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Writer's pictureJamal Saafir

Twitter Rebrands To “X”


Elon Musk is still making changes to Twitter and this time the change is to its name.

The social media platform Twitter is now “X” or X.com.


As of Monday July 24th, 2023, Tweets will be no more, but will now be “X’s” according to a Twitter (X) post by Musk himself.


According to a report from The New York Times, late Sunday night Elon Musk began reshaping the Twitter brand which began with its name. Created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, the legacy of the Tweet and its logo, the blue bird, have come to a screeching end.


Musk is dismantling the old image for a new image, which had been temporarily experimented with as a favor to a Twitter user in April of 2023 when Elon replaced the blue bird with a Shiba Inu, which is the Dogecoin cryptocurrency logo.

Though short lived, at the time the only thing the change seemed to influence was the price of Dogecoin which went from .07 cents to .10 cents upon release of the news on April 3rd.


"Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," Musk tweeted on Sunday.

On Monday at the San Francisco Twitter headquarters, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while meeting rooms were given new names with an “X” in them, including “eXposure”,“eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times.


Work crews also commenced removing bird-related paraphernalia, such as a giant blue logo in the cafeteria. Outside the building, workers took off the first six letters of Twitter’s name before the San Francisco Police Department stopped them for performing “unauthorized work,” according to an alert sent by the department.


Musk's goal is to turn Twitter into an “everything app” called X, which would embody social networking as well as banking and shopping.


On Monday, Musk took to Twitter to share a photo of a giant X being projected on the Twitter (X) office building in San Francisco with the caption: “Our headquarters tonight.”


These alterations are the most visible of the changes that Musk has brought to Twitter since purchasing the company in October. Behind the scenes, he has taken many steps to makeover the firm, terminating thousands of staff and changing the platform’s features, including badges meant to verify users, as well as the guidelines governing what is prohibited and what is allowed to be said on the platform.


Twitter users who religiously tweeted over the years and developed a strong presence on the site appeared estranged by the shift. “Has everybody seen the (eXecrable) new logo?” the actor Mark Hamill tweeted on Monday, with the hashtag #ByeByeBirdie. Others viewed the move as Mr. Musk’s latest lash at the site, with some stubbornly saying they will continue to refer to the site as Twitter and will continue to “tweet.”


Mike Proulx, a vice president and research director at Forrester stated, “the app itself has become a cultural phenomenon in all sorts of ways,” he said. “In one fell sweep, Elon Musk has essentially wiped out 15 years of brand value from Twitter and is now essentially starting from scratch.”


Mike Carr, a co-founder of the branding company NameStormers, said Mr. Musk’s X logo could be interpreted as having an ominous “Big Brother” tech overlord vibe. Unlike the blue bird, which he described as warm and cuddly but perhaps a bit dated and weighed down by bad press, the new logo is “very harsh,” he said.


“If they do this wrong and it was anybody other than Elon Musk, he’d be running a higher risk because people could start making fun of it,” said Mr. Carr, who has helped come up with names for thousands of clients, including CarMax, the used car company.



Musk has had interest in the X name since 1999 when he assisted with founding the online bank X.com. The company changed its name after merging with another start-up and forming what would become PayPal.



In 2017, Musk said he had repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal. “No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me,” he tweeted at the time.


Tesla, Musk’s electric car manufacturer, also has an SUV called the Model X. Musk’s son, X Æ A-12 Musk, is regularly referred to as “X” for short. The holding companies created to close the acquisition of Twitter were named X Holdings. Musk also heads an artificial intelligence company called xAI.


“I like the letter X,” he posted on Sunday.



Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder and former chief executive, said in a tweet on Monday that while a rebrand was not “essential” to achieving Musk’s vision, there was an argument for it.


“The Twitter brand carries a lot of baggage,” Mr. Dorsey wrote. “But all that matters is the utility it provides, not the name.”


Martin Grasser, a San Francisco artist who was part of a team in 2011 that helped design the most recent Twitter bird logo, said it was meant to convey “simplicity, brevity and clarity.” The goal was to have a logo that was as memorable as Apple’s or Nike’s, he said.


Mr. Grasser said Mr. Musk could do whatever he wanted with the brand, but “I hope the bird occupies a space in culture that is a happy memory or becomes one of those logos that belongs to culture rather than a company.”






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