Since Musk’s takeover last year, the billionaire is estimated to have fired around 4,400 of the company’s 5,500 contract workers. Credit: Shutterstock/ Larry Zhou.

YouTube and LinkedIn will become future competitors to social media platform X, formerly Twitter, owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino told staff on 27 October.

In a meeting with staff to celebrate one year since Musk’s tumultuous takeover of the platform, the two executives discussed the plans to shift X towards video and hiring.

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Yaccarino and Musk also discussed potential plans for a news wire service, XWire, in the same vein as Cision’s PR Newswire.

Since Musk’s $44bn takeover of the platform on 27 October last year, the billionaire is estimated to have fired around 4,400 of the company’s 5,500 contract workers, Platformer reported.

Yaccarino began as X’s chief executive on June 5 2023 and has made a concerted effort to lure back advertisers to the platform after many left in droves following Musk’s acquisition.

The CEO is likely to try and renegotiate multiple contracts with companies like Amazon, IBM and Salesforce, The Financial Times reported.

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The executives also floated the idea of X’s financial tools, with the rationale that payment tools will provide businesses with more opportunities on the platform.

Both Musk and Yaccarino provided little detail on what X’s version of YouTube and LinkedIn would look like.

YouTube and LinkedIn have both been investing in AI tools, with YouTube recently beginning testing on Dream Screen, an experimental feature that creates AI-generated video or image backgrounds based on text-based user input.

LinkedIn also announced multiple new AI features, many of which will be powered by ChatGPT maker OpenAI.