OPINION: Interested in X? Meet the 52-year-old man obsessed with naming everything with this letter

Personalised social media was all the rage in the early days of the internet. A whole generation of teenagers taught themselves HTML and CSS coding so they could redesign and customise profiles on popular social media sites like MySpace, Tumblr and Bebo. It was a heady, artistic, and free time on the internet, when social media was for users first and advertisers last. 

Like a teenage superfan devoted to their favourite band, Elon Musk has re-imagined Twitter as ‘X’, in the next phase of treating a global platform with millions of users (a number that drops daily) like his own personal, personalised MySpace page. Except he’s a 52 year old man, devoted only to himself and his image.

It’s the latest in a list of companies the billionaire has named for the letter - such as SpaceX, his venture into artificial intelligence xAI, the original version of PayPal, X.com (which now redirects to twitter.com) and his son with singer Grimes, X Æ A-12 - and the latest in a long list of questionable decisions since his takeover of the company in October last year.

People still call our streaming service 4OD so good luck https://t.co/olKv5FFTWf

— Channel 4 (@Channel4) July 24, 2023

His new challenge (on top of every other challenge he paid $44 billion for) is getting the new name to stick. Channel4 went viral Monday afternoon after tweeting “people still call our streaming service 4OD so good luck”. Countless people in Limerick city will still refer to Brown Thomas as “Todd’s”, the department store’s predecessor in their O’Connell St premises. Given the hostile attitude most of Twitter’s remaining users seem to have for its new owner, there’s a real possibility that most people will keep using the original name out of sheer spite.

Elon and his new CEO Linda Yaccarino are touting the rebrand as the launch of an ‘everything app’. In a series of tweets - sorry, in a series of “Xs”, Yaccarino described X as “the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking”. It’s difficult to imagine X as the future of anything, as it continues to haemorrhage users to the rash of new competitors such as Mastadon, Bluesky and Threads, all of which see their numbers get a boost with every announcement Elon makes.