Twitter Inc. has undergone a significant structural overhaul, according to a court filing submitted on April 4. The social media giant is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with right-wing activist Laura Loomer, as reported by Slate. Loomer is suing the company for violating federal racketeering laws after it banned her account in 2019. While Loomer's lawsuit is expected to fail, Twitter is still required to submit corporate disclosure statements as a defendant, which is how the company's recent changes came to light.
In the filing, Twitter announced that it "no longer exists" and has been merged into X Corp, which is now the defendant in the case. X Corp is identified as the "successor in interest" to Twitter Inc. and its parent corporation is X Holdings Corp.
The merger appears to have been on the mind of Elon Musk, who owns Twitter and X Holdings Corp, since he first purchased the social media company.
Additionally, in a mysterious tweet posted on Tuesday, Musk simply wrote this:
While details are yet to be confirmed, it appears that Twitter Inc. has indeed been taken over by X Corp.
In April 2022, Musk registered X Holdings I, II, and III in Delaware, three separate companies designed to facilitate his purchase of Twitter. According to the deal, Twitter would merge with X Holdings II but keep its name and general corporate structure while continuing to operate under Delaware law. X Holdings I would then serve as the merged entity's parent company, while X Holdings III would take on the $13 billion loan that a group of big banks provided Musk to help cover the $44 billion purchase.
However, the official structure after Musk's takeover was not to last. According to the Nevada Secretary of State's online business portal, Musk registered two new businesses in the state on March 9: X Holdings Corp. and X Corp. Then, on March 15, Musk applied to merge those Nevada businesses with two of his existing companies: X Holdings I with X Holdings Corp., and Twitter Inc. with X Corp. In the latter's case, the articles of the merger mandate that X Corp. fully acquire Twitter, which means that "Twitter Inc." no longer exists as a Delaware-based company. Now it's part of X Corp, whose parent company is the $2 million X Holdings Corp.
The structural overhaul was acknowledged in the Loomer case about three weeks after X Corp. was registered in Carson City, but there have been no updates in any other legal documents or announcements to the public. Currently, the company known as "Twitter Inc." is involved in a host of litigation, including a case against the country of India over censorship concerns, against vendors who claim Twitter is not paying them what they're owed, and against former Twitter employees who claim Musk violated labor laws when he fired them en masse last fall.
Elon Musk has a history of using the letter "X" in his business ventures, from his online bank X.com to Tesla's Model X car and SpaceX. The three X Holdings corporations and "Project X," the official SEC-recognized name for the Twitter purchase's $13 billion bank loan, also use the letter. After completing the Twitter takeover in October, Musk claimed that this purchase would "accelerate" the creation of an "everything app" that would be named after the letter X. Such a "super app," Musk has stated, could resemble something like China's WeChat, the combination messaging/social networking/payment app that boasts a billion users. Twitter's functions would play an important role in this app's development.