Is the Twitter bird about to go extinct? It appears so, if Elon Musk gets his way.
Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, said in a series of tweets late Saturday night that he was going to change the brand of the social platform to be an “X,” sharing an animated gif of a stylized X against a stark black background.
“If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow,” he said as part of a series of tweets. “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
As usual with Musk, it’s hard to tell how serious he is. He is known for making eyebrow-raising comments and then not following through on them or otherwise pivoting.
Still, Musk has long had an obsession with the letter. Or as he tweeted last night while sharing a photo of himself making his hands into an X while standing in front of signage for the Tesla Model X: “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X.”
Musk has a son named X Æ A-12 Musk with the singer Grimes but calls him by the name X.
But, of course, Musk also founded the website and online banking service X.com in 1999. It would eventually merge with another company to become PayPal. Musk reacquired the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017 and said in a tweet Saturday that the new Twitter, er, X, will operate off of it.
Tweets will be called an X, Musk wrote, and followers will be called “viewers,” a reference to a goal to make Twitter a bit more like TikTok or YouTube.
It’s not immediately clear if Musk cleared the name change with Twitter’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino, a veteran advertising executive who joined Twitter from NBCUniversal in May, has been touting Twitter’s reach and as a place for premium video. For example, Fox Sports has been hosting a live pre-show on Twitter for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, and there are similar plans for NBCUniversal to do so for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Musk said when he hired Yaccarino that he should shift to a role as executive chair and CTO, “overseeing product, software & sysops.”
