X: The New Twitter

By Michael Pascual 

Last year, Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, and renamed it X. With this came major changes to the site and staffing of the social media platform, with hundreds of employees laid off. This change led to the alienation of many of its users, but has also been praised by many more. 

A change in name is something that happens to many companies, some notable examples include Paypal’s shift from Confinity and Subway’s shift from Pete’s Super Submarines. However, Musks’ plan with this name change is to alter what the platform itself is, turning it into a space where people can bank and exchange money, as well as dramatically expanding the social media features available to people on the platform. 

However, with this change came a mass firing of Twitter employees, a whopping 80% (6,500 people). Elon explained his reasoning behind this decision in a tweet, stating, “Regarding Twitter's reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.” However, many of these employees were a part of the censorship aspects of the site, making X a significantly more toxic platform to be part of. 

There was also the disastrous decision made to allow people to purchase the blue checkmark. In the past, the blue check mark was created to signify a person of celebrity status, people who are relatively well known by the public. By making the checkmark a purchasable thing, many scammers decided to purchase one and use it to trick people into giving them money, assuming that they were speaking to a trusted person, due to the blue checkmark next to their name. 

It has now been over 6 months since the change, it is still unclear whether or not this change in branding has been a success for the platform, so until it becomes clear just how much the mass firings and blue checkmark scandals have affected the platform, we won’t know what will happen to this company.