The reason Elon Musk is torpedoing Twitter’s brand
Changing Twitter’s bird logo to dogecoin’s Shiba Inu. Renaming its headquarters to Titter. A logo reminiscent of an 1980s porn production company. The paid checkmark mess that turned verification into a radioactive and possibly illegal disaster. Intentionally mislabeling independent media outlets. Reviving Tucker Carlson’s toxic show.
Over the last year, Elon Musk has been working hard to tank Twitter’s brand image, taking it from a functional (if problematic) social media network to a hobbling tech company that has reportedly lost more than half its value since he bought the company for $44 billion.
But why? What is the point in dismantling a powerful brand into scrap parts? We asked three leading branding experts to help us decode the mess Musk is making of Twitter, and came up with a few leading theories.
Musk is angling for a grand rebrand
Perhaps Musk roasting his blue chicken to a crisp is a sign of a total rebrand ahead. After all, he announced on April 18 that Twitter Inc. is now X Corp, which is reportedly part of a master plan to turn it into an “everything app” made in the image of the 1-billion-user Chinese app WeChat. When it’s done, the new Twitter will provide payment services, commerce, and even some sort of artificial intelligence engine. Just this week, Musk named a new CEO that will guide the company into this transition while he works on the technical aspects of it.
“There’s a lot of speculation as to Musk’s motives [regarding Twitter], but one thing that commentators seem to align on, is that it appears on face value to be straight out of his ‘break it until you make it’ playbook seen in the early days of both Tesla and SpaceX,” says Kirsty Minns, executive creative director at Mother Design. The big problem is that this playbook applies to new companies, she says, not a globally recognized brand with an established set of values. And while new owners and CEOs tend to want to make their mark in existing companies, Musk’s actions go well beyond that.
Pau Dueñas—former partner at Morillas, one of leading branding agencies in Europe—agrees with what Minns says. He also believes that the damage to the Twitter brand is not superficial; the damage comes from Musk’s management and bad communications policy: “He may have a different vision for the company, but he should be able to articulate a plan, share it, push for it, and communicate thoroughly to make it happen, and not have to fight with all, neither make such noise that does not add value to anybody,” Dueñas says.
In an interview over email, Dueñas says Musk’s reckless changes may indeed be in pursuit of his X-application and that maybe there’s a rebrand plan in the making. Musk’s actions show that he does not want Twitter to be as it was. He is radically changing and re-engineering it. “Therefore, the old brand—as it stood before the acquisition—no longer exists in terms of meaning as we knew it,” he says. “And if he changes the visual identity down the line, it would be consistent with this path.”
It’s all one big (and expensive) troll
But maybe a guy with effectively unlimited wealth might be wrecking Twitter’s brand just for fun. He is, after all, the big boss of Twitter now, with no accountability to anyone after having scrapped Twitter’s board of directors last fall. With no one to pull on the reigns, Musk is free to do as he pleases, using Twitter as a toy in his lifelong career as the King of Trolling. It could explain why Musk changed Twitter’s blue bird logo or why he defaced his own HQ—these actions are low hanging fruit for provocation. They’re bound to get attention.
If that’s the case, “he is demolishing an important pillar of the company,” says Dueñas. And angering people unnecessarily. In his mind, the blue bird brand may be the symbol of everything he wants to change, so there’s no point in respecting that mark at all.
Twitter’s brand is now Musk’s brand anyway
There’s a third possibility to explain all this mayhem, as Jody Hudson-Powell—partner at Pentagram, London—tells me over email: “At this point Elon is the brand, and the act [of changing the bird and the HQ logo] was very on-brand, it plays well with his audience.”
But playing to that audience might create problems for another audience: Not everyone wants the “Elon Brand.” Certainly not most Twitter users. We know that users, organizations, and advertisers are already abandoning ship, with 30 million estimated to leave in the next couple of years. Multiple options—from Mastodon to the T2 Twitter-clone developed by Twitter own ex-employees to Substack’s Notes platform—are popping up. It seems only a matter of time before one of those alternatives catches on and absorbs a majority of users who are neither Musk’s sycophants nor Tucker Carlson’s fans. The gamble is that people might tire of Musk’s brand of Twitter before his fabled X-app comes to fruition, rendering the billionaire’s messy rebrand plan obsolete and leaving Twitter’s brand tarnished forever.
Of course, as Minns says, that’s where the rebranding might come in: “Rebranding has the power to change a business’ fortunes, but it’ll only serve as sticking plaster over reputational scars if the one wielding the ax remains.” No matter if Musk rebrands Twitter into X-whatever, the fact is that he will stay around and he has angered way too many people to keep the Twitter brand intact. So, the question, Minns asks, is, “Would Musk be able to turn the Titanic” with a rebrand? And can a rebrand change its collision course with the iceberg that will sink it forever?
I would argue that Twitter has already hit the iceberg, which is Musk himself. The Shiba-Inu, the Titter, and the 80s Blue logo are just a few of the cracks in this sinking ship in which his dog is really the Captain while Caligula’s horse is frozen Leonardo Dicaprio holding to Kate Winslet’s door.
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