Musk sees YouTube and LinkedIn as rivals to X
Elon Musk is aiming for a sweeping transformation: When he acquired Twitter a year ago, he announced his plan to build the platform—now known as X—into an «app for everything.» Now he’s getting even more specific.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk also wants to compete with YouTube and the career network LinkedIn with his online platform X, according to a media report. Musk and the X boss Linda Yaccarino, who was appointed by him. had highlighted the two services as future rivals in a meeting with staff, financial service Bloomberg wrote Friday night. The occasion for the meeting was the anniversary of the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, who has since renamed the platform X.
Musk and Yaccarino had also talked about plans to give corporate information dissemination services, such as PR Newswire, competition with their own offering called XWire, according to an informed person.
Musk already announced at the time of the takeover that he wanted to build Platform X as an "app for everything" based on Twitter. This is to include money transactions, among other things. Shortly before the anniversary, X unlocked video and voice calls for some users.
After acquisition, Twitter lost advertising customers
Musk had bought Twitter a year ago for $44 billion. Afterwards, some advertisers left the platform because they feared a more negative environment for their brands. Musk said several times that ad revenues had halved. He is trying to bring in more money with subscriptions - and limited the ability to use the service for free. Web analytics firms estimate that X has fewer users under Musk than Twitter did before the acquisition. There are no official comparative figures.
However, Yaccarino wrote in a blog post about the acquisition that X is accessed by more than 500 million people each month. Prior to the acquisition, Twitter had only provided data on the number of users the service reached with its advertising products. It also wrote that an average user spends 32 minutes a day on the platform - adding up to a total of 7.8 billion minutes of active time per day. Yaccarino joined X from media giant NBCUniversal, where she was responsible for contacts with advertisers. (SDA)
