Elon Musk says he’s bringing back Vine’s archive

Elon Musk says he’s bringing back Vine — sort of. The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered the video archive for the popular short-form video app, thought to have been deleted, and is working to restore user access.

Vine — something of a precursor to today’s TikTok, but with only 6-second-long looping videos — was acquired by Twitter back in October 2012 for $30 million to expand the social media platform’s video ambitions. Unfortunately for Vine creators and fans, the company fumbled the app’s potential and decided to shut down Vine in 2016 by limiting all new uploads. The following year, it was fully discontinued, though a user archive remained for a time.

Despite no longer having an App Store presence, Vine still has a place in the internet’s collective cultural consciousness. Through online compilations of the best Vines uploaded to YouTube, and through the careers of numerous creators who got their start on Vine, the company lives on to some extent, and its content continues to be discovered by new generations.

Musk himself seemed interested in bringing back Vine after acquiring Twitter (now called X) in October 2022. In a poll posted on the social media app, he asked Twitter’s users, “Bring back Vine?” to which nearly 70% responded “yes.” Axios reported at the time that Twitter had devoted some engineers to working on the Vine reboot, but nothing ever came of it.

It’s unclear whether Musk has any ambitions for Vine beyond getting its archive back online, however. In the same post about restoring Vine, he also touted that Grok’s new video-creation feature, Grok Imagine, also available to X Premium+ subscribers, is “AI Vine.” That suggests that his interests in video creation no longer lie with human creativity, but in human-directed AI prompting.

Whether or not Musk will actually deliver on the promise remains to be seen, as the X post could have just been another way to draw attention to Grok AI, rather than being representative of a real effort inside the company to make old Vines available for reposting.