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Elon Musk hints that he could start his own social media platform

Anita George
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There could be an alternate ending to the whole Elon Musk Twitter takeover saga. Another Musk-helmed social media platform could be on the horizon if he’s allowed to back out of his bid to purchase Twitter.

On Tuesday, among a series of reply tweets to questions about Musk’s Twitter bid and his recent selling of Tesla stock, one particular reply tweet of his seemed to indicate that the Tesla CEO might very well just start his own social media platform if the Twitter deal falls through:

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https://t.co/bOUOejO16Y

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2022

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Now, beyond his pithy “X.com” tweet, we don’t know much more than that about this possible social media platform. This tweet mainly seems to indicate that if Twitter is unable to force Musk to purchase the bird app, he’d still be interested in owning a social media platform. And that platform could be an entirely new one with X.com as its domain.

While we don’t know much else about this possible platform, we do know a few things about the domain Musk mentioned. As Gizmodo notes, X.com is a domain that Musk already owns. X.com began as an online bank that Musk co-founded in 1999 and then it “merged with a competitor in 2000.” In 2017, Musk then repurchased the domain from Paypal. If you visit the X.com website, you’ll only see a plain, white background with a small “x” in the top left corner.

And if this is a social media platform Musk intends to build from scratch, then we might have some clues as to what an X.com platform could look like because we know what Musk has hinted at wanting for the bird app, back when he still wanted to purchase it. Generally speaking, we could see less restrictive content moderation, encrypted messaging, and a push for authenticating accounts (verifying that they belong to humans and aren’t bots).

All of this is still up in the air though, until we know the outcome of Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk, in which Twitter intends to force Musk to go through with his acquisition of Twitter.

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Anita George
Anita George
Computing Writer
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
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