twitter into the next everything app and that is not, it is not known as twitter anymore. musk has officially re-branded the company as x. he wants the app to be central to everyday lives, and a hand handle everything from communications, to finance, to gaming. so we re going to find out what this is all about with the best man we know, nbc tech correspondent jake ward. jake, i want you to explain all of this to us. first, re-branding the company as the letter x. you ve got wall street analysts who believe the company could use billions of dollars of brand value, not to mention the letter x on the internet is gonna fast-track you to a porn haven. [laughter] i know. i don t know, stephanie. i mean, elon musk is so exhausting to cover because he is so indomitable about these ideas which, to any sensible
facebook, under meta s registration. it s for everything. it goes on and on about what it could be four on the internet, you know, the transmission of data on the internet, basically under the name x is covered by a patent registration that facebook holds. not to mention microsoft, which uses x and a pattern filing having to do with xbox. you are gonna go up against those two companies and win just by being big and which. they are also big and which. i don t know, it doesn t look like this has a path forward. but the guy is indomitable, and he seems to have been so focused that he blew up a past life on this, so maybe s gonna do that again. zuckerberg is not gonna stand for this, but it s not just the name. can we talk about what he actually wants to do with the company. there are these everything apps in asia that are popular, but he doesn t even have twitter down at this point. and he wants to expand into every aspect of our life, how he can make that work,
wall street analyst or tech journalists, don t make any sense. the thing we have come to understand in the last few days about his mania for this idea is that he s had it for a long time. it turns out that back in the year 2000, during his short-lived tenure as the head of paypal, who elon musk went after the same concept of an all in one online banking and everything app that was going to be called x at the time. he was so slavery devoted to this idea that in fact, it seemed to have got him ousted from that job. that s why, peter peter thiel wound up the head of paypal. so this seems to be something like a kind of maniacal return to something that is really, really devoted to in a kind of former life, but it is driving him to, as you say, erase billions of dollars in value. wipe out a company whose name has become a verb, tweeting has become a verb. there are whole movie blocks built on it. people would die for the kind of brand value that twitter
had. he s wiping it all out it seems in something that he was into a couple decades ago. x already has a distinct brand on the internet and it has nothing to do with what twitter does. but my question is, can he even pull it off? he may have had an idea for years, but according to reuters, there are hundreds of companies out there that actually hold trademark rights to the letter x, including mark zuckerberg who, of course, runs meta. well, this is the crazy thing about it, right? is that not only could it conceivably it turns out, it isn t enough to be really, really focused on this idea, and you have been that way for two decades. it turns out, it s not enough drafted domain name bout of people back in 2017, you need to have a trademark. and it turns out, he doesn t own that trademark. lots of other companies do. and if it was just small companies, then you could conceivably, you know, surmise that maybe elon musk could outlast him in court. but he would have to go off against
especially given that he fired a third of the company since he bought it? he very much has spoken openly in the past about his admiration for chinese companies like wechat, which is the sort of standard thing you used to do everything from chat to your significant other, to buy sodas out of a vending machine. and it s an extraordinary app. but that thing took billions, and years, and tens of thousands of people to pull off. elon musk does not have the time, the people. he know he is slowly running out of money. it really does not seem plausible to me that he s gonna go for it. but he seems to be going for it in this indomitable way that we get used to. and we are literally watching him tear twitter off the side of the building in san francisco. it is amazing to just watch how quickly he is physically and metaphorically erasing the value of twitter which once represented itself. indomitable elon is how we will leave it right there. jake ward, great to see you, thank you so much. bef