Musk’s X Grabs Another Handle

There’s a way of the world and then there’s Elon Musk’s way. Ever since he shopped for Twitter paying $44 billion, the man has been acting in a sort of bull-in-the-china-shop fashion. He removed all the legacy brand images of the microblogging site, took over the X handle without the owner’s permission and changed several rules along the way. 

Twitter fans saw red when Musk’s company took away the specific X handle belonging to Gene X Hwang of Orange photography one fine morning. Following a backlash they sent him a note offering everything but money, which further irritated the social media world with Reddit going berserk around the time this played out. 

However, if you thought that was the end of it, there’s more of the Muskian ways coming. The company has now taken over the @music social handle owned by Jeremy Vaught, a software developer who grew his follower count to about half a million. “16 years ago, I created @music and have been running it ever since. Just now, Twitter/X just ripped it away. Super pissed,” he wrote on X while sharing a screenshot of the email they’d sent him informing of the change. 

The email that Vaught received was quite cryptic. “The user handle associated with account @music will be affiliated with X Corp. Accordingly your user handle will be changed to a new user handle,” the mail said. Of course, they offered to transfer his data, including followers and lists to a new account of his choice. 

The manner in which Musk’s team has decimated Twitter, there seems a tinge of viciousness to the entire exercise. Not only did they take down the blue bird that represented Twitter from the building, they also renamed other Twitter accounts and products. TweetDeck became XPro, Space became XSpaces, Business became XBusiness to the point the CEO is now @lindayaX. 

The latest effort seems more cryptic than the first one where the Musk team offered Gene X Hwang some merchandise and a visit to their offices. This time round it’s just the regular stuff and the option of choosing a handle that can never be the same as the one Vaught had acquired and ran diligently for a decade-and-half. 

Moving on from the manner in which Team Musk reacted, it’s worth trying to figure out why they went after the particular handle. It is obvious that X wants to play host to artists and musicians, an idea that Twitter had tried previously and failed. Wonder how many recall the debut of #Music app in 2013, an idea from We Are Hunted, whom Twitter had acquired a year earlier. 

The app got users’ music from partners such as ITunes and Spotify and combined it with Twitter data through their followers and made recommendations. In spite of representing a good social music discovery option and recommendation engine, Twitter had shut it down in 2014. Now it looks like Musk believes he can win where Jack Dorsey lost. 

By the looks of it, the @twittermusic handle used by the earlier app has gotten its data moved to @music, which suddenly boasts of 11.5 million followers. Of course, there seems to be things that aren’t clear yet as this account tells us that it was created in 2011, while Vaught had it back in 2007 and @Music app came even before. 

We poked around the @music handle and found tweets of musicians and their work that included YouTube videos. That X Corp has taken the bait once again is quite clear by the “hostile takeover” of the account handle though where it’s gonna lead will only come out later. Since X had opened its revenue-sharing mechanism with creators last month, we’re confident that this could just signal more of the same. 

Another indicator is the company’s decision to allow subscribers to upload two-hour videos on its service – something Apple leveraged by releasing an entire episode of “Silo” on it. News host Tucker Carlson too has been actively posting lengthy videos. Maybe, it’s time for musicians to carry forward this tradition and earn some more.