| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. The decision to rename Twitter came, like all good decisions, late on a Saturday night. Elon Musk, the company's new owner, used his social media platform to announce the shift: "Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand, and, gradually, all the birds." Given that Musk had spent $44 billion to acquire the company, given that its brand is recognized around the world and given that Musk's other changes—especially the mass layoffs and the general catturdification of the platform—have erased two-thirds of the company's value, you might have expected him to exercise a little caution with the most obvious asset Twitter Inc. has left. But nah. That night, or possibly sometime early the next morning, he decided that the new name was X and crowdsourced a logo to replace Twitter's iconic blue bird. By Monday, July 24, employees had given conference rooms X-themed names (s3Xy, eXposure), a construction crew was removing the Twitter logo from the building, and Musk had added posts about logo design to his usual social media output of conspiracy theories, right-wing politics and unbridled self-adulation.  Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on July 26. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Why X? Well, Musk says it's about turning Twitter into a WeChat-like "everything app," which will include payments, streaming video and e-commerce. But it's also about his ego. Musk sees himself as an entrepreneurial auteur, and X is his signature, factoring into Tesla (which makes the Model X), Space Exploration Technologies (commonly called SpaceX) and even the name of one of his children (X Æ A-XII, or "X" for short). There's a long history here. In 1999, Musk started an online finance company, X.com. Musk imagined X as a full-service online bank, but it never really got there and instead merged with Peter Thiel's PayPal just before the dot-com bust. The two companies were about the same size, but PayPal was arguably the more promising of the two, because it had focused exclusively on online payments and had developed a following among eBay sellers. Musk became CEO of the combined company in the spring of 2000, but got fired within the year—in part because he was unable to make peace with the name of the popular service. As I wrote in my book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, Musk became fixated on changing the PayPal brand to X. Like Twitter now, PayPal was losing huge sums of money, but it was popular. The name was already being used as a verb, as in "I'll PayPal you for dinner," and there seemed to be no good reason to throw away all that goodwill. Former employees told me Musk ignored focus groups that suggested customers didn't like the X name because it evoked pornography and asked the company's marketing department to push ahead with the rebrand anyway. This was one of the factors that spurred an employee revolt led by Thiel and the early PayPal employees, who convinced the venture capitalist Mike Moritz to replace Musk as CEO. The X.com brand disappeared, and PayPal went on to tremendous success without it. But Musk never really got over the slight, and at times argued that his vision for the company had been right all along. In 2017 he bought the X.com domain name back from PayPal. "No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me," he tweeted at the time. This, more than anything else, explains the latest X-themed adventure. It isn't about a "super app," which is a less realistic ambition for Twitter today than it was when Musk started talking about it last year. Finance, even more than social media, is about creating a safe and trustworthy environment, and Musk has spent the past nine months undermining what little sense of trust and safety that had existed on the old Twitter. And that's before we talk about the actual practical challenges of trying to start a money transfer company. Finance is a heavily regulated industry, and Musk doesn't exactly have a light touch with financial regulators. So much of what Musk has done at Twitter has felt self-sabotaging, and this is just the latest example. He seems to be changing the name for no other reason than to prove he can. And, unlike at PayPal, there's no one in his inner circle willing, or able, to reign him in. Last week, responding to a user who suggested that "Twitter could rebrand to a donkey and I'd still scroll for 6 hours a day," Musk tweeted—er, x'ed—that he'd actually changed the logo once before, as part of a Dogecoin related stunt. "We rebranded to a Shiba Inu dog for a while," he wrote. "No impact." With X already struggling to maintain engagement from its users and retain its advertisers, "no impact," might be the best-case scenario. —Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Businessweek | 
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