Elon Musk wants to turn X into a LinkedIn competitor

The social media platform formerly known has Twitter has undergone a multitude of changes in the one year since Elon Musk bought it for a reported $44 billion, including a sudden and unexpected name change to ‘X.’ Despite the initial concerns over Musk’s erratic policies, the site has reportedly seen an increase in user engagement over the past year, and major advertisers that ditched the platform in droves just a few months earlier, are said to be returning in recent months.

With X seemingly getting back into some sort of stability, the company recently introduced a new hiring feature called ‘X Hiring’ that offers verified organizations an opportunity to post job listings on their profiles. With its LinkedIn competitor up and running, Musk is now going for the Microsoft-owned platform’s jugular in his own inimitable way. In a post earlier today, Musk described LinkedIn as “cringe” and claimed that he doesn’t use it at all, even to check out the resumes of candidates seeking employment in his companies. He also promised that unlike LinkedIn, the hiring feature in X will be “cool.”

X Hiring is currently in beta, and only available to companies that pay a $1,000 subscription fee per month. It is part of Musk’s plans to turn X into a so-called ‘everything app’ on the lines of WeChat, something that he has talked about on more than one occasion. Towards that end, the company has already rolled out new video features to compete with streaming platforms like YouTube, so a shot at LinkedIn’s position as the dominant professional social media application was probably always on the cards.

In its current avatar, however, the hiring feature on X is still very bare-bones and a long way away from being a true LinkedIn competitor. The being said, Musk seemingly has a method to his madness, and many of the unusual things he is trying on X are seemingly working out despite serious concerns from industry watchers. Now that X Hiring is up and running, only time will tell if it will gain traction and create a headache for Microsoft in the years ahead.