adrian: more change at twitter. first it was the ownership. now it is the brand, with the website's bird icon making way for a simple x. but is it that simple? and why the change? what is behind owner elon musk's move, and why is he making it? this is "inside story." adrian: . welcome to the program. i'm adrian finighan.

he bought twitter for $44 billion, so perhaps it should not be unexpected that elon musk wants to leave his mark on the social media website. but the announcement that a simple x will will replace the iconic bird logo surprised millions of twitter uses, as well as investors and the marketing world. his takeover of the website has been turbulent, with mass layoffs of staff, concerns over how content is moderated and criticism of changes to the social media platform. what is behind the branding transformation? how will it go down? and what is musk hoping to gain from it? we will be asking these questions and more with our guests in just a few moments. but first, a report. reporter: it is no secret that the world's richest man has ambitious plans for one of the world's most used social media platforms. and in true elon musk style, he told his followers on saturday that they too could be part of his new vision for twitter. then on sunday, his twitter

profile changed. the blue bird logo was out, and in was the new black and white x. the rebranding beamed onto twitter's headquarters in the u.s. the logo a change musk has said is part of his twitter vision to use the app for multiple purposes, including audio, video chatting and payments. he has referred to as the everything app, all powered by artificial intelligence, pushing it closer to asia's so-called super apps. we chat in china, which is one of the regions's biggest platforms. it is used as a one-stop app for millions of users daily needs, well beyond just short messaging. elon musk bought twitter last year for $44 billion. turmoil followed after he fired half of the workforce. since his takeover, the company has lost half of its advertising revenue. other changes have included charging users for previously free services, such as the blue verification tick. the signature bird sign was

created in 2006 when twitter was founded with short messages called tweets, just as birds communicate by chirping. musk faces new competition from an old adversary. mark zuckerberg's meta launched a rival platform called threads earlier this month. but elon musk's fascination with the letter x goes beyond his business ventures, naming his son two years ago x. whether x becomes a mark of success or not, it will define musk's latest venture. whatever happens, a master of self publicity is keeping him in the news. adrian: let's bring in our guests. from london, we are joined by james greenfield, the founder and ceo of brand agency koto studio. in dublin, elaine burke, a science and technology journalist and host of the

podcast "for tech's sake." also in london, allyson stewart-allen, ceo of international marketing partners. a warm welcome to you well. james, let's start with you. elon musk has long envisioned a super app along the lines of china's we chat that will do everything from online shopping and banking and video messaging. twitter ceo linda yaccarino tweeted that x will be the platform that can deliver everything, but is getting rid of the bird logo a good idea? it is the platform's most recognizable asset, isn't it? >> yeah, it totally is. i think there has been a lot of people that have longed for a super app in the west for a while now. the challenge is if you are starting with something like twitter, which has a pretty controversial recent past, i do not think you are going to get rid of all that by changing a bird to an x.

i think they may have underestimated the challenge they have, particularly where there is a lot of other places and spaces where people can spend their time at the moment. adrian: how can someone like elon musk underestimate? he is a savvy businessman. look at spacex and tesla. how can he be getting it so wrong with twitter? >> i think there is a difference between product and brand and marketing. i think that is one of the things a lot of people in the tech industry may be underestimating sometimes. you can make a compelling product. there is no doubt tesla has moved the world of ev's forward in an amazing way. but that does not mean necessarily that tesla is a great brand. at the moment, what is really working in tesla's case is you have this product that feels very different, it is ahead of the competition, it has delivered something that is very visible. all of the controversy and all of the things he says is great marketing for it.

the product will only get you so far because you need to break into groups that are not necessarily interested in product or elon as a character. so i think any brand has to go on a journey into the mass market position. i think that is where you need brand and marketing to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. adrian: elaine, what do you think of the rebrand? and elon musk's plan for a super app? >> it is not a new concept from elon musk. even before buying twitter, he had put forward this idea of a super app -- x, the everything app. he already had the name in mind. he had talked about it as some sort of a spin out of twitter. this was even before he bought the platform. x seems to be a brand that he himself is keen on. spacex being the name of his

space technology company. and it has been rolled out -- again, like a lot of things happening with twitter, he makes the announcement on the weekend and suddenly things are moving in a fast-paced way on monday. what we are seeing today is the x logo being rolled out to the platform. it is on elon musk's own page. the twitter account is now an x logo, but it is still called twitter, and the buttons on the site still say tweets. that is something that is really strong in the twitter branding. they actually created a whole language around social media, and what was once called microblogging is simply referred to now as tweets. i think to step away from that is a bit of a mistake, and it does seem to be a bit of elon musk making a brand in his image. adrian: he says tweets will be rebranded as x's. does that mean we will all be x'ing instead of tweeting in the future? this is silly, isn't it? >> well, i think with irish

people in particular, that will be a really hard move to make because we are known to stick to our guns. whenever a brand takes over a venue, we will still call it by the old name. and some things just stick as well. in ireland, we call everything that is a vacuum cleaner a hoover. so some brands are very powerful and take over an entire category no matter who tries to take over that space. changing people's language is not as easy as he may think it is. he is just giving people constant opportunity to walk away from a platform that they have been threatening to walk away from for quite some time now. adrian: what damage has he done to the twitter brand, not just with this x rebranding, but since he took ownership of it. to what extent will that damage spill over into his other brands and impact things like tesla and spacex? and of course his own reputation as a businessman?

>> what a really great question. of course, he is a brand, mr. musk. we all know what he stands for or we think we do, whether it is the cars or the space exploration or this social media platform. and i think one idea is that perhaps this little x as a rebrand is an experiment. he is renowned for doing small experiments. it could well be he is gauging all of our reactions to this rebrand, and x weeks from now it will go back to being called twitter again. my hunch is this may not be a permanent brand change. that he is just trying to see how we respond. in terms of the bleed into his other businesses, he is his other businesses, which is

really quite a problem. whenever you have a key person who has their imprint all over these companies, one risk therefore is you associate the company squarely with the personality of the founder or of the owner. that is hugely risky. we see this all the time in, for example, using celebrities as endorsers. they then go rogue and do crazy things. that then causes problems to the brand. all i need to say is kanye west and adidas. it could well be that someone speaks up and says, elon, you need to go in the backseat and let the people you appointed drive these businesses the way you have asked them to. which really would minimize the risk. so there is a lot of variables that will determine the long-term future of not only x, formerly known as twitter, but

all of his other businesses too. adrian: he has already eroded trust in the twitter brand by removing blue ticks, making users pay for them, firing thousands of staff, restricting the number of tweets that users can see in their feeds, reinstating controversial accounts. how much more damage can this man do? do you think we are witnessing the death throes of twitter, or is it too early for that? >> i think if you survey advertisers, who are definitely looking at reallocating their budget away from twitter because of all of the tumult, i do wonder whether his ambition of making this an all-encompassing application where you can -- it is e-commerce, you can buy from it, you can use it for social purposes and other reasons -- at the end of the day, the business model is at its heart around the

advertisers. if the advertisers are leaving because users are leaving, which is usually how it works, then the advertiser will go somewhere else. and as elaine was saying earlier, there is choice now. you can go to threads. or you can go to instagram or any other of meta's platform. or linkedin, depending on your target audience. it is not that these advertisers do not have options. they have lots of options. and if they leave, then mr. musk's business model will have to be reinvented somehow or other. i am not sure how. adrian: james, to what extent has musk thrown a golden nugget here to mark zuckerberg just days after meta launched its twitter rival, threads? if you were advising musk as a client, what would you be telling him about his brand?

>> i would be telling him to calm down on the instability. i think it is one thing being a product guy and putting stuff out there and trying stuff. i would be saying to him you have to be careful with your brand. your brand is something that is incredibly precious to you. they take a long time to build, and they can be destroyed very quickly, as we were talking about with kanye west and adidas a minute ago. but i think in this case, he needs to understand that people only have an appetite so much for instability. one of the most important things you can be as a brand is consistent. you do not need to be boring, but you do need to be consistent. people need to trust you. whether that is an advertiser or a user. particularly if he is going to move into the financial space where he is thinking of this as a payments app. there is no part of our world as a consumer where we want to have trust and security more than

with our money. i think the idea of everyone suddenly jumping onto x and using it to pay each other when there are many other options available for that seems quite unlikely to me at the moment. my suggestion would be, if you are going to go about a rebrand, do it carefully, really think about the outcomes. we have a bit of a frankenstein product in the market with different names and products, and that is just going to erode trust. once you erode it, it is hard to win it back. adrian: i want to come back to something you were saying a few moments ago about people doing everything on x and whether they trust the brand. but first, elaine, do twitter users actually care what the platform is called as long as they can use it much as they always have done? will they still engage with the platform if it does more than just microblogging? >> that is the thing that james

was hinting at there, that this is kind of the end of twitter as we know it possibly, because this x everything app isn't going to be about microblogging. it does seem that he is going to try to build a super app. i do think that is misguided because the successful super apps that exist are in china, where they do not have access to things like twitter, instagram or facebook. so we chat has been able to grow and expand in that environment. in other areas where super apps have been successful, it tends to be in economies where people do not have as much access to bank accounts. a lot of these apps are tied to payments referred to as micro payments. you need to have a high level of trust for people to start doing their finances through your app, and that has not really been the case with twitter under elon musk, trust and transparency at a high level.

he seems to be targeting u.s. and eu markets, and we tend to have a high proliferation of people with other finance options. it is hard for me to see what opportunities he will be able to unlock here where others have not tried or have not unlocked those things in european or u.s. markets. i do not have confidence elon musk is the person to do that. i do believe he thinks he can. i do not see twitter remaining the platform it was before his purchase of it. it will become something very different as he tries new things and possibly fails at them. adrian: is that a gap that threads will fill? >> you mentioned, is this a golden opportunity for mark zuckerberg? the worst nature of x's branding coming out today could be a symptom of playing catch up with

the release of threads, which seemed to be capitalizing on a bad moment for twitter when they introduced the rate limit. it seems threads upped their release date because of that. maybe there is in the background the competitive nature between the two companies where they are rushing things just to compete with one another. what it did for threads is it saw a huge adoption very quickly, the fastest service ever to reach 100 million users, but activity has not seemed to match that appetite. i think there was a huge influx of people securing their name on a major platform, which is an important thing to do, but not matched with the level of activity and engagement. so that is the challenge that zuckerberg has to overcome here. if twitter keeps giving opportunities where it gets distracted with the purpose of the platform that most people use it for, then zuckerberg has another moment here to capitalize and may up that engagement.

adrian: we are sitting here thinking that elon musk is slightly batty. what if this is genius? what if x becomes a super successful app? of course advertisers are going to pay to be on it. that may be a long way down the road. or is it? is it going to make money in the end, and we will all be sitting here when x is the platform that everybody is on, thinking this man is amazing? >> the assumption behind your question is that people will change their habits fundamentally and stop their purchases through other platforms, paypal, amazon. these habits are entrenched now. covid has helped us in determining how we buy online.

if we are going to change that, we need good reasons. we are going to need to be educated, which costs a lot of money, by x as to why there is value in changing our habits. lots of governments, lots of platforms, lots of businesses have tried very hard to get us to change our consumer habits. they have spent a lot of money and a has not worked. we have not yet been given the reasons to switch and that takes energy. we generally once we make a decision, we want to stick with that as consumers. we probably go to the same supermarket we have always gone to for decades.

if we are really going to switch, we need a good reason. and so far, that reason has not been presented to us. now, maybe there is a big surprise coming and it is going to be so compelling that we are going to change the way we do things. but i am not sure that musk has the billions they would take to get us to change those habits. unless he is going to give away free money and say use our channel and we are going to give you tons of rebates and incentives so that it is worth your while. is that in his plan? has he done that with test lot? no, so why would he start back here? i am not convinced this is

really going to pay off for him. adrian: james, a super app would be meta on steroids as far as data gathering. what are the ethics here? how concerned will consumers be about handing all of their data to a company that does not have the best of reputations thanks to its new owner? >> i think that is a massive challenge. our trust in technology is generally decreasing anyway. people have realized there are as many negative aspects as positive. people worry about the effect on our children come on in democracy, politics.

we went for a period in the late 2000's when it was positive. there is an argument that our data is precious and we should be careful about who we give it to. i am not sure the average consumer should be as worried about their data as people think they should. to build on elaine's point, i think the reason there are are super apps that work in other countries this because of their access to drinking -- banking. you can look at meta, instagram is a brilliant product, but a

has had some losses. they tried to go after the workplace. that never really connected. what we find in the united states and europe is that we think there is a limit to how much we want a company to dominate. in a country like south korea, government corporations do everything. i find it hard to believe it would happen in a country like the u.s.. adrian: elon musk says people more or less live on the platform we chat in china. why hasn't the u.s. and europe jumped on a platform like that before now? >> it is not that nobody else

has had the ambition before now. there are antitrust issues when it comes to monopolizing many industries. the laws do attempt to control that. we have the digital services act for very large platforms. looking at how they control data across different services and maybe share data across different services. that will create new hurdles for any company that wants to create a super app. i do think those super apps are a symptom of the markets they have launched in.

the way people feel about conscious consumerism and thinking deeply about what companies they do business with has transformed the ability for any business to take that control over multiple services. it is something i do not really see happening here. i think there is too much regulation, consciousness. it is something plenty of companies would like to do because it is a huge market. amazon comes closest to being somewhat in that model. but the marketplace stuff has been quite hard for social media platforms. facebook marketplace exists, but it is not having a lot of trust. adrian: what will regulators have to say about a platform that does everything?

>> i think we want to protect consumers and gave them choice. if we keep them captive, and make it hard for them to exit, that is problematic. lawmakers certainly in the united states and europe and think u.k. are pretty concerned not just about how do we break up these companies heading toward monopoly, it is also about their monopoly on data and how they exploit data for commercial purposes. surveillance capitalism is very real. the reason these companies are in business at all is because

they make more money off of selling the insights from the data than they do from selling you any goods. elon musk is not unaware of that. he is very clear that this is another revenue stream. perhaps it will be the lifeblood of x. so far, it does not look like x has the critical mass users or advertisers to make that really pay off. so again, we are back to what is the incentive? adrian: we are out of time. many thanks indeed. as always, thank you for watching. you can see the program again by going to the website at aljazeera.com. for further discussion, join us

on our facebook page. you can also join the conversation on twitter. from the whole team here, thanks for being with us.