Twitter ceased to be an independent company after merging with a newly formed shell company called X Corp, raising speculation about what Elon Musk intends for the social media platform.
Twitter “no longer exists” after merging with X Corp, according to a filing on April 4 in a California court in a lawsuit filed last year against the company and its former CEO, Jack Dorsey, by conservative activist Laura Loomer.
It’s unclear what the change means for Twitter, which has undergone a radical overhaul since Musk bought the company for $44 billion last year.
The billionaire owner has suggested in the past that buying Twitter would be an “accelerator” to creating X, which he called an “everything app.” Musk tweeted about the move on Tuesday with the single character “X.”
X
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2023
X Corp, an ‘everything app’
The world’s second-richest man has signaled his desire to make X similar to China’s WeChat, a super app owned by Tencent Holdings that is used for everything from payments and event ticket bookings to messaging.
But he has been vague about how it will fit in with his sprawling business empire, which ranges from electric car giant Tesla to Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX.
Musk also owns the domain “X.com,” the name of the online payments company that started and eventually merged with PayPal.
In April of last year, Musk first established a trio of holding companies in Delaware with a variation of the name “X Holdings,” as part of his takeover bid for Twitter, but X Corp was established on March 9 in Nevada, according to records filed with the state.
Its merger with Twitter was presented on March 15. Musk is chairman of the firm and its parent, X Holdings Corp, which was also created last month and has an authorized capital of $2 million, the documents show.
Musk could create a parent structure, similar to Alphabet, where he has all his companies. I don’t see how you can overlay e-commerce or payments on Twitter just when its bigger peers like Alphabet and Meta have struggled to become a do-everything app on the consumer side.
said Mandeep Singh, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Twitter, which no longer has a team that handles media inquiries, did not immediately comment on questions submitted by Bloomberg News. Lawyers for the firm representing Twitter in the case, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move sparked intense speculation on Twitter about what it meant, with Musk’s tweet drawing more than 13 million views in a matter of hours.
In Japan, the topic “Twitter Gone” began to trend, with users joking that Twitter’s new name will resemble that of a local rock band, X Japan.
