Key takeout
Elon Musk has the talent to attract attention on social media. Can he do the same thing, even the once popular social video app, now undeprecated? We may know.
On Thursday morning, Tech Stalwart, CEO of Tesla (TSLA) posted to X, “We’re getting Vine back, but in the form of AI.” That 8-word post – he hasn’t explained in detail yet, but he has driven away the whirlwind of speculation. This post has produced thousands of interactions about X and possibly contributed to the price rotation of Memecoin Vine (Vineusd).
It wasn’t immediately clear what would happen next with Vine, what the 6-second video app that was cancelled in January 2017, or what “AI Form” meant. X did not respond to Investopedia’s request for details on Vine, which was reported for just $30 million since its creation in October 2012 by the then-Jack Dorsey Twitter.
The looped short video app showed promise, but Twitter said in 2016 it would be removed amid a wider restructuring. No official explanation was provided, but the shutdown was attributed to the rise of rival social media platforms Instagram and Snapchat.
“We didn’t build the right features in time,” and “we didn’t help creators monetize,” said Rus Yusupov, co-founder of Vine, in 2022.
Musk previously floated a grape revival. A few days after confirming the acquisition of Twitter in 2022, he launched “Bring Back Vine?” The polls have received overwhelming support. Axios reported that Musk’s team is “working on a reboot of Vine” by the end of that year. And earlier this year, Musk said he was “examined” that he brought back the vines as a ban on Tiktok.
Having had over 200 million active users at its peak, Vine will have Tiktok and Meta Platform (Meta) reels if it revives and competes with other established looped video products.
That said, masks have a trick to throwing people for the loop.
