Since Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, the social media site has gone through several ringers that have made it almost impossible to recognise it as the media giant it once was. However, it will only become even more unrecognisable as, in a recent post on the platform, Musk announced a massive rebranding, putting an end to the iconic blue bird logo.
In an official tweet, Musk announced that “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” True to his word, the blue bird with which Twitter was associated has now been replaced by the letter “X”. Now, people are left scratching their heads as to why this sudden change occurred and what else we can expect from Musk and his team.
More often than not, when companies are stuck in a predicament, one of the moves they often make is a major rebranding in hopes of sparking new life and interest in the company and their products or services. It’s no surprise that since Musk took the helm of Twitter, the platform has been on a steady decline, and it looks like it’ll only lose more money, as it now have some competition in the form of Meta’s Threads.
Musk officially announced the rebranding on his official page on Sunday, 23rd July, complete with a three-second pinned video, previewing the new logo design. Many Twitter users doubted he was going to push through with it – until they were surprised to see that the largest social media app is now, indeed, named “X”.
This was not the only change orchestrated by Musk; in April 2023, it was revealed that Musk had changed the organisation’s name from Twitter Inc. to X Corp., which is incorporated in Nevada and has its headquarters in San Francisco. Musk has been obsessed with the letter – from Tesla’s Model X to SpaceX, and even the name of his own child has an X in it (for reference, his son’s legal name is “X Æ A-XII” and is also nicknamed “X”).
Musk does not shy away from this fact; if anything, he promoted his love for the letter in a separate post. This is only the first anticipated wave of changes, as the platform is expected to slowly but surely remove all images and associations with the bird, and soon, the website domain will be “x.com”, For now, the aforementioned domain name simply redirects users to Twitter.com. People may remember that x.com was the original name of an internet bank Musk co-founded in 1999 before it changed its name to PayPal a year later. Musk has not disclosed when the popular social media site will receive its full transition into “X” at the time of writing.
