By switching from Twitter to X, Elon Musk has caused billions of dollars to go up in smoke

Did Elon Musk make a mistake renaming Twitter to X? According to several analysts interviewed by Bloomberg, the billionaire would have gone up in smoke several billion dollars in a few hours.

Twitter almost no longer exists. Sunday July 23, Elon Musk announced the arrival of X and the abandonment of the Twitter brand as well as its famous blue bird logo. The social network is still in a transitional phase where the bird appears everywhere and the action proposed by the site remains to “Tweet”, but Elon Musk promises that all this should soon disappear.

A decision that inevitably caused a lot of reaction on social networks, but also among market analysts. Bloomberg was able to question several of them and their conclusion is without appeal: Musk would have caused 4 to 20 billion dollars to go up in smoke.

Destroy a brand in moments

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. According to Todd Irwin, who runs a branding, renaming the service is an error. The blue bird logo is known all over the world and can now be found on many posters alongside Instagram or Facebook logos. It is true that it is very common to see a small Twitter logo in shops, public transport or other public places. We can doubt an immediate replacement of these logos by the new X.

According to other agencies interviewed by the American media, the Twitter brand would be worth between 4 and 20 billion dollars. A wide range which is explained by the difficulty of assessing the value of a brand. After all, value is really determined by a takeover, and Elon Musk doesn’t seem keen on reselling the Twitter brand. To explain this high value, the article quotes in particular the passage of the platform’s vocabulary such as ” tweet in common parlance, particularly in English.

With the move to X, the platform has to start all over again. Especially since Elon Musk has promised to recreate a new vocabulary for the social network and to rethink the retweet function.

As Bloomberg reports, other companies have made significant changes in recent years. Google became Alphabet, but this change was never visible to the general public. Similarly, the move from Facebook to Meta was very important for the company, but the names of products such as WhatsApp, Quest or Instagram have remained the same.

According to Brand Finance, the Twitter brand has already lost 32% of its value since the takeover. It is not just this drastic change that is to blame. The various controversies around Elon Musk and the direction of the social network, or lack of direction, scared the big brands and advertising revenue fell by more than 50%. The opinion of Jasmin Enbers, analyst for Insider Intelligence, summarizes this situation well.

Twitter’s corporate brand is already strongly tied to Musk’s personal brand, with or without the X name, and much of Twitter’s established branding has already been lost to users and advertisers.

Allen Adamson, co-founder of another brand marketing agency, talks about a decision based on Elon Musk’s ego and “ one of the fastest falls in history for a brand and a company “.

Elon Musk clearly made a bet with this drastic name change. This makes the headlines and the businessman promises to have many projects around X. In the meantime, skepticism reigns supreme.

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