‘How about we just call it X?’: Elon Musk trolled over TikTok’s beloved new replacement

With TikTok’s days potentially numbered, companies are scrambling to fill the vacuum that the social media giant may leave behind. In the internet’s fight for a replacement, Elon Musk managed to catch a few strays.

Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote or just plain “RED” has stepped up to become a contender. The Chinese social media company has solidified itself as a potential refuge for the thousands of people soon to be displaced by the TikTok ban. But some users joking claim that Xiaohongshu is far too complicated a name. “How about we just call it X instead?” says one user already on Musk’s platform of the same name. Shots fired.

Elon Musk’s affinity for the letter X is infamous. The billionaire has attempted to bestow the one letter name on numerous companies he’s been affiliated with in the past, only to be shot down by… everyone else at the company. His first attempt to name a company X came in the early dot.com days, when he created X.com – which, yes, sounds like a porn site. Musk’s colleagues thought the same, and tried to convince him to use a name that sounded a little less like an innuendo. Eventually, the nays won out, and Musk and his colleagues changed X.com’s name to PayPal after merging with a competitor. Not willing to let his obsession with the alphabet’s 24th letter go, he tacked it on to the end of his rocket company SpaceX, and then was finally able fulfill his X-monikered company dreams after he purchased and gutted Twitter.

And yet, despite the $44 billion Musk spent to rename it, everyone still calls it Twitter. So maybe Xiaohongshu should rename itself to X after all?

It’s the perfect name, tbh.

Like the intro to Kingdom Hearts 1, “X” is simple and clean.

Such a good name. I can’t believe no one else thought of it before.

Worth every penny.

It’s the law of unindented consequences. TikTok gets burned, and now the internet intends to bully the richest man in the world into renaming the app he ruined.

Way ahead of you.

The funniest thing about all of this is that the United States is banning TikTok in order to curb China’s influence on the nation, and in response the internet is migrating to another Chinese app. There’s no way to stop it. The U.S. can keep banning apps and people will keep flocking to the next one that crops up. It’s like a social media hydra, cut off the head of one app and two more grow to take its place. It just goes to show that when it comes to the internet, the American government is woefully out of touch. Considering the average age of this nation’s geriatric legislative body, it’s no surprise. Maybe this will be the thing that convinces lawmakers to establish term limits? Like Musk’s hope that people would start calling Twitter X, it’s wishful thinking.