Twitter’s absorption into the cult of Elon Musk has seemingly taken another step towards completion with the company apparently ceasing to exist as an independent entity and merging with Musk’s X Corp.
Neither Musk nor Twitter has actually announced this. In fact, the news comes from the ongoing court case between, depending on your point of view, anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist and failed far-right congressional candidate/ground-breaking investigative journalist Laura Loomer and the social media platform and former owner Jack Dorsey (Loomer has also taken action against Facebook parent Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, so she’s at least consistent.)
That case stems from Loomer’s banning from the platform in the pre-Musk era. Musk has since reinstated her account, along with those of several other far-right commentators, in his quest for “absolute freedom of speech.”
The case, however, is still ongoing. As such Twitter, as a defendant, must continue to submit corporate disclosure statements to the court.
In its most recent court filing, submitted last week ahead of the Easter holidays and now made public, the company provided notice that “Twitter, Inc has been merged into X Corp and no longer exists.”
According to the Nevada secretary of state’s online business portal, Musk registered X Corp, and also a second company X Holdings Corp, in the state on March 9. On March 15, Musk applied to merge those Nevada businesses with two of his existing companies: X Holdings with X Holdings Corp, and Twitter Inc with X Corp.
The merger was actually picked up by an anonymous SPAC trader last week, but with just 210 followers on the platform the trader’s Tweet, and Twitter’s demise, seem to have gone largely unnoticed until the court documents came to light:
Wait, Twitter soon to be X?
Merger filed with Twitter and X Corp and X being the survivor? pic.twitter.com/oNDkZufsHQ
— SpacTrader110 (@SpacTrader110) April 4, 2023
As the “successor in interest” to Twitter Inc, X Corp is now the defendant in Loomer’s suit. The court filing could shed some light on Musk’s cryptic tweeting of nothing but the letter “X” last week, shortly after it was made:
X — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2023
Musk had previously tweeted last year, as his takeover of Twitter took shape, that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
As for exactly what “the everything app” looks like, Musk hasn’t been generous with the specifics, although he has in the past spoken of his goal for a “blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like Twitter.”
Regarding when we might see X, we’re light on details here too. Musk has previously said he envisages the Twitter buyout accelerating X’s creation by three-to-five years, but also added the proviso “but I could be wrong.” Given that this is three-to-five years from an unspecified finishing point, which could be wrong, we probably can’t extract too much from that.
It’s the latest twist in the one-man-show that is Elon Musk’s ego, though at the rate Twitter appears to be disappearing down the plughole under new management we can’t be sure whether it’ll still be around for its owner to tweet about X’s arrival: Musk recently told employees the company was valued at just $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion Musk bought it for last year.
Twitter’s press office email account is currently set to autorespond to media enquiries with a poo emoji.
