Elon Musk's Twitter Problem is He Doesn't Get People

He doesn't get most people, anyway.

Dear readers,

We’re heading into another beautiful summer weekend, and if you’re trying to figure out what to cook, why don’t you make what I’m going to make tonight: David Chang’s charred pork chops and peaches with spicy mint sauce? As David writes, the recipe is an “ode to the flavors of summer,” with charred meat, spice, tang and sweetness. And the best part? You make it on a sheet pan under your broiler, so you won’t even need to fire up your grill!

Okay, now let’s talk about the company formerly known as Twitter.

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In 2009, Blackwater had an unusual problem for a large corporation: Its brand was too recognizable. The company's evocative name had become synonymous with its grave misconduct in Iraq, so one of the steps in the company’s plan to rehabilitate itself was to take a new name. Blackwater became "Xe.” Why Xe? According to the Washington Post, “a spokesman for the firm said the name had no particular significance,” though Blackwater founder Erik Prince told the Wall Street Journal the name was a reference to the atomic symbol for xenon, which, as Prince correctly noted, is “an inert, non-combustible gas.”¹

The intention behind the change was to shed a brand that was recognizably menacing and replace it with one that was forgettable and, well, inert — a poor strategy for most firms but a good one for Blackwater, which was trying to enter the corporate equivalent of the witness protection program.² In another story on the rebrand, the WSJ wrote:

The company's bear-paw and crosshairs logo became an icon within the private-security industry, so much so that some Blackwater guards had it tattooed on themselves. After the September 2007 shooting, the company attempted to soften the look of the logo and removed the crosshairs, and changed its name from Blackwater USA to "Blackwater Worldwide."

The new logo is a stylized black "X" on a white background, with a small "e" superimposed on it.

Here is that logo:

In related news, Twitter is now called "X,” and this is its new logo:

Unlike Blackwater, (the company formerly known as) Twitter is not trying to go into hiding. So why chuck a widely recognized name and logo and replace them with a brand that says nothing in particular — that, indeed, is an algebraic symbol used to represent an unknown quantity?

Elon Musk's explanation for this is that the service formerly known as Twitter is to become an everything-app that requires a more expansive brand.³ He wrote on Monday:

The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth — like birds tweeting — but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video. In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.

The whole thing makes very little sense to me, and I don’t just mean the choice to drop the brand he just paid billions of dollars for and replace it with one that says nothing. It’s the substance, too:

• I find the idea of Twitter as a place to read article-length posts or watch hours of video to be very unappealing, and given Tucker Carlson’s failure to launch an influential television-like show on the platform, it appears that even conservative users agree with me about that.

• I don’t see how he expects to take a social platform that was already relatively small, and whose image he has now subjected to intense ideological polarization, and use it as a platform to launch payments and messaging businesses that by their nature have to be extremely mass in order to win. Imagine if WhatsApp, during its rise, had a high-profile leader who actively repelled half the political spectrum — how would that have affected its usefulness as a place to reach everyone you know?

But then, I guess I just don’t see the world like Elon Musk does.

There is one thing I agree with Musk about: a key driver of his success in business has been that he sees the world differently. He made this point in his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live two years ago, drawing a link from his autism spectrum disorder, to his strange personality, to his irrepressible desire to champion esoteric ideas that have (sometimes) made him a lot of money:

It’s an honor to be hosting “Saturday Night Live.” I mean that. Sometimes after I say something, I have to say “I mean that,” so people really know that I mean it. That’s because I don’t always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak. Which I’m told makes for great comedy.

I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host “SNL.” Or at least the first to admit it. So I won’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don’t worry, I’m pretty good at running “human” in emulation mode.

I’d first like to share with you my vision for the future. I believe in a renewable energy future. I believe that humanity must become a multi-planet, space-faring civilization. Those seem like exciting goals, don’t they?

I think if I just posted that on Twitter, I’d be fine. But I also write things like, "69 days after 4/20 again, ha ha." I don’t know, I thought it was funny; that’s why I wrote “ha ha” at the end.

Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?

But here’s the thing. There are areas of business where it's an advantage to think differently from everybody else. Tesla and SpaceX have both fit this bill. And there are other areas of business where it's advantageous to think like most people think — or, at least, where it’s advantageous to have a strong, intuitive sense of how one’s offerings and actions (including non-“chill” ones) will be perceived by most people. Running a mass social network falls in the latter category. Naming and branding a social network falls even more squarely within the latter category. If you want to succeed, it’s important to have an intuitive grasp of what huge, huge swathes of the public are going to think of your work product.⁴

Twitter's sign is seen partially removed after San Francisco Police stopped the changing of their sign to the company's new name, "X," at Twitter's corporate headquarters office in San Francisco, California on July 24, 2023. Elon Musk killed off the Twitter logo on July 24, replacing the world-recognized blue bird with a black-and-white X, as the tycoon accelerated his efforts to transform the floundering social media giant. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

What Musk has consistently shown through his management of Twitter is that he does not get his counterparties — he doesn’t understand why people use Twitter, why companies advertise on Twitter, or how his often overtly hostile attitude toward both groups will affect their willingness to continue to do business with him (in the case of customers, on the more unfavorable financial terms he wishes to impose). It also strikes me as a serious misread of the consumer public that he apparently thinks Twitter — already a relatively small social platform, and one that he has now made ideologically polarized — will serve as an attractive base for messaging and payments services that will need to reach extremely broad bases to work. (Twitter’s extremely janky technology — a problem that pre-dated Musk and got worse under his ownership — also seems like a key barrier to getting the public to trust and adopt these products.)

A businessperson does not need to be good at everything. Sometimes it’s good enough to know what you’re not good at and hire people who are good at it, or to stay out of the lines of business that don’t suit you. If Musk listened to people who were better than he is at branding, he wouldn’t have pulled this “X” nonsense. And that gets at one of Musk’s failures that’s much less interesting than his failure to understand his customers. Like a lot of people who were very successful in one domain, he became convinced that he was an all-purpose genius. And like most of them, he’s not.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. It is also a noble gas, but I guess Prince had the modesty not to explicitly claim in 2009 that Blackwater was rebranding itself as noble.

2. Two years later, Xe renamed itself again, calling itself Academi. As a strategy to avoid the stench of Blackwater, the repeated name changes look to have been pretty successful. Had you heard of “Academi” before you read this footnote, and did you know it was the successor to Blackwater?

3. There is a simpler explanation: Musk is just obsessed with “X” as a brand. This isn't even the first time he’s tried to junk a well-recognized brand in favor of “X.” 23 years ago, when he was CEO of PayPal, he wanted to transition the company and its brands toward the usage of "X," despite widespread goodwill for the PayPal brand among eBay users, and despite focus groups showing users didn't like the "X" brand since it sounded like it was for pornography. His push for the rebrand was one of the factors that led Peter Thiel and David Sacks to lead a coup to remove him as CEO and install Thiel in his place. Yes, that David Sacks, the one who occasionally pauses his endless cheerleading for Vladimir Putin to fluff Elon. How the worm turns!

4. If you insist on making a spectacle of yourself, as Elon does, you’ll also have to anticipate what they’ll think of you.