Amid his ongoing legal battle against Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk teased a potential social media site of his own as a competitor for Twitter. While responding to a question from one of his followers, Musk dropped a cryptic tweet, hinting at a potential new social media platform ‘X.com’.
On Tuesday, a social media user asked the billionaire tech tycoon whether he had given any thought to creating his own social platform.
Musk, who is quite active on Twitter, noticed the question and responded by just writing “X.com”.
X.com used to be the domain name of a startup Musk founded two decades ago, which he later merged with financial services company PayPal.
In fact, last week, Musk talked about the website during Tesla‘s annual shareholder meeting last week as well.
“I do sort of have a grander vision for what I thought X Corporation could have been back in the day. It’s a pretty grand vision and of course, that could be started from scratch but I think Twitter would accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk had reportedly said.
The tweet comes at a time when Musk is involved in a high-stakes legal battle with Twitter.
Twitter recently sued Musk after he decided to back out of the $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3.5 lakh crore) takeover deal. In April, Musk reached an acquisition agreement with Twitter at $54.20 (roughly Rs. 4,500) per share in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion.
However, Musk put the deal on hold in May to allow his team to review the veracity of Twitter’s claim that less than 5 percent of accounts on the platform are bots or spam.
Back in June, Musk had openly accused the microblogging website of breaching the merger agreement and threatened to walk away and call off the acquisition of the social media company for not providing the data he has requested on spam and fake accounts.
Musk alleged that Twitter is “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” as outlined by the deal, CNN reported, citing the letter he sent to Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde.
Musk demanded that Twitter turn over information about its testing methodologies to support its claims that bots and fake accounts constitute less than 5 percent of the platform’s active user base, a figure the company has consistently stated for years in boilerplate public disclosures.