Elon Musk's bet-the-house, against-the-odds gamble on Twitter is about to get substantially riskier — with exponentially higher stakes.

• Why it matters: Musk is obsessed with killing the Twitter name and its reason for being, and transforming it into a merger of a moneyless marketplace + public square + video content factory — his everything vision for an everything app.

Fast forward one year: Twitter will no longer be Twitter, or even a simple platform for argument and information sharing. It will be X, a Musk-run social universe that pulls together 24 years of his ideas and wildest fantasies.

• In Musk's random tellings, it will be Twitter + Substack + YouTube + PayPal + Amazon + TikTok + WeChat + Baidu — all rolled into one universe marked by one letter: X.

🥊 Reality check: While Musk has been talking a good game about wanting to build new things on top of the old Twitter, in the nine months he has run the place, he has done little of that.

🔎 Behind the scenes: Walter Isaacson spent almost three years with Musk — sometimes for 12-hour stretches, day after day — for a stunningly detailed book, "Elon Musk," coming Sept. 12.

• Isaacson told me Musk has been plotting the X rebranding for more than nine months — since just before signing the paperwork to buy Twitter.

"He said it can be a trillion-dollar company — easily," Isaacson said. "This is an idea he has thought about for 25 years — a financial platform that helps anyone profit from creating content."

• "He feels it can transform journalism by offering an alternative to subscription models, where people can just make easy payments for whatever strikes their fancy."

In Isaacson's book, he reports that Musk told him two weeks before taking over Twitter in October that he was going to change the name to X.com.

• Musk has been obsessed with killing the bird logo since the day he first walked into Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, with Isaacson in tow.

"When he first walked in, it was like a hardscrabble cowboy walking into a Starbucks," Isaacson recalled. Conference rooms had names like Aviary, Tern, Bluebird, Canary and Mallard.

• Musk said: "There are too many birds here."

🐦 To many, the bird was witty and jaunty — a clever play on the company's name and function. To Musk, it was a sign that employees weren't thinking big enough, and didn't have a burning sense of mission.

• Isaacson describes Musk wandering the floors of his new company. "He pulled all the woke T-shirts out of the cabinets, and scoffed at the notion of psychologically safe workplaces," the author said. "It was like watching a movie on fast forward. ... I could see him getting more and more frustrated with the culture."
• Musk said: "We have to replace this with a maniacal sense of urgency."

On the first full day of the X rebranding, the bird-themed conference rooms had already been renamed to eXposure, eXult and s3Xy, the N.Y. Times reports.

• More on the book.

Replying to a tweet listing early names of now iconic companies (Netflix was originally Kibble), Elon Musk last night explained his thinking.

Some House Republicans privately expect a spending fight to trigger a government shutdown in October, with one member saying they "wouldn't be making any plans" for that month, Axios' Juliegrace Brufke reports.

• Why it matters: Speaker McCarthy's ranks include members who are skeptical he can pull off another survival move by the end of September — with worker furloughs and shuttered federal services at stake.

What's happening: House conservatives oppose the use of an "omnibus" to package all 12 must-pass appropriations bills together. But lawmakers are pessimistic about the odds of passing the bills individually by Sept. 30.

• Many of the House GOP appropriations bills are being loaded with measures on hot-button topics like abortion that could threaten passage — and make it harder to negotiate with the Democratic-controlled Senate.

🔎 Between the lines: Congress can extend the existing budget with a continuing resolution to give members more time to hash out a deal.

🔮 What's next: Short of an omnibus, talk of "minibuses" — which could link some of the 12 appropriations bills together without being a single big package — is emerging, despite resistance by conservatives to bundling bills.

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Record-breaking, deadly heat in the U.S. and Europe would have been "virtually impossible" in a world without human-driven climate change, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes from new data published today.

• Why it matters: The findings show society is more vulnerable than previously thought to relatively low levels of warming, compared to what could be coming.

With all-time heat records falling in North America, Europe and Asia, seven members of the international group of scientists known as World Weather Attribution examined the potential that human-caused climate change is shifting the likelihood and severity of heat waves.

• Without climate change, the study finds, China's heat wave would have been a 1-in-250-year event. But now, such an event has a 20% chance of occurring in any given year.

Read the 21-page report ... Share this story.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy last night raised the possibility of an "impeachment inquiry" into President Biden and compared him to Richard Nixon, Axios' Andrew Solender reports.

• Why it matters: McCarthy has dangled impeachment against Biden cabinet officials. But this is the closest he's come to making that threat against the president himself.

🔎 Between the lines: The House isn't ready to vote on Biden's impeachment yet — a move many swing-district moderates wouldn't go for. But McCarthy faces significant pressure from his right flank to go full bore.

• Last month, the speaker went so far as to kill a right-wing effort to hold a House vote on impeaching Biden over his border policies.

📺 But McCarthy told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Monday that the House investigation into business dealings by Biden family members "is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry, which provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed."

• Citing testimony by IRS whistleblowers to the Oversight Committee, McCarthy said: "This president has also used something we haven't seen since Richard Nixon — used the weaponization of government to benefit his family."

The other side: Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte, in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), offered to make U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who led the investigation into Hunter Biden, available for testimony. Read the letter.

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American patriotism has declined steeply among young adults over the past decade, and now sits at a record low.

• Why it matters: Pride in national identity is lowest among those 18-34 — showing the fractures among generations at a time of deep partisanship, Axios' Sareen Habeshian writes.

🧮 By the numbers: In Gallup polling from June, Americans 55+ were nearly 3 times more likely to be extremely proud of their nationality than younger generations.

• Overall, 39% of U.S. adults say they are "extremely proud" to be American.
• Only 18% of those aged 18-34 said the same, compared to 40% of those aged 35-54 and 50% of those 55 and over.

Explore the data ... Earlier story: Patriotism by party ... Share this story.

Children from ultra-wealthy families are more than twice as likely to gain admission to Ivy League schools compared to others with comparable test scores, according to a widely shared new working paper from a group of Harvard economists who study inequality, Emily Peck writes for Axios Markets.

• Why it matters: The study shows that elite-school policies "amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year," N.Y. Times Upshot wrote from the paper.

What's happening: The high-income admissions advantage, among students with the same test scores, is driven by three factors, the paper says:

1. Preferences for children of alumni.
2. Weight placed on non-academic ratings, which tend to be higher for students applying from private high schools.
3. Recruitment of athletes.

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The blockbuster weekend debut for "Barbie," combined with a better-than-expected opening for "Oppenheimer," led to one of the best North American opening weekends of all time, Axios' Sara Fischer writes from Comscore data.

• Why it matters: "An obvious lesson from the gargantuan success of both 'Barbie' and the [Taylor Swift] Eras Tour is that there is a huge, underserved market for entertainment that takes the feelings of girls and women seriously,” N.Y. Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote.

🔮 What's next: Movies based on the iconic toys Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels are in the works.

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