Skip to content
It seems the Twitter-Elon Musk saga refuses to die down. With Twitter suing Musk for backing out of the $44 billion acquisition deal, and the court proceedings set to begin on October 17, the Tesla mogul recently teased that he was planning to launch his own social media platform.
When a Twitter user asked if Musk had ever considered creating his own social media platform in case the Twitter deal fell apart, Musk responded by saying, “X.com.”
If the Tesla boss is forced to go ahead with the Twitter acquisition, Twitter will only be an elaborate add-on in the expansion of the rival platform. It will only leverage what he is prospecting to do with X.com.
If this is true, Musk will join a long list of users who had issues with Twitter, who then created their social media platforms. The most recent and notable of such cases would be that of former US President Donald Trump and his platform, Truth Social.
While most of these derivative platforms cannot sustain themselves beyond a year or two, Trump’s Truth Social, and India’s very own Koo, have done well for themselves. Koo claims they have over 7-8 million active users every month and expect 100 million app downloads by the end of 2022.
Musk has owned the domain “X.com” for years and across businesses. X.Com was Musk’s first venture before he got involved with PayPal. The company that X.com was associated with merged with PayPal and was later sold to eBay in 2002.
The SpaceX boss repurchased the domain from PayPal in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.
At that time, Musk stated that he bought back the domain name for sentimental reasons, although many experts believed this was a cover-up. Musk, after all, isn’t exactly known to be sentimental. Experts and trade analysts then thought this might be the start of Musk’s most grand endeavors, perhaps even more significant than SpaceX or Tesla. So it would be safe to assume that there is a perfect chance that Musk had a long-term strategy in place.
Earlier this year, Musk decided to pull out of his bid to acquire Twitter while saying that Twitter either withheld information or didn’t represent it accurately. His main contention was the number of Twitter bots and spam accounts and whether the user base that Twitter boasted of was, in fact, accurate. A very heated and public tussle between the folks at Twitter and Musk, during which Twitter’s shares tanked.
Knowing that he may be forced to acquire Twitter, Musk recently sold about $7 billion worth of his portion of Tesla’s holdings. If Musk cannot buy Twitter, he is required to pay $1 billion.
