Elon Musk has converted Twitter into a personal company which means he is not accountable to his share holders.
By Aman Gupta
Twitter is no longer a legal entity, having merged with a shell company called X Corp on March 15 this year. Twitter CEO and owner Elon Musk also owns the domain for X.com, a payments company he founded and then merged with PayPal. The news could be another step toward Musk’s ambitions for an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat.
According to a court document dated April 4, Twitter “no longer exists” and is now X Corp. The lawsuit was filed against Twitter and its former CEO Jack Dorsey for allegedly violating the free speech rights of conservative activist Laura Loomer.
The court document read, “Twitter Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists. X Corp. is a privately held corporation, incorporated in Nevada, and with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California”
Musk broke the news of Twitter’s merger with X Corp. to his 134 million followers via a cryptic tweet that included the letter “X”.
What do we know about ‘X’?
Shortly after acquiring Twitter in a $44 billion deal last year, Musk had made his intentions clear that the company would be an accelerator in creating X, the everything app.
Given Musk’s fandom for WeChat, his “super app” could likely emulate many of the Chinese app’s features, including payments, messaging, and social networking.
X Corp. was set up on March 9 in Nevada and Musk is the president of the company while X Holdings Corp. serves as its parent company with an authorized capital of $2 million.
Musk’s move to create X Corp. could be an initiative towards creating a larger parent company for all of the billionaire’s properties similar to the structure of Alphabet Inc.
However, it isn’t immediately clear whether Musk’s other businesses including Tesla and SpaceX would become a part of X Corp.
There has been a flurry of changes since Elon Musk took over Twitter. In the last week alone, Musk removed Twitter’s signature blue bird logo from the homepage, replacing it with the Doge meme, and later removed the letter “w” from the company name outside its San Francisco office.
Twitter is also removing the verified blue checkmarks from the platform, meaning that only users who have paid for the Twitter Blue service will have access to the blue checkmark next to a person’s profile.
Courtesy: The Livemint