Elon Musk, who bought the social media platform formerly called Twitter last fall, has rebranded it to ‘X’ after a weekend of messaging signaling the change that included a photo of the new logo projected on the company’s San Francisco headquarters and a video of a flickering X.
Musk said the logo now appearing on Twitter’s site instead of the iconic blue bird would likely be tweaked. He replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background.
“Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk had tweeted minutes after midnight ET Sunday.
New CEO Linda Yaccarino also weighed in. “For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential. X will do that and more. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past 8 months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started. @elonmusk and I are looking forward to working with our teams and every single one of our partners to bring X to the world,” said the former NBCUniversal ad chief.
There’s confusion clearly over how the shift will be implemented. One user noted a cost to businesses to change the logo.
“It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” she tweeted. “Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square,” said Yaccarino. She called X “the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” she said in another tweet – if that’s what they can still be called.
Asked by one user what tweets should be called now, Musk said, “x’s.”
Asked what retweets should be called, he responded, “that whole concept should be rethought.”
Musk let go thousands of workers and alienated some advertisers and users with tweaks to the company’s policies after closing on his $44 billion acquisition, but this is by far the biggest change to the platform and the most public facing one.
It’s not out of the blue. Under Musk (founder of SpaceX), Twitter’s corporate name became X Corp., sitting under a entity called X Holding. His former online banking startup PayPal was first called X.com. “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X,” Musk tweeted Sunday.
Musk has also spoken about developing Twitter in to a super-app, including banking. Yaccarino called X “the platform that can deliver, well….everything.”
A tweet by the artist Beeple:
More to come…
