Microblogging site Twitter is no longer an independent company as its new owner Elon Musk has merged it with his firm X Corp.
Though Twitter is still functional as a social media platform, this could be Mr Musk’s first step towards transforming the company into an “everything app” like China’s WeChat.
In the past, Mr Musk has indicated that acquiring Twitter would be an “accelerant” for creating X that he called an “everything app”. He said he intended to make X similar to WeChat.
First released in 2011, WeChat is a super-app owned by Shenzhen-headquartered technology company Tencent Holdings. It is an instant messaging and payments app that is used by more than 1 billion people.
Mr Musk, the billionaire founder of the world’s biggest electric vehicle company Tesla, tweeted about the move on Tuesday with the single character “X”. His one-letter tweet had attracted more than 22.5 million views within hours.
“Twitter … has been merged into X Corp and no longer exists ... X Corp is a privately held corporation … its parent corporation is X Holdings Corp. No publicly traded corporation owns 10 per cent or more of the stock of X Corp or X Holdings Corp,” said a document submitted on April 4 last year to a US court in a lawsuit filed against the company and its former chief executive, Jack Dorsey, by activist Laura Loomer.
Ms Loomer is suing Twitter for flouting laws after her account was banned in 2019.
Mr Musk, who has more than 134.4 million followers on Twitter, was the original owner of the X.com domain. It was the name of the online payments company that he started and ultimately merged with PayPal. However, he repurchased the domain in 2017 for an undisclosed sum.
Mr Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, was also accused of manipulating Twitter's algorithm to boost the reach of his own tweets in February.
He instructed a team of his engineers to tweak the algorithm so his tweets would gain traction, resulting in a flood of his messages appearing on users' feeds, Platformer.news reported.
Mr Musk's time at the helm of Twitter has been tumultuous.
He has fired more than half of the company's employees and shut down units and offices around the world, raising concerns that there may not be enough people to carry out oversight roles in vital areas of its operations.
Twitter's revenue and adjusted earnings plunged by 40 per cent on an annual basis in December, as several advertisers withdrew after Mr Musk took charge of the company, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.
