Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, officially revealed a major rebranding of the social media platform. As part of this sweeping change, the site’s famous bird logo was replaced with an “X,” much to the chagrin of users.
Musk, who acquired the microblogging site for $44 billion the previous year, announced the upcoming departure of the Twitter brand and its bird-related imagery in a post on Sunday. The domain X.com now redirects users to the social media platform’s homepage, while Twitter.com continues to be active. However, the mobile app’s branding has not yet been updated for many users.
The reason behind this transition to X is Musk’s vision to transform the platform into an “everything app.”
In a post on Sunday, Twitter’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, mentioned that X would focus on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking, and would heavily rely on artificial intelligence.
Linda tweeted, “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
The process of moving towards X began in April when Twitter Inc. changed its name to X Corp., as per court filings.
Musk, who holds the positions of executive chairman and CTO of the company, announced that tweets would now be referred to as “x’s.” However, when asked about the term for retweets, he suggested that the concept needed to be reconsidered.
He also tweeted an image of the Twitter headquarters with an big “X” projection on the building.
Musk’s preference for the letter “x” is not new, as evident from his other business ventures. His rocket manufacturing company, SpaceX, also features an “X” in its logo. Additionally, Musk recently launched an artificial intelligence startup called xAI, with a mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
It is worth noting that Musk previously founded X.com, which later merged with Confinity and rebranded as PayPal in 2001. He repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017.
