Did Elon Musk make a mistake renaming Twitter to X? According to several analysts interviewed by Bloomberg, the billionaire would have blown up several billion dollars in a few hours.
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| Twitter to X: Elon Musk made billions of dollars go up in smoke |
Twitter almost doesn't exist anymore. Sunday, July 23, Elon Musk announced the arrival of X and the abandonment of the Twitter brand as well as his famous blue bird logo. The social network is still in a transitional phase where the bird appears everywhere and the action proposed by the site remains to "Tweet", but Elon Musk promises that all this should soon disappear.
A decision that inevitably caused a lot of reaction on social networks, but also among market analysts. Bloomberg was able to interview several of them and their conclusion is clear: Musk would have made $ 4 to $ 20 billion go up in smoke.
Destroy a brand in a few moments
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. According to Todd Irwin, who manages a branding agency, the renaming of the service is a mistake. Facebook Instagram The blue bird logo is known all over the world and can be found today on many posters alongside the logos of Instagram or Facebook. It is true that it is very common to see a small Twitter logo in shops, public transport or other public places. We can doubt an immediate replacement of these logos by the new X.
According to other agencies interviewed by the American media, the Twitter brand would have a value between 4 and 20 billion dollars. A wide range that is explained by the difficulty in evaluating the value of a brand. After all, the value is really determined by a takeover, and Elon Musk does not seem to want to sell the Twitter brand again. To explain this high value, the article cites in particular the passage of the platform's vocabulary such as "tweets" in the common language, in particular in English.
With the transition to X, the platform must start everything from scratch. Especially since Elon Musk has promised to recreate a new vocabulary for the social network and to rethink the retweet function.
As Bloomberg indicates, other companies have made significant changes in recent years. Google became Alphabet, but this change was never visible to the general public. Instagram Facebook's move to Meta was also very important for the company, but the names of products such as WhatsApp, Quest or Instagram, remained the same.
According to Brand Finance, the Twitter brand has already lost 32% of its value since the takeover. It is not only this radical change that is to blame. The various controversies around Elon Musk and the direction of the social network, or its lack of direction, have scared the big brands and advertising revenue has decreased by more than 50%. The opinion of Jasmin Enbers, analyst for Insider Intelligence, sums up this situation well.
Twitter's corporate brand is already strongly linked to Musk's personal brand, with or without the name X, and much of Twitter's established branding has already been lost by users and advertisers
Allen Adamson, co-founder of another marketing agency specializing in brands talk about a decision based on Elon Musk's ego and "one of the fastest falls in history for a brand and a company".
Elon Musk has clearly made a bet with this radical name change. This makes the headlines of the media and the businessman promises to have a lot of projects around X. In the meantime, skepticism reigns supreme.