The "X Factor" was never going to work
Of all the changes Elon Musk brought to Twitter, the one I'm quite skeptical and cringed about is the renaming of the platform itself to "X".
I don't know who advised him that this name could even work at all. X is so generic a name that it doesn't really mean anything because it already stands for a lot of things, how can one even think that a whole new brand can be built out of it? For example, one of the first picture that comes to my mind is "X-Men" movie series and the famous Professor X. But from what I gather, Elon is more of an Iron Man fan boy than Prof X, right?
The X-Men brand isn't some fluke, the Marvel folks have put some decent effort in creating that story line, plot, dialogs, sound and video effects, etc. to build the legend that it is. If me sitting here in India knows so much about X-Men series, I can only imagine the kind of cult it must have built in US, UK, etc.
And who can forget the "X" variable in mathematics? It is often used for equations like (X2 + Y2). X is also very commonly used in discussions to denote an unknown quantity or factor. For example, "Let us assume that X is the demand factor for this new product.".
I don't know about other parts of the world but at least here in India, almost every person I've talked to still calls the platform "Twitter" and not X! Indeed, as long as the domain twitter.com still works, one might be even correct or justified in calling it so. But who knows how long that domain is going to work.
However, one of the noblest things for Musk to do in 2024 is to just revert or rollback this decision and restore back the "Twitter" brand. This is not just a popular demand but if I recall, Elon himself had often said that they will experiment with twitter and roll back what doesn't work? At least his top advisors or generals must strongly advice Elon to consider reverting this. Maybe they can come up with a slightly modified version of the Twitter logo with a different color and a bit of what Elon has in mind with respect to X? I'm sure there is no dearth of creativity in either Silicon Valley or Elon's team!
Nobody likely did. He's just weirdly obsessed with X for whatever reason. So much so he even named one of his children X AE A-XII. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)
So I doubt he will roll back the change no matter how much people dislike it, or how many people still refer to the site as Twitter.
It's entirely possible Musk has conflated the juvenile bragging points conferred on a single-letter username with brand-bragging rights for a corporation. "Who's going to forget "X", amirite?"
Personally, just like the OP's math example, no one is going to forget X but also X can stand for anything.
The 'one letter user name' works because it says "I've been here from the start" but when you very publicly buy something you can't really claim to have been there from the start like, oh, say Tesla...
The easiest answer is that Musk is very rich, somewhat intelligent and stupid. Though, I could see from his somewhat terminally online brain thinking that having the user name was the bragging right and not the 'being into something before was cool and popular' part.
Sort of like having single digit user ID or single letter user names on a forum. How juvenile.
Reading the wiki page on X.com, it doesn't mention anything about the origin of the name, but I did find this when searching about it.
I think open-ended is a key word there, possibly tying into what OP said about X being a variable, and then reading the description of X.com as a bank, it sounded like he wanted to make it something that handled all types of financial transactions and data etc. I think Musk having claimed to be familiar with programming and physics (or anything heavy with mathematics in general) the X association as a variable would be more prominent in his mind.
Combine this with statements he said around the time of purchasing Twitter and subsequent to that, he again talks about how some other countries have an "everything" app, most notably WeChat in China, and that seems to be the vision he keeps painting for X. To me, it only furthers this notion that he views X like a variable, that it can be anything, or possibly everything.
Of course given his fascination with X has spanned such a long time frame, I'm sure there's been different impressions he's had of that letter and possibly varies depending on what/where/who he's using it for. As others speculated in here, it also seems like it could be a bit of a power move by Musk, being able to claim a single letter domain is obviously quite rare, especially for the English alphabet where there's only 26 letters. That could be the "novel" part of what he had originally stated about the name way back when. Considering many of the names of his children mentioned on that wikipedia page are also rather 'novel' one could say, he seems to like making a point about being different.
You can also add in a variety of other possible contributing reasons mentioned in that Atlantic article I linked.
The other thing about him renaming Twitter, ultimately it seems like he wanted to destroy some of the branding around Twitter. There were stories about how he wanted all imagery of the birds gone, he despised the culture of the Twitter company workplace, he despised the moderation culture, the culture of a lot of the users using the platform, the inclusiveness, the 'cancel culture' and so forth. I think the rebranding was not just solely a function of the obsession with X, I think it was intentional that he wanted to do away with a lot of the associations that were held with the Twitter brand, and it just so happened he still hadn't had a project take over the X.com brand already so it was a great pairing in his mind.
I'm sure there's no way to truly know what his fascination is about with the letter X, and at this point he likely couldn't give a reliable answer either. It's one thing to say what he thinks about it now, it's another thing to recollect potentially subconscious details and thoughts he had about the letter X 25 years ago or whatever the time would be.
Counterargument: this renaming was directly responsible for the only time I have ever clicked an embedded tweet in a news article.
I was scrolling down the page, and this element slid up from the bottom (as things do when you're scrolling down the page), and there was an X in the top right corner, so without reading I thought "oh look it's a popup about cookies or newsletters or something" and instinctively tried to close it by clicking the X.
I'm sure they've made hundreds of cents from people making this mistake while not using an adblocker.
I have read articles about all the trademark problems he stepped into by using x. I am confident that no attorney advised him to do this.
The name is 100% an obsession of Elon's. As mentioned earlier, he is obsessed over the letter X. Now, as to WHY he is obsessed with it... your guess is as good as mine. If you give any weight to other opinions online... some have said that Elon's personality is like a teenager's. That makes almost too much sense- X can be seen as this very "I'm 14 and this is So Edgy" kind of thing. Mind you, this is purely opinion.
The only fact we have is that Elon spent 44 BILLION dollars to buy it. He owns it, and he's damned well going to do with it whatever he pleases.
The biggest thing that makes me sad is how popular it still remains. Actually, let me get VERY specific: I live in Japan, and this platform has always been super-popular due to how conveniently the main writing system (kanji) fits into it- 144 characters (though i guess it's now at 250?) with kanji means that the Japanese can actually write a LOT on the platform. A part of me swears that this is at least a part of the reason why it remains alive, despite so many predictions that it would be dead by now.
To add to what @cfabbro said on the X-obsssion, wikipedia also mentions his x.com online bank (1999), XPRIZE (2012), Tesla Model X (2015), spaceX (2022), xAI (2023). In fact, I'm not sure why he didn't go with StarLinx or change his own name to Mux.
Musk seems to see himself with a lot of illusions of grandeur. Some sort of god-king complex. Guys like that used to build giant statues and have people worship at their name and thrown into a furnace at their displeasure. This is sort of the same thing, imo: whenever you hear 1/26th of the world's most successful language, you think of him. He can't throw people into a live fire, but he can turn off the communications grid of the front line of the world's topmost superpower at his command. There really is nothing new under the sun:
All that matters is that he think the name change is a fantastic idea.
I don't understand your point in mentioning a mythological story in reference to musk. He's just a billionaire doing billionaire things. No one is asking anyone to worship him. Whether he is prideful is clear to anyone.
Not trying to be rude, I just don't think your example is very relevant.
I think they're saying that Elon would be sacrificing people at altars instead of in beta testing if he was born earlier in human history.
"Billionaire things" are just the modern version of ancient King Things.
Weirdly generic names are kind of a trend with tech giants. The build-in image viewing program in Windows is called Photos, Facebook is now Meta, and their HMD product is Quest. And there's 3 too, of course. I guess Apple started it.
Eh, I don't think any of these is necessary the same thing. Re: Facebook becoming Meta, this was clearly part of their larger failed Metaverse strategy, and thus has more obvious logic behind it than Twitter's name change. As for the Quest, it worked better when paired with the Oculus name, since the company name there was more descriptive and interesting.
Also, having your built-in image viewing program just be called Photos isn't even remotely weird -- the Google Photos app is just called "Photos" on my Pixel and there are plenty of equivalent default apps titled "Calculator" or "Calendar" or "Music". That's just good naming practice for default programs, as having more creative names would make it harder for new users to find them.
But yeah X is even worse than any of those is my point lol
As I see things, It's intension is to hide that it is an actual program, and make it just be an udefineable service which magically shows images. This is what bugs me, that big tech actively try to misform and uneducate their users.
Also, good luck searching the web for anything related to Photos.
I'm not particularly convinced naming default apps based on their function is an example of big tech actively trying to misinform and uneducate their users. That's not to say they don't do that in other ways; I'm just not convinced this does that.
I guess maybe in the same sense that bundling a web browser with an OS is somehow anti-competitive? That always did seem like a weird thing to nail Microsoft on.
It's a short name (not possible to trademark) and you need to search on the full name, which will be "Google Photos" or "Apple Photos".
This is a decent solution to all the good names being taken, because they carved out a namespace for it. Using the short name means they don't need to repeat "Apple" or "Mac" in dozens of program names on a computer. (Although they used to do that sometimes: "MacPaint," "MacWrite.")
In programming, repeating the same prefix everywhere is sometimes called the smurf naming convention, after a kid's show that I suppose everyone has forgotten nowadays.
As a counterpoint, what name would make it clear that it's an actual program without being confusing to users or annoyingly wordy? If you have a good suggestion I could easily have my mind changed, but I can't think of any.
MS DOS, MS Paint, MS Word works pretty well, I think. But I'd argue that even SuperDuperÜberCoolImageViewer would be a better than Photos, because it at least is recognizable as the name of a program. I'm not a complete idiot regarding computers, and yet I recall that I had to do a double take with Photos because it doesn't sound much like a program name. My guess is that a lot people just think of it as the thing showing them images when you click them, without having any awareness of what it actually is, partly due to the generic name.
Isn't the photo technically called 'Microsoft Photos", which is not really different from "MS (short for Microsoft) Paint" or "MS Word"? Not trying to dunk, I really don't see a difference
"MS Paint" was what the program was called. I instantly recognize what people talk about if they say "remember MS Paint?". But if they said "Remember Paint?" I would likely be clueless.
Photos, on the other hand, isn't commonly known as "Microsoft Photos". Here, the label "Microsoft" is only used when making your media about Photos search engine friendly, or when you do web search yourself.
That said, the "MS" label wasn't entirely consistent. Looking up old images, I noticed that the programs title bar said simply "Paint".
My sister and I used the program a lot, and we only ever referred to it as "Paint". People tend to shorten names and phrases.
Even in the open source world, terms like "python", "flask", "java", "eclipse", "angular", etc. mean something entirely different to non technical folks!
Apple (itself a generic name) at least has distinct product names: iPhone, iPad, MacBook. It’s directly clear what you’re talking about.
It’s not the case for their apps though, but that isn’t too weird.
Actually this is a great counterpoint. Apple calls their stuff iSomething or MacSomething… they mostly make sense. Elon could have gone with TwitterX to follow SpaceX, could have gone with SolarX, TeslaX, etc it would be a bit silly but at least everything would be discernible and clearly under the same X umbrella. Having twitter become X is just dumbfounding.
If Elon called it "TwitterX", people would just keep calling it "twitter", and they wouldn't even be wrong. They already are, but in this case they're obviously deadnaming it rather than just being lazy. The problem with "TwitterX" is that it's longer than "Twitter" and adds no useful information, so the name change would just look gimmicky and sad. It literally wouldn't be a name change, just a sort of addition. At least X is punchy, and knocks off a syllable.
Going with X (or changing Twitter's name at all, for that matter) is profoundly stupid, but if you accept the premise that the name should be changed, then X is a much better option than TwitterX. In other words, TwitterX is only the second-best option regardless of your position.
On the other hand, TwitterX is shorter than "The website formerly known as Twitter".