The SpaceX IPO prospectus offers a fascinating window into the spectacular death of Twitter

After months of anticipation, Elon Musk’s Space X finally made its S-1 financial filing and business prospectus public for all to see. The document, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), makes an ambitious case to investors that Space Exploration Technologies Corp.—yes, that’s the official name—is poised to build a future for humanity that will include cities on the moon and other planets. But perhaps unexpectedly, the prospectus also offers a fascinating autopsy of one of the internet’s most legendary brands. Buried within the revenue and profit figures for SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses is a by-the-numbers look into the spectacular death of Twitter, the social network that Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022. Musk, of course, has since changed the name to X, and while media outlets for a time took to putting “formerly Twitter” in parentheses whenever they’d cite the social network’s posts in news copy, that practice seems to have fallen out of favor. More recently, Musk folded X into xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, and even more recently, he merged xAI with SpaceX. It’s within this context—xAI is part of a loss-making AI unit within SpaceX—that we can now see limited financial disclosures related to the former Twitter. Here are a few things we’ve learned: Rebranding Twitter to X was costly From a sheer brand perspective, the decision to change Twitter’s name to X was at once perplexing and vexing. Twitter’s blue bird logo, after all, was once so recognizable that it could be easily identified the world over. By contrast, X is both unmemorable and unoriginal. Let’s leave aside for a second that it is already the name of a legendary 1980s punk band, it’s also a moniker that always requires additional context. Twitter, meanwhile, already had the authority of existence at the time when Musk purchased it. It had brand value, and when it became X in 2023, that rebrand was costly. While the SpaceX prospectus doesn