Two Years on, X is Still Not Close to its ‘Everything App’ Vision

It’s not been almost two years since Elon Musk decided to re-name Twitter to X, which fulfilled a long-held dream that Musk had had of hosting an app at x.com.

Which is a weird ambition, but Musk had bought the x.com URL in the early 2000’s, and had held onto it ever since, in the hopes of one day launching an all-encompassing, payments-based app. Called “X.” Because he really likes the letter x evidently.

So, how has the X rebrand gone, and is X now on a path to becoming the “everything app” that Elon had once envisioned?

Well, kind of. I guess. Depending on how you view it.

First off, on the X rebrand, as reported by Sherwood, Google searches for “x login” recently exceeded search traffic for “twitter login” for the first time since the renaming.

Which is a good sign, right? That means that more people are now recognizing the app as X, which is a big step.

Though this is only web traffic, and given that the vast majority of X usage is on mobile, it’s only tangential searches for the login page that are likely coming in via search engines.

But those users are also less likely to be regulars, and that, again, points to the rebrand taking hold, in at least some capacity.

I mean, X itself isn’t really helping, with a heap of its documentation still referring to “Twitter” and “tweets.” But Elon stated that he was confident that users would eventually forget about Twitter, because X would be so much better.

I don’t know that it’s fulfilled that promise, but it seems that people are now finally getting used to the new branding.

Which leads to the next question: Is X becoming the “everything app”?

No. No it is not.

Despite all the grandstanding and superlatives that Elon and X CEO Linda Yaccarino throw around, X, for all intents and purposes, is the same as Twitter was, with minor functional updates and changes that haven’t really impacted general usage.

Well, not in a positive way at least.

For example, X claims that it’s now a video platform, but there’s been little change in focus in the app to better amplify video content, and it hasn’t announced many significant video deals, outside of its initial set of partnerships.

It did add a new video tab earlier this year, but a video-first platform would open to a video feed first, right?

X’s payments initiative, meanwhile, still hasn’t got off the ground, with Elon and Co. still working to get full licensing clearance in order to enable the first stage of its in-stream payments push.

It’s still coming, according to Yaccarino, and X has been experimenting with how its in-app payments process will look and function. But given that it hasn’t launched in the U.S. yet, I don’t imagine that this will be coming to other regions anytime soon.

And then there’s X’s usage.

As part of his initial vision for the platform, Elon Musk projected that X would reach 600 million active users by 2025 and 931 million in 2028.  

How close it is to those goals depends on your interpretation.

For context, back in 2022, when Elon took over the app, Twitter was sitting on 217 million mDAU, or “monetizable daily active users.” Recently, Elon reported that X was now up to 600 million monthly actives (MAU).

Which means that, technically, X is on track to reach his projections, however his initial growth projections had suggested that it would reach 600 million daily active users, not monthly.

So you could argue that it’s growing, but also it’s not where Elon had suggested. X’s daily active user count, meanwhile, is sitting on 250 million mDAU, where it’s been since November 2022.

There’s also evidence to suggest that X is losing audience, with the platform seeing a 15% decline in European usage since Elon Musk took over at the app. That’s based on its EU transparency reporting, but X doesn’t have to provide auditable user numbers for other regions.

But such a significant decline in Europe seems to belie Musk’s claims of the platform seeing big growth, because in order to do that, it would have to add a heap more users in other regions to counter its EU dip.

Website traffic stats have been down (though they increase in May according to SEMRush data), and X’s download rankings are declining,  so there’s not much to actually support X’s suggestion that it’s adding users.

Which would be another way in which it hasn’t reached its “everything app” ambitions as yet. But maybe, once payments are active, once it has more video deals, maybe it still has a chance?

Really, it probably matters less than it once did, because xAI recently acquired X, which it uses as a critical data source. That means that the onus on X’s business has been slightly reduced, as it now shares funding with xAI, and Elon’s been able to keep raising funds for his AI project due to broader enthusiasm about the tech.

So X will remain in business for the foreseeable future either way. But two years in, looking at the state of the app, based on all of these factors, it’s not really a definitive success.

Maybe it can be framed that way, and maybe the fact that Elon was able to use the app to help Donald Trump get re-elected as president is success enough for his investment.

But right now, X still has a lot of ideas, but not a lot of results in reforming the platform.