Elon Musk has told engineers to get to work on a Vine reboot

• Elon Musk told Twitter engineers to ready a Vine reboot, Insider has confirmed.
• Twitter bought the short-form video app in 2012 but shut it down in 2016.

The short-form video app Vine could be revived soon, six years after being shut down, if Elon Musk has his way.

Musk, who completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last week, has directed Twitter engineers to work on a Vine relaunch, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to Insider on Monday.

Axios, which first reported the news, said Musk gave an end-of-year deadline and that one engineer told the publication that Vine's old code base "needs a lot of work."

Neither Twitter nor Musk immediately responded to a request for comment from Insider. Vine co-founder Rus Yusopov declined to comment when contacted by Insider and co-founder Dom Hofmann did not respond ahead of publication.

Twitter bought Vine in 2012 but shut it down shortly after in 2016. The app was known for looping six-second videos, pre-dating TikTok in popularizing short-form video content.

Twitter's founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted earlier this year that shuttering Vine was his "biggest regret."

Musk hinted at his intentions on Monday in a Twitter poll asking "Bring back Vine?" As of Monday afternoon it had more than 4 million votes, over 69% of which responded "Y" (for yes).

MrBeast, a popular YouTuber, responded to the survey, "If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that'd be hilarious."

When Musk asked "What could we do to make it better than TikTok?," MrBeast responded to "make it hard to copy."

TikTok quickly grew during the pandemic, prompting rival Instagram to adopt and focus on video features like Reels. Last year, TikTok said that it had 1 billion global active users.

But it's also faced privacy and national-security concerns over its Chinese parent company ByteDance, and has caught the attention of both former President Trump and President Biden's administrations.