No one really knew what Elon was up to when he first bought twitter. Many speculated it as a dumb move and one that's costing him boat loads of money.
Twitter only recently became profitable in 2018 and 2019 but then fell sharply in expenses in 2020 but ended up starting to figure out things in 2021. After that point Elon bought twitter and then later transformed it into X.
It was at that point that people started to realize the grand plan for this all creating the "everything app" and one that would be out of the reach of investors as the company is no longer publicly traded. And I'll be honest with you that to me was a smart move even though it was an expensive one. Going public has always destroyed companies. Making the applications worse and worse for it's end user as the only focus then becomes profits, profits and more profits trying to squeeze every little drop out of its users. This creates a horrible user experience which eventually catches up with you as your business continues to decline.
Since the take over however we have seen some advertisers leave but still revenue still seems to be rather steady and even though Elon is now charging a small monthly fee many are happy to be paying it.
The userbase as grown to over 540 million as of Q2 of 2023 however a lot of this information is not longer reported as it's not required since the company is not publicly traded and has to answer to investors.
Shaping The Everything App
Twitter now known as X already has a social aspect to it covering short form, long form and video uploads. The next few phases seem to now be live streaming and a payment system. This makes sense as X would be able to provide live tipping via their own payment platform and collect a small fee on every donation that comes in. Unlike other platforms such as Youtube and Twitch that rely on 3rd party payment provides and thus try to take a massive cut of the donation. Twitch and Youtube take 30% of all donations in super chat/hype chat which is whopping along with their subs.
Perhaps X would be able to offer something better housing everything themselves which could allow X to offer better terms to their content creators.
During the live stream Elon did touch base a bit on the live streaming saying...
“I think the very specialist apps are still gonna be probably better than us in a lot of ways, but you know, I think we can be the best generalist app. There’s some value to being a generalist app for, I guess, discovery and for interacting with the largest number of people in the world.”
It's unclear still as to how subscriptions would work or crypto or if either would even exist through the live streaming aspect. The everything app still feels like a fun case in which new things are being tested all of the time to figure out if they would work or not.
Personally for myself I've seen many companies try to do "everything" and they lose focus on what made them successful in the first place. This causes hyper expenses and a very unprofitable business for a few reasons. The first being the loss of focus on what made you successful in the first place. That part of the site or app slowly dies as attention is taken away from it. The second is trying to fix or update one thing often causes breaks in other parts of the application.
That's why if you're going to build a so called everything app each still needs or should be separate from each other and if they need to connect they connect in VERY clear spots which can be tested quickly before rolling it out.
The nice thing about all of this is we are seeing first hand a multi billion dollar person try to build an everything app and seeing the faults and successes it does have. If anything this is a MAJOR learning point for other applications and businesses.