News broke early today that Elon Musk is going through with his plans to purchase twitter at the original offer price. This news comes as a surprise to many (including me), as it was widely believed that Musk had backed out of his deal to purchase Twitter. However, it seems that the Tesla CEO has had a change of heart, and is now moving forward with the acquisition. The news of Musk's impending purchase of Twitter caused the social media company's stock to skyrocket in early trading, and it is currently up over 20%.
According to the Tesla CEO, the acquisition of Twitter is linked to his plan to create “X.” Most likely a nod to X.com – the online bank Musk cofounded that later became Paypal, X will likely be a super app similar to the ones extremely common in East Asia.
Essentially, a super app is an all-in-one solution that offers everything you need in one place. It consolidates multiple services into a single platform so you don’t need to download different apps for different tasks. For example, WeChat is a Chinese super app that allows users to do things like chat with friends, book taxis, pay bills, and more – all within the same platform. Musk is likely to combine Twitter’s services with those of Tesla Starlink to name a few.
At this stage, no further information on X has been announced by Musk himself namely as to how it will work or when its release is scheduled but it certainly puts his idea of buying Twitter in a clearer image aside from his pro-free-speech crusade. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. It's also worth noting that this news comes after a recent tweet from Musk in which he suggested a possible Russia-Ukraine deal. This caused some backlash online, with many people seeing it as too sympathetic to Russia. It's unclear if the two events are connected, but I wouldn't completely rule it out.