October 2020 began with a surprise.

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, is the social media platform that many of its users love to hate.

For communicators, marketers, and media professionals, this research is a roadmap for navigating the future of digital storytelling.

While many are quick to dismiss this move as another quirk of Musk's eccentricity, it is essential to recognize that he operates on an entirely different level – playing chess while we are stuck playing checkers.

Elon Musk this week ended his destructive charade as the owner and operator of Twitter not by ceding operational control to someone more capable or by admitting his vision for the product is completely unworkable, but instead by just killing it entirely.

If we take Musk and Linda Yaccarino, X’s CEO, at face value, it is the latest in a line of decisions to unburden Twitter from the weight of its past, “move at the speed of light”, and take a new direction.

The OG social media company saw an opportunity to unseat the app that always seemed to be cooler and more influential, though Facebook and Instagram both dwarf Twitter in terms of users.

Cable news political broadcasters are arguably the primary user of “inside baseball,” terminology, the most recent major example being on May 24, when an overload of twitter users made the site crash, derailing Gov. Ron DeSantis’s announcement that he was officially running for president.