what's up with this whole "X" rebranding?

Meta’s rebranding at least makes sense. The company has been more than Facebook for a long time, so collecting everything under a different umbrella isn’t too far fetched. Facebook still exists as a product, so they haven’t thrown away all the brand value. Google did kind of the same with Alphabet.

Rebranding Twitter to X doesn’t make sense at all.

But they're not just re-branding. Twitter is now under some kind of corporate shell company. I haven't seen much coverage of that, but my suspicion is that it's intended to act as some kind of insulator to contain Twitter's debts.

Like when they break a company into pieces and put everyone's debts and no assets into a single part and then that part declares bankruptcy and all the debt magically goes away, leaving everything else with lots of assets and no debts and a future that looks really rosy. I can't help but think that this is something similar to that.
- Wow, I wish I could split myself up into separate entities to bankrupt part of so that I can get away Scott free. But alas, I'm a real person, not a company with "personhood."
Especially because they bought a bunch of companies that weren't Facebook. Another example is Google rebranding as Alphabet. Those make complete sense.

Musk previously owned an online banking site known as x.com, which would later merge with PayPal, another service founded by Musk, which then became a separate entity with Musk no longer being involved it.

And when Musk was forced to complete the purchase of Twitter, he announced plans to make Twitter into a "Super app" like China's WeChat application, which can be used for payments.

Musk's hyperfocus on X might also be because when he was in his twenties, everything "cool" was having an X in it, like XForce and stuff like that.

He also wanted to create his X Corp company to have a single X as its name, but he couldn't do that because there was an Alphabet company already using that name.

Musk didn't found PayPal. X.com merged with Confinity, another online financial site (founded by Peter Thiel and others). Confinity had already begun development of PayPal at that time. In the resulting company, still called X.com, there was a series of leadership conflicts, with Musk pushing out CEO Bill Harris to become CEO, before himself being replaced by Peter Thiel. It was under Thiel that the company changed it's name to PayPal, and later went public. By the time there was a company called "PayPal", Musk was not longer involved with daily operations.
everything “cool” was having an X in it, like XForce and stuff like that.

Like that show Wormhole Xtreme
- I'm a simple man. I see Stargate reference I press little up arrow.
- Indeed
Peter thiel did PayPal.
It feels more 1990s Xtreme! wannabe than anything, but what would I know
that doesn't make it less dumb

The simple answer: Elon Musk is a whole lot stupider then he was given credit for.

Can we also talk about how absurd that picture at the bottom of the login page is? It looks like something a warez site would have as its landing page in like 2003. Made by some guy named xXx_l33tz3r0_xXx

Haha, this makes me actually nostalgic thinking about some of the warez sites I frequented back in 2002/2003! Scanning for "pubs" with scetchy software was what I considered a good time back then.
Dude I thought the same. Thought it was some stock photo of "hacker". and absolutel looks like warez from the 90s.
Oh god just saw it, it reminds of my 12yo self

Just Elon Eloning his Elonism to Eloning levels.

More seriously: Elon decided it's a good move to rebrand his new toy. Nobody knows for sure what's going through his head. It's probably some sort of OCD, or something...

I want to start a rumor that he was just born a Lon but added the E to make himself look cooler.
- Sounds like something he'd do tbh

With Facebook Threads being the new kid on the block and after all the bad publicity, rebranding Twitter was probably seen as a good PR move.

It feels like Musk believes that its more important for people to talk about Twitter than actually to use it.
Or it would be in a parallel dimension where reactionary panic moves that are also stupid when seen in isolation would be considered good PR 🤷

Elon can never let perceived slights go, like the Thai cave rescuer thing. He wanted PayPal to be called X and lost, now he's rebuilding it 20 years later.

And more importantly, who cares?

One of the most recognizeable brands from the past 20 years is suddenly changing it's branding and throwing all that recognition into the trash. I don't know why people keep acting like this isn't worth talking about. I don't give two shits about musk or Twitter and don't even have Twitter accounts or whatever, but even I recognize this is a noteworthy change (and his reasons for doing it) for the world.
- Tweeting is literally in the dictionary. It's insane that Musk wants to throw that away.
- I actually do wonder whether he is trying to destroy it on purpose. Every step he's taken is perplexing if he wanted the platform to actually succeed. Of course it is also possible he is just very very stupid.
- I don’t know why people
  
  They are edgelords

Part of me wonders if it's an attempt to tank the SEO, so people can't search for or news or easily talk about the site anymore - because it's been nothing but bad.