Since Elon Musk bought Twitter a year ago, he has blown it up to create something else entirely.
What is now called X is in the process of becoming “a single application that encompasses everything,” he recently told employees. Being the “digital town square,” as he has described Twitter in the past, isn’t enough. For X to succeed in Musk’s eyes, the platform needs to compete with YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and the entire banking industry.
“We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app,” Musk said during an internal X meeting on October 26th, which The Verge listened to and is publishing a full transcript of below. The meeting was timed to the anniversary of Musk officially buying Twitter for $44 billion and was his first joint all-hands with Linda Yaccarino, who joined as CEO in May.
Musk, who still oversees X’s product and engineering teams, did most of the talking during the 45-minute call. While the goal of the all-hands was partially to answer the questions that employees submitted ahead of time, he instead took the opportunity to pontificate on everything from sharing bad news in meetings to the state of journalism.
Turning Twitter into X has been a messy process so far. The company’s biggest advertisers have mostly fled over the past year, thanks to Musk’s antics; his X Premium subscription hasn’t caught on; the business is still not profitable; and its valuation is sinking.
Musk, however, projected optimism during the call last week, saying at one point: “I think this is the fastest rate of innovation maybe ever for any internet company.”
Here’s the full transcript of Musk and Yaccarino’s all-hands meeting with X employees on October 26th, lightly edited for clarity:
Linda Yaccarino: It’s our all-hands, and I want to say thank you to everyone on this call, and especially for everyone in acknowledging what we’ve been able to accomplish in what has been a remarkable first year since the acquisition. It would be absolutely impossible not to acknowledge all the hard work from everybody around the world who’s on this call, especially as we’ve had to come together since the terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel. Unspeakable times we’re living through. It has been 20 days since our teams have been working around the…