Musk and Zuckerberg should cage fight over whose rebrand is worse

Mark Zuckerberg’s best fortune is Elon Musk. As Musk rebrands Twitter to X, Facebook’s Meta rebrand seems less bad.

Zuckerberg can lift weights now, but he needs to help Meta recover from a rough few years. After rebranding to Meta in 2021, Facebook spent $13.7 billion on VR and AR in 2022, but social VR apps like Horizon Worlds remain unpopular.

Zuckerberg was the internet’s most hated. He testified before the Senate about Facebook’s blatant data breach, a social media executive’s worst nightmare. We laughed at his love of “smoking meats” and Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. When he renamed his company Meta and quadrupled down on the bet that we all want to wear VR headsets all day, we questioned our reality.

Musk, FRS, saves Zuckerberg. Worse than investing $13.7 billion in something no one wants to pay for? Spending $44 billion on something nobody wants. Zuckerberg’s cage fight training has made him buff, so some people want him. Mark, even Meta’s stock is rising!

Musk and Zuckerberg have seemed somewhat serious about cage fighting each other at the Roman Colosseum (personally, I want this fight to happen because one TechCrunch manager has jokingly agreed to send me to Italy to cover the match, but isn’t there a little truth to every joke?). Which corporate branding is worse, Meta or X?

Musk renamed “Birdwatch” to “Community Notes” because Twitter was liberal with birds. However, this brand overhaul was planned. Musk has made so many bad business decisions at Twitter (or is it X now?) that some believe he is trying to destroy it for fun. I disagree, though. Musk’s first big company was x.com, which he is now redirecting to Twitter. For a company that facilitates online payments, renaming it to PayPal makes sense. Musk bought Twitter to make it “X, the everything app,” and he calls his toddler X instead of his full name, X ^ A-12. He already has SpaceX (get it? X?) and just announced xAI, another company he is apparently building.

And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023

“There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation,” tweeted (or X-ed?) CEO Linda Yaccarino. “X will deliver…everything.”

Facebook’s Meta name change was mocked, but it makes sense. Facebook is one of Meta’s apps, but it’s not more important than WhatsApp or Instagram. Threads, Musk’s kryptonite. Even though Meta is a stupid name for a metaverse no one wants, it’s nice to easily distinguish between Facebook the platform and Facebook the company. Since Google has expanded beyond search, it rebranded to Alphabet. However, X is a preemptive rebrand that assumes Twitter will soon host a family of apps like Meta, which do not yet exist. If Musk develops payments, texting, gaming, or whatever, is X a good name?

Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023

We associate X with the close button on computers. User retention suffers. XXX is shorthand for pornography, but Musk could use that to make Twitter profitable (advertisers left anyway!). However, users have noted that Twitter videos may soon be called “X videos,” after a porn site. Twitter’s new logo may be doomed since it resembles a Unicode X character, making it hard to copyright. Twitter’s new logo didn’t even have a scalable vector file when projected on the side of its San Francisco HQ.

Musk-Zuck is here. It’s not as thrilling as a duel in the world’s most famous arena. Bad choices battle.