The blue bird is gone. On July 23, 2023, Twitter swapped its logo for a white X on a black background, and owner Elon Musk said “tweets” would soon be called “x’s.”
The new mark replaced the bird on the desktop site first. It had not yet reached the mobile app. Musk changed his own profile picture to the logo and added “X.com” to his bio, then posted an image of a flickering X and a photo of the branding projected onto Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. Asked in a Twitter Spaces audio chat whether the logo would change, he answered “Yes.” The company is now called X Corp, and Musk said the change “should have been done a long time ago.”
What Musk is aiming for
Musk wants a “super app” called X, a platform he has talked about building for months. The model is WeChat, the Chinese messaging and social media platform that lets users pay for services and has grown into one of the region’s biggest apps. It was estimated to have 1.29 billion users in China alone last year.
Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s new chief executive, wrote on the platform that the rebrand was an exciting new opportunity. “Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate,” she said. “Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
Drew Benvie, a social media commentator and founder of the agency Battenhall, said Musk was “going full throttle for the everything app space.” Adding a couple of services, such as shopping or payments, could be enough to make X better than Twitter was, he said, but “there are already so many alternatives, so Musk and co are playing an enormous game of catch-up.”
Mourning the bird
Twitter’s own website calls the bird “our most recognisable asset.” The bird is named Larry, which co-founder Biz Stone said in 2011 was a tribute to Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird. In April the company had briefly swapped it for the Shiba Inu dog of Dogecoin, which pushed that meme coin’s market value up.
Martin Grasser, who designed the bird in 2012, wrote: “Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird.” Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s best-known co-founder, shared the post with a goat emoji.
Business commentator Justin Urquhart Stewart said the changes would not please Twitter’s “loyal but aging base.” Younger generations have moved onto other apps, he said, and Musk “has got to be careful as you are almost starting from scratch with an older audience meanwhile damaging the original brand.”
Phishing worry
Jake Moore, global cyber adviser at ESET, said a quick shift from one company name to another can invite phishing. “A rebrand is the perfect opportunity to send phishing emails requesting users to sign in via a new URL,” he told the BBC, with fake links that could capture real Twitter credentials.
Musk has long been drawn to the letter X, though no one knows exactly why. His 1999 online banking venture was called X.com, and when it merged with PayPal and eBay bought it three years later, he made $165m. He owns the X.com domain, which now redirects to Twitter. He is also chief executive of SpaceX, and recently launched an AI start-up called xAI as an alternative to ChatGPT.
