In a series of tweets starting late on Saturday, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, revealed his plans to change the platform’s logo from the iconic blue bird to a simple “X.” This move comes almost 10 months since he said that his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter is the “accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
The informal announcement started with a tweet that signaled the impending transformation, where he said “and soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And as with many of Musk’s Twitter/X-related decisions, he expressed a desire to implement changes immediately. He announced in the morning X.com will now redirect to Twitter.com and that the interim logo will go live later in the day.
But even before this, Musk’s display photo, as well as the Twitter page’s, had been changed to the logo that entrepreneur Sawyer Merrit offered to Musk on Saturday night, which Musk said will “later be refined.”
The billionaire also reportedly sent an email to Twitter employees, informing them of the forthcoming transformation to “X.”
The changes are mostly about the branding at this point, as Twitter’s business had already been renamed X Corp back in April.
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Musk has had a fixation with “X” for some time. X.com was an online bank Musk had co-funded with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999. Its name was changed to Paypal after it merged with competitor Confinity Inc in 2000. Two years after, the service, along with the X.com domain, was acquired by eBay, but Musk was able to buy back the domain from Paypal — for its “sentimental value” — in 2017.
X also features in SpaceX and Tesla SUV names, anchors X.Ai, and it is the nickname of his first child with Canadian musician Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes.
XE.com
Nonetheless, Steven Dengler, co-founder of XE.com, called out the new logo and branding for its similarities to his 1993-founded brand. He shared XE.com’s logo from 1993 to 2007, and it does look quite familiar.
Dengler also had this to say to Musk, the world’s wealthiest person:
X marks the spot
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino later posted the plans for X, on its way to becoming Musk’s ambitious “everything app.” She that more than being the global town square, the platform will become “the future state of unlimited interactivity.”
If that’s the plan, then there’s still a long way to go though between Twitter and X, and the change in branding is all still just buzz. The change also comes shortly after Musk, the greatest stock promoter of all time (see here, and here, and here), shared that Twitter is still in the red after losing about half of its advertisers since the acquisition.
In June, mutual funds firm Fidelity Investments, which owns shares in Twitter now X Corp, estimated the value of the company to be around $15 billion, just a third of what Musk paid for it in October.
Musk and the platform are also been facing a number of legal woes from former employees and vendors over claims of non-payment. Meta (Nasdaq: META) also recently successfully launched Threads, its response to Twitter. It boasts of having 100 million users within five days from launch. Around the same time, both Musk and Yaccarino downplayed the platform’s dip in numbers.
Meanwhile, people on Twitter are thinking ahead.
Information for this story was found via Twitter, The Verge, CNN, the Associated Press, and the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
