X Platform owner Elon Musk and company CEO Linda Yaccarino said on Thursday that they view YouTube and LinkedIn as future competitors while pursuing new lines of business in video and recruiting, according to people familiar with the matter. Sources said X held an all-hands meeting on Thursday to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Musk's acquisition of Twitter.
At the meeting, Musk and Yacarino mentioned the two sites. The two also mentioned an ambition to create a news service called XWire that would compete with Cision's PR Newswire, the person said. The person asked not to be named because the discussions are private.
The meeting was the first time Musk and Yaccarino addressed the entire company together, the person said. Yacarino was hired as X's CEO in May after overseeing advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal.
On October 27, 2022, Musk completed a $44 billion deal to privatize Twitter. He quickly fired most of the social platform's top executives and laid off much of its staff. Advertisers are fleeing the platform and saying they don’t want to come back. Both Musk and Yaccarino have boasted that people are spending record time on the platform and that it has 500 million users — although some third-party estimates indicate that the number of people logging in is down from this time last year.
It's unclear what X's competitors to YouTube, LinkedIn and PR Newswire will look like, and executives have offered few details.
In a joint internal memo sent to X employees, Musk and Yacarino said the company is "now in a growth phase" and said the platform has "completed a decade of innovation in just 12 months."
In conversations with employees, the two executives also discussed X's payments ambitions, adding in the memo that the financial tools will "bring more opportunity to people and businesses."