In May, Elon Musk presided over an uncharacteristically subtle tweak to Twitter’s home page. For years, the prompt in the text box at the top of the page read, “What’s happening?,” a friendly invitation for users to share their thoughts. Eight months after the billionaire’s takeover, Twitter changed the prompt ever so slightly to match the puzzling, chaotic nature of the platform under the new regime: “What’s happening?” became “What is happening?!”

This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.

I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.” (Even with its new name, the site is pretty much the same as ever; the blue bird logo in the left-hand corner of the website is now a black X, and … that’s about it.) This X boondoggle may simply be the flailing of a man who doesn’t want to own his social network and was pressured via lawsuit to buy it, but Musk and the Twitter (X?) CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would like you to believe that much bigger things are coming.

1. Musk wants to build the “Internet of Elon.”

The first theory requires taking Musk’s ambitions somewhat seriously. In a tweet last October, he declared that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Versions of these “super apps” already exist and are popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so we know what this means: X would function as a holistic platform that includes payment processing and banking, ride-sharing, news, communication with friends, and loads and loads of commerce. Think of it as the internet, but without leaving Musk’s walled garden. In a leaked recording of a Twitter town hall back in June 2022, Musk hinted that China’s WeChat was a model of sorts for X. “There’s no WeChat movement outside of China,” he said. “And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”

If you squint, you can see the logic. Plenty of people across Twitter—influencers, freelancers, small-business owners—use the platform to sell things. Many of these people use various “link in bio” pages to direct people to their work and receive payment. X, the theoretical everything app, could streamline and consolidate these exchanges, and, like WeChat, generate revenue from them. Musk has already launched a program to share ad revenue with some of Twitter’s larger “creator” accounts, the early beneficiaries of which included many prominent right-wing shock jocks. And if he could manage to get hundreds of millions of people to live and shop and bank on his app, instead of, say, shitpost memes and argue politics with white nationalists, that would be an immense success.

To do that, X would need to build out an advanced, secure payment platform; apply the appropriate regulatory licenses to legally process payments and store money; and, of course, recruit businesses and financial institutions to use the platform. According to the Financial Times, the company began filing applications for those licenses early this year and has been at work building parts of a payment infrastructure. The bad news is that the person Musk tasked with spearheading the project was laid off—along with about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce.

[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Musk does have experience in the payments business. He founded an online bank—also called X.com—in 1999, and it shortly thereafter merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Perhaps this would give his super-app idea some credibility, if not for Musk having spent the past 15 months blundering through his latest business venture in full view of the public. He has alienated advertisers with his reactionary and conspiratorial political opinions, sent the company deep into debt, and, at times, rendered the platform unusable by limiting how many tweets users can see. The platform appears to be shrinking under Musk’s leadership, according to third-party traffic data. Spam is rampant, and the most satisfied users seem to be previously banned racists and anti-Semites who have regained access to their megaphone.

It’s already a hard sell for Musk to convince people that his sputtering platform is the best place for posting Barbenheimer memes, let alone the right home for … everything, including our money. But the cognitive dissonance between Musk’s reputational hemorrhaging and his grand ambitions is easier to bridge when you consider the second way to explain X, which is that it’s a desperate shot in the dark.

2. X is pseudoware—just buzzwords and a logo.

Unlike Facebook’s pivot to Meta, which was oriented around a real (though flawed and unappealing) virtual-reality product, X is a rebrand built on little more than a vague collection of buzzwords cobbled together to form a complete sentence. On Sunday, Yaccarino described the forthcoming app as “the future state of unlimited interactivity” that is “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” She also noted that, “powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” (Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment.)

Her tweet is a near-perfect example of business-dude lorem ipsum—corporate gibberish that sounds superficially intelligent but is actually obfuscating. What is “unlimited interactivity?” How will X be “powered by AI”? Does she mean generative AI like ChatGPT or standard algorithms of the sort that have powered Twitter’s “For you” feed for years? The particulars are irrelevant: The words just need to sound like something when strung together.

Musk, too, is guilty of such blabber. He has argued that his hypothetical project, if built correctly, could “become half of the global financial system.” This is the empty language of a dilettante, the equivalent of me telling you that this article, if written correctly, is on pace to win the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, or that I am the executive wordsmith for The Atlantic’s Words About Computers section.

Musk’s and Yaccarino’s descriptions of X don’t just suggest vaporware, an industry term for a hyped-up product that never materializes. They feel like something else, too: I’d call it pseudoware. Like a pseudo-event, pseudoware masquerades as something newsworthy, even though it is not. Yaccarino’s Mad Libs–ian tweetstorm is the press release for this pseudo-event: big talk for a pivot that has so far manifested in ornamental changes. Musk’s first orders of business have been to adopt a new logo and to project it in conference rooms at headquarters. When Yaccarino tweeted that “X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” I take her at her word: No one seems to have spent much time thinking about any of this.

It’s natural to wonder why the world’s richest man would spend his time dismantling one of the world’s most recognizable social-media brands in favor of an inscrutable super app nobody asked for. He could, at any moment, jet off to a private island and drink bottomless piña coladas while giggling about Dogecoin instead! Herein lies the third and most important explanation for X, which is that it is a reputational line of credit for Musk.

3. Musk needs to save face.

Musk’s reputation is dependent on people believing that he can gin up new categories of industry and see around corners to build futuristic stuff. His $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was marketed with a visionary framework: Musk would realize Twitter’s dreams of being a truly global town square and solve the intractable problems of free speech at scale. Having failed at that, Musk is, in essence, going back to basics with X—it’s an opportunity to remake the internet in his own image.

[Read: Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time]

As Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin pointed out, Musk’s original X.com brand was a total failure. He was obsessed with the name and the web address, but consumers, not illogically, associated the brand with adult-entertainment sites. Musk was ousted by X.com’s board after the merger in 2000, a year before the service was renamed PayPal, but the payment company remains an important part of his legacy. X, then, is a callback to a younger version of the entrepreneur—one who is associated with success, products that work, and generous investor returns. It also represents unfinished business and a chance to rewrite an earlier phase of his career.

In this sense, X is less a brilliant vision than it is an act of desperation. Musk is behaving much like a start-up with an unsustainable burn rate—he needs a cash injection. And in order to raise some reputational capital, he needs a good idea, one that seems plausible and scalable. X checks all the boxes for such an idea. Its ambitions are so vague as to be boundless, which signals perpetual growth and moneymaking—it is, quite literally, the everything app. In this way, X is an inkblot test for anyone who still wants to believe in Musk: Squint the right way and X takes on the form of whatever hopes and dreams that person has for the future of the internet. This is the fleeting genius of pseudoware: The best feature of marketing an app for everything is that you can get away with saying mostly nothing.

But just how many people still have unwavering faith in Musk is an open question. How many people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the man who can’t pay his rents and server bills on time? Who is going to help build this technological behemoth for the man who fired the majority of his company and allegedly owes $500 million in severance payments? And, perhaps most important, who is excited about what Musk is focusing his time, energy, and money on?

Even though X wants to be big, a WeChat clone is conceptually small in comparison with the projects that have allowed Musk to market himself as a savant: space exploration, rewiring the human brain, revolutionizing transportation to save the Earth. The most cynical view of X is that the people who still respect Musk are reactionaries who delight only when their enemies have been gleefully trolled. Perhaps, then, Musk’s dismantling of the social network is a success, so long as it makes the right people miserable. Left with few options, Musk has decided to mortgage the Twitter brand to save his own. Even by his standards, it’s a risky bet.

In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly dimmed and been replaced by an existential hangover of the first order.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

The most gutting stretch of Christopher Nolan’s new Oppenheimer biopic occurs when the great scientist, played by Cillian Murphy, begins to experience the disenchantment that would haunt him for the rest of his life. As he watches two bombs rumble away on trucks from his desert lab toward Japan, any illusion that their terrible power is under his control is punctured. Hiroshima was bombed three weeks after the Trinity test. In the film, a sickened Oppenheimer averts his gaze from photos of its disfigured victims. Like Nolan’s camera, he cannot bear to look.

Oppenheimer would later say that through the bomb, physicists had come to know sin. Having plucked a dangerous fruit from the tree of knowledge, they consigned themselves—and all of humanity—to a fallen world, tormented by the constant possibility of self-extinction. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Oppenheimer consoled, or perhaps deceived, himself that his invention’s apocalyptic potential could and would be contained, in part through his efforts.

Oppenheimer had reason to believe in his influence. The public had embraced his personal legend: Inflamed by a fear of a nuclear-armed Hitler, he had ventured into the invisible realm of atoms and returned with a tremendous power, capable of stopping a war cold and returning sons to their mothers. Honors were heaped upon him. In Nolan’s film, we watch as Oppenheimer is courted for a plush role: director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the academic home of Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer also chaired the committee tasked with advising the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. During the latter half of the 1940s, his pronouncements on matters of science had a singular gravitas. “Certainly he knows as much about the potential of atomic energy as any living American,” reads an editor’s note atop his essay for The Atlantic.

What did he do with this outsize voice? He opposed the development of a much more powerful, second-generation atom weapon—the hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the “super”—in part because he was concerned it would accelerate an arms race with the Soviet Union. He also lent his prestige and credibility to ongoing efforts to avoid that arms race altogether. He helped draft the proposals that evolved into the Baruch Plan, an arms-control regime that the United States put before the United Nations. Under the latter’s direction, all countries would forfeit their atomic-weapons programs, and atomic energy would be a global collective good, administered by a centralized regulatory body at the UN, over which no country would enjoy a veto.

[Read: We have no nuclear strategy]

After the final failure of these proposals at the UN, in 1948, Oppenheimer turned, as one does, to The Atlantic. His essay is a fascinating historical artifact and act of public grief. Titled “The Open Mind,” it lays out Oppenheimer’s account of the back-and-forth over arms-control proposals. Soviet leaders had voted against them, but their response had not been wholly negative. They agreed that all countries should dismantle their atomic-weapons programs and that atomic energy should fall under international oversight. But they objected, perhaps understandably, to America’s insistence on keeping its weapons program running until the new system was functional. They wanted President Harry Truman to disarm first, a condition that he could not abide.

During the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s powers of foresight had failed him. However accurate his calculations concerning the innards of the atom, he’d misjudged what would happen geopolitically after he and his colleagues wrenched it apart. Out of naivete, or the expedient blindness of ambition, or some combination of the two, he may have believed that he could stop its further use after the Nazis had been defeated, or that the terrifying spectacle of the bomb would eventually lead to a renunciation of ever larger weapons and wars.

In 1949, he understood that no such renunciation was in store. “We see no clear course before us that would persuade the governments of the world to join with us” in atomic disarmament, he wrote. This time, the implications were obvious, and they implicated America, which, as Oppenheimer laments, “responded by adopting some of the very measures that we had hoped might be universally renounced.” The mass manufacture of the atomic bomb was under way and American scientists had clear orders to put the new physics in service of even more destructive weapons.

Oppenheimer saw a cosmically bleak arms race taking shape, and this time his  foresight proved accurate. Within months, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and only three years later, in 1952, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb roughly 500 times as powerful as the one that had largely destroyed Nagasaki. The Soviets followed suit a few years later, and by the time of Oppenheimer’s death, in 1967, the two countries had nearly 40,000 nuclear weapons between them, many of them set on a hair trigger.

[Read: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes]

Oppenheimer knew that he’d helped to conjure this world into existence. He sought to prepare our readers for its horrors. In the main, his advice was to not lose hope, and to remember that our imagination of the future is limited. Oppenheimer was perhaps heartened by the quantum world, shot through as it is with uncertainty, that had captivated him in his youth. He seemed to draw strength from a belief that the macro world of human affairs is likewise contingent, such that nothing about our fate is ever settled.

Oppenheimer quotes from a speech that Abraham Lincoln gave in Baltimore three years into the Civil War. At the beginning of that conflict, few expected that “domestic slavery would be much affected,” Lincoln said, and yet it had been. Reality is unpredictable; it will surprise you. Lincoln reminded Oppenheimer that surprises swing both ways. A world that appears to be fallen can sometimes veer toward moral progress.

We have seen such swerves before, even in the nuclear realm. By the 1980s, enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons appeared to be a fact of life on planet Earth. In 1986, the Soviet Union’s stockpile reached an all-time high of about 40,000 warheads, and the United States had more than 20,000. Very few people imagined that the end of the Cold War was imminent. Nor could many have guessed that in 1991, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev would sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first in an extraordinary sequence of agreements that shrank the two countries’ arsenals to less than a quarter of their previous size.

Bush and Gorbachev were wise to seize the day, because that era’s peace—and its clean two-party strategic symmetry—proved ephemeral. The specter of nuclear annihilation has since returned with force to the global collective psyche. Vladimir Putin has invoked it in speeches about his invasion of Ukraine. China has built up an arsenal that may be large enough to destroy every major American city.

[Read: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

As Oppenheimer well understood, there is no technological reason that world-threatening stockpiles of nuclear weapons will not be with us for hundreds of thousands of years. To keep large numbers of them in place for that long, in a strategic setting where any small exchange could very easily become a large one, is to play a fool’s game. No one should feel safe because seven decades have passed without another incident of nuclear warfare; that sample size is too small.

Beyond advising hope, Oppenheimer didn’t offer much guidance as to how we might dismantle the sword of Damocles that he helped to string up above human civilization. A notorious dandy and eloquent impromptu speaker, he was always drawn to style; in his Atlantic essay, he invokes it in a higher form. “It is style,” he wrote, “which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light.”

The problem Oppenheimer had in mind was arms control. He asked that those who negotiate on America’s behalf carry out their work in a spirit of openness. He asked that they appeal to the reasoning minds of those who sit across the table. He appears to have believed—or to have wanted to believe—that a widespread adoption of this style might be enough to set into motion a new evolutionary step in geopolitics, through which the world’s major powers might come to a shared understanding that peace is the highest wisdom. To this end, he counseled patience. Time and nature must be allowed to do their work, he noted. Seven decades on, it looks to be slow work indeed.