Elon Musk bringing headlines back to X, marking major U-turn

Elon Musk is bringing headlines back to news articles posted on X, marking a major U-turn for the platform’s billionaire owner.

Musk spearheaded the September policy change of removing headlines and texts from news article links posted on the platform in an effort to keep users on the site longer rather than clicking to outside content.

The move, which left news links just displaying an article’s lead image, was also aimed at allowing more space for posts to appear on each user’s timeline, reducing clickbait and encouraging more users to sign up as subscribers.

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However, the decision was met with widespread derision, particularly from journalists who know newsrooms rely on strong headlines to grab readers’ attention and drive traffic to their websites. 

Musk took to X late on Wednesday to announce his about-face.

“In an upcoming release, 𝕏 will overlay title in the upper [portion] of the image of a URL card,” Musk wrote.

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He did not elaborate on why he had decided to reverse course, or when the latest change would be implemented.

X users appeared to be happy about the move while replying to Musk’s post.

“Please stop fixing things that aren’t broken so that then they need to be fixed when you break them,” one user wrote, although not everyone was impressed.

“I actually enjoy the current state, not having to read bu****it misleading headlines, wrote another. “Forces the post author to put more effort into describing the article.”

The removal of headlines is just one of a number of sweeping changes Musk has made to the platform since taking ownership last year, as he pitches X as a more relevant platform for content creators. 

For instance, premium subscribers can now post longer videos, their posts are shown higher up, and they also receive a cut of ad sales.

The eccentric billionaire, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, changed the name of Twitter Inc. to X Corp. earlier this year and swapped out its iconic bird logo for an “X” Logo. 

Musk said he wants to transform the app into an “everything app” by adding banking and money transfer services, as well as a dating site to the platform.   

The value of the social media platform has declined over the past year since Musk’s group of investors bought it for $44 billion and took the company private.

X employees were offered new stock options viewed by Fortune that valued the company at $19 billion. That’s down slightly from the roughly $20 billion it was worth in March, a figure that was reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Chris Pandolfo and Landon Mion contributed to his report.