{"id":10975,"date":"2023-07-30T08:37:15","date_gmt":"2023-07-30T06:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/30\/will-rebranding-twitter-give-elon-musk-the-x-factor-i-wouldnt-bank-on-it-john-naughton\/"},"modified":"2023-07-30T08:37:15","modified_gmt":"2023-07-30T06:37:15","slug":"will-rebranding-twitter-give-elon-musk-the-x-factor-i-wouldnt-bank-on-it-john-naughton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/30\/will-rebranding-twitter-give-elon-musk-the-x-factor-i-wouldnt-bank-on-it-john-naughton\/","title":{"rendered":"Will rebranding Twitter give Elon Musk the X factor? I wouldn\u2019t bank on it | John Naughton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twitter\u2019s owner has given his toy a new name, but any ambition he has to turn it into a WeChat-like financial service is fanciful<\/p>\n

So Elon Musk, the world\u2019s richest manchild, has changed the name of his favourite toy. Henceforth, Twitter is to be known as X<\/a>. Strangely, though, you can still log on to twitter.com and be invited to tweet. This is a missed comic opportunity. Instead of the chancellor being able to say, for example, that he had tweeted his concern about the public sector borrowing requirement to the prime minister, he could be saying that he had \u201cX\u2019d Rishi\u201d on the matter. Sigh.<\/p>\n

So what is it about Musk and X? Well, it goes back quite a way \u2013 to 1999, when Musk set up X.com<\/a> as an early online bank. For \u201cearly\u201d, read \u201cweird\u201d. Customers were not charged fees or overdraft penalties. New users got $20 for free just by opening an account and a $10 bonus for every one of their contacts who signed up. As for the venerable banking convention that you should know your customer, Musk demurred. According to Max Chafkin, the biographer<\/a> of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Musk bragged to CBS News that it was easier to get a line of credit at X.com than it was to sign up for an email account. \u201cYou can fill out the whole thing, be done in two minutes, be in your account and have it funded already.\u201d Not surprisingly, within two months, X.com had more than 200,000 users, some of whom who had given fake addresses and immediately set to writing cheques that bounced.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nTwitter\u2019s owner has given his toy a new name, but any ambition he has to turn it into a WeChat-like financial service is fanciful
\nSo Elon Musk, the world\u2019s richest manchild, has changed the name of his favourite toy. Henceforth, Twitter is to be known as X. Strangely, though, you can still log on to twitter.com and be invited to tweet. This is a missed comic opportunity. Instead of the chancellor being able to say, for example, that he had tweeted his concern about the public sector borrowing requirement to the prime minister, he could be saying that he had \u201cX\u2019d Rishi\u201d on the matter. Sigh.
\nSo what is it about Musk and X? Well, it goes back quite a way \u2013 to 1999, when Musk set up X.com as an early online bank. For \u201cearly\u201d, read \u201cweird\u201d. Customers were not charged fees or overdraft penalties. New users got $20 for free just by opening an account and a $10 bonus for every one of their contacts who signed up. As for the venerable banking convention that you should know your customer, Musk demurred. According to Max Chafkin, the biographer of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Musk bragged to CBS News that it was easier to get a line of credit at X.com than it was to sign up for an email account. \u201cYou can fill out the whole thing, be done in two minutes, be in your account and have it funded already.\u201d Not surprisingly, within two months, X.com had more than 200,000 users, some of whom who had given fake addresses and immediately set to writing cheques that bounced. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twitter\u2019s owner has given his toy a new name, but any ambition he has to turn it into a WeChat-like financial service is fanciful So Elon Musk, the world\u2019s richest manchild, has changed the name of his favourite toy. Henceforth, Twitter is to be known as X. Strangely, though, you can still log on to …<\/p>\n

Will rebranding Twitter give Elon Musk the X factor? I wouldn\u2019t bank on it | John Naughton<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10975"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}