• Twitter Inc. has merged with Elon Musk’s X Corp meaning that Twitter Inc. no longer exists, technically speaking.
• This information was revealed in a court filing and hasn’t been officially announced.
• Meanwhile, Elon Musk picked a fight with Substack claiming without evidence that the platform was siphoning Twitter’s data for its Notes platform.

The entity known as Twitter, that is to say, Twitter Inc. no longer exists. Before we dive into the details, we doubt that the entity no longer existing will have any sort of material impact on the platform. Well, in the short term at least.

The company that operates the social media platform has now merged with Elon Musk’s X Corp per a court filing. The court filing spotted by Slate at the weekend is in connection with a lawsuit filed by Laura Loomer. As part of that suit, Twitter Inc must submit corporate disclosure statements to the court and the swallowing of Twitter Inc by X Corp is part of the latest filing.

Despite this, Twitter is still known as Twitter and its owner hasn’t made a grand announcement of a change in name or indeed any mention of the merger.

Musk has, in the past, said that he sees Twitter as part of his “everything app” X which is meant to be a Western equivalent of China’s WeChat which encompasses social media, payment platforms and video sharing among other functions.

In order for X to be successful though it needs to be a place people want to go and Musk spent much of Easter weekend alienating folks.

Beefing with bloggers

At the weekend, bloggers discovered that Substack links shared on Twitter were being limited.

After denying that Substack links were being blocked, Musk early this morning admitted, “Substack was temporarily categorized as ‘unsafe’ when we discovered that they were illegally downloading vast amounts of data to pre-populate their Twitter clone.”

Substack has denied that it is downloading “vast amounts of data” as per Musk’s claim and several Twitter users have been quick to point out how ludicrous that claim is especially with no evidence to back it up.

What seems to have happened, from our perspective at least is that the announcement of Notes by Substack along with it’s made for purpose platform for writers, scared Musk. While the billionaire wants Twitter to be the prime destination for content creators, it lacks any sort of features or benefits for that purpose.

Sure, you can pen a 4 000 character blog on Twitter, but why would you when there is no way to monetise that content?

This mess caused one of Musk’s most ardent supporters and author of the Twitter Files Matt Taibbi to announce his departure from Twitter and we suspect more will follow suit. This prompted a digital tussle with Musk and Taibbi which ultimately saw Musk posting DMs between himself and the writer before deleting them.

If Musk isn’t careful, his everything app will be a ghost town before he’s able to announce it.

[Image – CC BY 2.0 Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection]