Twitter Rebrands to X and destroys a reported $4-20B in brand value

0:00All right. So Twitter rebranded to X and it's reported that they destroyed$4 to$20 billion of brand value. What do you think about this rebrand? so i'm not gonna ever go against elon when it comes to business the guy's uh much much much more successful than i am he probably earns more interest on a day or a week whatever you want to end up calling it than i probably have in total because if he's worth 200 billion and you generate call it 10 returns is probably not that high but still that's 20 billion dollars a year he's far more wealthier than I am in a few days than I probably will ever get.

0:41But either way, when you look at what he's doing with Twitter, he bought X, I believe it was in 2017 or 19, back from PayPal. He purchased a domain from it. X.com? Yes. And he had ambitions to do something with it for a while now. And if you recall, While X back in the day was the name of his company merged with PayPal. And he wanted to go back to his roots. Didn't work out. Didn't work out. A lot of founders sometimes have this affinity to a brand name or a domain name or something that they've done in the past. And if it just doesn't work out, sometimes they just keep pushing forward. It's sadly a quality trait that a lot of us have.

1:20And sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. I would have never changed Twitter to X though. He wants to make it this all in one app. We use Twitter as a social network. I think in the United States, it's a little bit different. I can't talk about some of the other countries, but it's a very developed country. Same with most of Europe and a lot of the world in which we already have apps that do banking and social networks and apps that do shopping really well. And I get a lot of them are standalone, but we're happy with the experiences. At least in the United States, I don't think most people are looking for one app that does everything like they had in China.

2:00So, I mean, there's a couple of things here. This point was actually made, so I was talking to Brian Dean this morning, mutual friend, and this will be the number one biggest redirect project ever, if you think about it from an SEO standpoint. And I don't know how that's going to go. You know what I mean? Because when you redirect a new site, it takes a while for everything to pick up, but this is like billions of links and pages and things like that. How do you make that work, right? Without messing up. And I think the chances are when you do the project, I'm not saying they can't get it right overall in the long run.

2:35I bet you when they release it, if I had to bet a million dollars, and I'm a betting man, I will take a million dollars for anyone who wants to bet me on this. They'll mess up at least one of the links if they do the redirects from Twitter to X. At least one of them will be done wrong when it comes to 301 redirects and SEO. I don't know if we've seen any of these rebrands actually work out, right? Unless you're like, you know, Time Warner going to Spectrum or maybe it's the other way around where like you had negative brand equity and you just had to rebrand to something else. But that worked for the cable companies because the cable companies here had just such brand equity that people hated them.

3:11But Twitter didn't have that much negative brand equity like the cable TV providers. So you look at Facebook going to Meta. I still don't think that's like, I mean, but Meta is technically the parent company. It's like Alphabet. Yeah. You still can go to Facebook.com. It's not like they're forcing you to meta. So this one I think is a bit risky. I mean, but again, like to Neil's point, you don't bet against Elon. I just, I think also the new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, I just don't think, she hasn't been, she hasn't tweeted for a while, right? And that's not to say the CEO should tweet. She just tweeted like the other day.

3:43The other day, but she doesn't tweet often, right? And so one has to wonder like, what is she actually doing, right? I don't know yet. It's too early to say. I know what she's doing. Her background is ads and ad sales. She's generating more ad revenue for Twitter. Well, I guess we'll see the next 12 months. That's her job. That's what she's supposed to be doing. It's too early for us to say, but if I were to project, if I were a betting man, and I am a betting man, I don't think she's going to be around in the next 12 to 18 months. I don't know about that. If you look at Elon, he's done very well picking executives.

4:12He's also really good at firing them quickly too. Yeah, but he's good at picking talent overall. He's built amazing leadership. Gwyneth from SpaceX is amazing. The CEO or president. I don't know what she is now. Either way, she runs it. She's done an amazing job. We'll see. We can come back to this. Maybe it could be a little out, but I don't think she's going to be around for the long term. That's my bet. So we'll see. Time will tell. For all you guys that are listening or watching on YouTube, if you already have a good brand and there's not really a negative perception against it, you don't need to waste your time rebranding.

4:42If your brand's pigeonholed into one market and you want to expand into other markets, sure, you can consider it. But if your brand's already pretty broad and there's no negative sentiment towards it, just keep it as is. I think like I respect how quickly he executed on this. And we'll talk about this in the upcoming episode. But like it was a pretty unnecessary thing to do at this time because there's so many more bigger fish to fry. Yeah, they should focus on closing more revenue as their main priority. More revenue, plus the other four or five things that he has going on too. The Neuralink, the Starships, the Starlink, the SpaceX, all this stuff, right?

5:19Dude, so again, I wouldn't bet against Elon, but I think the issue here is going to be is he's spread too thin. I don't care how talented you are when you're just doing too many things. None of them are going to get the attention they deserve. It doesn't mean that they won't do well. I just think he would do much better if you just focus on SpaceX and Tesla and that's it. You got asked this question the other day. It's like, how do you manage all this? And so Elon said, the way I manage all my companies is I just don't really sleep that much. And that is very tough to manage for if you're like a human being, like a normal person.

5:52But he's not a normal person, right? And that's how he makes it work. You know, he said something else. And this is digressing a little bit and we can wrap it up here. He had a section where he talked about the joy of having kids and he thinks everyone should have kids. so that's good so that's the he has a lot of kids yeah five no 12 i don't know how many but it's more than great yeah because he he's having twins right yeah so there's more than five for sure anyway we'll do an episode on kids maybe in the future but that is it for today please don't forget to rate review subscribe five stars on your favorite podcast app and also hit us on youtube as well because that's where you can see us hanging out in person right now so that's it for today.

6:29Bye. Yep.