Elon Musk Says Vine is Coming Back… in AI Form

Elon Musk says that he plans to bring back Vine, the short-form video-based social media platform that was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and then shut down by its parent company in 2017.

Vine’s death wasn’t short and sweet, either. Its slow fade away actually started in late 2016 when Twitter took down the mobile app and disabled uploads to the platform. It kept existing content viewable for a few more months before fully pulling the plug on January 17, 2017.

While TikTok and Instagram Reels have reignited the popularity of short-form video, Vine (and to a lesser degree Snapchat) came before and attempted to popularize the format. After being acquired by Twitter just a few months after it was founded, Vine launched an iOS app in 2013 and quickly followed it with a Windows and Android version. The concept was simple: Vine hosted quick, six-second videos that could easily be shared on other social networks (at the time, Twitter and Facebook were the main platforms for sharing), and the app itself was not only used to upload content but could also be used to browse uploaded videos and find creators.

Vine was incredibly popular with 200 million active users near the end of its life cycle. Twitter, unfortunately, did not know how to effectively monetize it and, therefore, couldn’t pay its creators to stick around on the platform. Once Vine went under, many creators it fostered moved to competitor platforms, including YouTube, despite it not offering nearly the same kind of content. TikTok jumped in popularity a couple of years after Vine’s demise, eventually skyrocketing to become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms just a few years later.

Many argue Vine could have had that level of success, but Twitter’s mismanagement doomed it.

This week, though, Elon Musk announced he was going to bring Vine back… “but in AI form.” Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter, didn’t offer any further explanations of what that might look like, nor what that even means. Additionally, Musk has repeatedly shown a penchant for over-promising and under-delivering, or at the very least embellishing the truth. That said, given his fascination with AI — including making an anime girlfriend powered by Grok — it isn’t a stretch to believe he would try to make a short-form video app that was driven by the same technology.