Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ought to cage struggle over whose rebrand is worse | TechCrunch

Elon Musk is the most effective factor that might have ever occurred to Mark Zuckerberg. As Musk begins to change Twitter’s branding to X, Fb’s rebrand to Meta doesn’t appear all that unhealthy.

Zuckerberg is likely to be good at lifting weights lately, however he nonetheless wants to drag Meta out from a severely rough few years. After rebranding to Meta in 2021, the corporate previously often called Fb spent $13.7 billion on VR and AR in 2022, although its social VR apps like Horizon Worlds stay extremely unpopular.

Zuckerberg was as soon as essentially the most reviled man on the web. We watched as he confronted a social media government’s worst nightmare, testifying earlier than the Senate over Fb’s blatant failure to guard consumer knowledge. We laughed at him, not with him, as he shared his love for “smoking meats” and Candy Child Ray’s barbecue sauce. We doubted our sense of actuality when took an enormous swing (and, thus far, an enormous miss) and renamed his firm Meta, quadrupling down on the wager that all of us need to put on VR headsets all day.

Enter, Zuckerberg’s saving grace: Elon Reeve Musk, FRS. You already know what’s even worse than investing $13.7 billion into one thing nobody desires to pay for? Investing $44 billion into one thing that nobody desires to pay for. Now, some persons are thirsting after Zuckerberg as a result of he’s gotten fairly buff with all his cage fight coaching. Every thing’s developing Mark, even Meta’s inventory!

Musk and Zuckerberg have appeared considerably severe about the potential of cage fighting each other on the Roman Colosseum (personally, I need this struggle to occur, as a result of one TechCrunch supervisor has jokingly agreed to ship me to Italy to cowl the match, and I do know he wasn’t severe, however hey, isn’t there somewhat fact to each joke?). However possibly the closest factor we’ll get to that battle is now unfolding earlier than us: what company branding sucks extra, Meta or X?

Twitter was a bit liberal with the entire fowl factor, and Musk disliked that from the get-go, altering “Birdwatch” to be known as “Neighborhood Notes.” However this all-encompassing branding change didn’t come out of nowhere. Musk has made so many bad business decisions at Twitter (or are we calling it X now?) that some individuals have theorized he might simply be attempting to run it into the bottom for enjoyable. I don’t assume that’s true, although. Musk has been obsessive about the letter X for many years now — his first huge firm was x.com, the area he’s now attempting to redirect to Twitter. That enterprise could be renamed to PayPal, which makes much more sense for a corporation that helps individuals make funds on the web. Musk calls his toddler X, as an alternative of his full identify, X Æ A-12, and upon shopping for Twitter, he declared that he wished to show the corporate into “X, the everything app.” To not point out that he already has SpaceX (get it? X?), and he simply introduced one other firm he’s apparently constructing, which is known as xAI.

“There’s completely no restrict to this transformation,” tweeted (or X-ed?) CEO Linda Yaccarino. “X would be the platform that may ship, properly….every little thing.”

All of us clowned on Fb’s identify change to Meta, but it surely at the very least considerably is smart. Meta is a cohort of apps, simply considered one of which is Fb, however Fb arguably isn’t any extra essential than WhatsApp or Instagram… and don’t overlook Musk’s private kryptonite, Threads. It’s form of good to have the ability to simply distinguish between whether or not we’re speaking about Fb the platform or Fb the corporate, even when Meta is a silly identify, referring to a metaverse that no one wants. In spite of everything, Google rebranded to Alphabet, for the reason that firm has grown significantly past only a search engine. However X is a preemptive rebrand that assumes that Twitter will quickly home a household of apps like Meta, but none of those apps exist but. And even when Musk does pull off growing funds, texting, gaming, or no matter he’s doing, is X actually a very good identify?

When utilizing computer systems, we’ve been conditioned to affiliate X with the button that you simply press to shut out of one thing. Not nice for consumer retention, there. After all, XXX is shorthand for pornography, which I’m not too pressed about, since that’s one enviornment Musk really might leverage to make Twitter worthwhile (advertisers already left anyway!). However that’s not the case for now, and customers have already identified that movies on Twitter might quickly be known as “X movies,” which is the identify of a porn website. Twitter’s new brand might be ill-fated in any case, although, because it appears to be much like a Unicode X character, making it troublesome to copyright. Twitter doesn’t even appear to have the scalable vector file of its new brand but, judging by the way it regarded when projected in huge measurement on the facet of Twitter’s San Francisco HQ.

So, the good Musk-Zuck cage struggle is lastly upon us. Sadly, it’s a bit much less thrilling than an epic duel on the earth’s most iconic enviornment. It’s a battle of unhealthy decisions.