Given that Musk's obsession with the "X" moniker goes back to the 90s at least, I imagine it would be more accurate to say his son's name and this rebrand are both branches from the same tree (see: x.com -> paypal, SpaceX, Tesla model X)
The initially-too-high offer plus downturn in his stock value right after, meant a deal structure that damn-near doomed the company anyway (tons of debt).
Best-case (for him), Twitter as we knew it dies and he manages to turn the burnt-down ashes into something profitable enough to overcome that hurdle. Twitter per se cannot reasonably get out of the hole he's dug for it.
Though, arguably, the brand itself was a huge part of the value, and he just threw that in the trash.
You know a guy's going down a weird path when all defenses of his behavior amount to "I know the last twenty things he's done have looked insane and none of it's made any money, but he's got a secret genius plan, I swear! 5D chess!"
This would explain things, if there was a credible suggestion for who's pulling the strings.
The theory of Elop destroying Nokia (consumer) makes sense, because he was at Microsoft, went to Nokia sold it to Microsoft at diminished value and stayed there for a good amount of time. But who would pay Musk for this? And how will he be compensated? Afaik, he's lighting a bunch of his own money on fire. Although, there has been a lot less news from him on Tesla and SpaceX, so maybe it was all a plan to keep him out of those spaces.
I've seen theories about Saudis paying for this in order to prevent the next Arab Spring, in which Twitter played a key role for the protesters to organize themselves. Seems a bit far-fetched, but these days, who knows?
The US is already there, with an almost brain-dead 90-year old Senator being as good as gone, so that a privately-owned company doing whatever its largest owner thinks fit for the good of the company going forward doesn't even get close to that.
Does this have anything to do with the cage fight/dick measuring content with Zuckerberg? I think almost everybody thought renaming Facebook to Meta was a bad idea, but maybe Musk knows something we don’t. ;-)
When it first happened I thought they were trying to evade Facebook’s bad reputation for privacy and politics and made a point to keep calling it Facebook.
After about a year “Meta” had the same stink of death around it as NFTs and I figured I’d be doing it no favor by calling it by its preferred name.
[0] https://nitter.net/elonmusk