What's going on?

Twitter’s inching towards Musk’s “everything app” vision, but getting there could be a puzzle.

What does this mean?

When Elon Musk bagged Twitter for $44 billion last year, he nailed his colors to the mast: his ultimate ambition was to turn the platform into an “everything app” named X, inspired by China’s digital Swiss Army knife, WeChat. With over a billion users relying on Tencent�s WeChat for everything from payments to booking event tickets, Musk spied an opening to replicate its success globally. And now he seems to be taking a significant step in that direction � ending Twitter�s life as an independent firm and merging it with a shell company named X Corp.

Why should I care?

Zooming in: Too small for its boots.
Musk’s cost-cutting strategies have helped Twitter reach a break-even point � but the crash diet he put the firm on has shrunk Twitter’s workforce from around 8,000 to a mere 1,500. That probably played a role in the six major outages that have struck the platform since the year began. And those wrinkles have got folks questioning the feasibility of any potential plans to add e-commerce and payment features, especially when tech titans with much more manpower � like Alphabet and Meta � are struggling with similar goals.

The bigger picture: Debunking Musk.
If Twitter wants to outpace those behemoths, it�ll need to get its own house in order first. After all, one of Musk�s main goals was to make the platform more trustworthy � and while he�s claimed that his crusade against bots and automated accounts has helped clamp down on misinformation, studies suggest otherwise. In fact, engagement with misinformation spreaders actually seems to have spiked post-takeover. That�s left Musk with egg on his face, but he�s doubling down on his favorite solution � a payment barrier, which would just so happen to top up company coffers while supposedly waging war on misinformation.