth realities, such as the repayment of 1 billion dollars of annual interest contracted by the debt of 13 billion dollars with the banks for the takeover of Twitter. But also, dealer with detractors, sometimes within investors of X Holding, owner of Twitter, like Jack Dorsey, co-founder of the social network who is today one of his first critics.

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