“Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” Elon Musk posted that minutes after midnight Eastern time on Sunday, July 23, 2023. By Monday morning in the US, the blue bird was gone from Twitter’s website and an X had taken its place.
CNN called it a radical rebranding. Musk tweeted that X.com now pointed to Twitter.com, and that an interim X logo would “go live later today.” He then shared a photo of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters lit up by a giant X. Deadline reported that he also swapped his own profile icon for a white X on a black background, and said the logo on the site would probably be tweaked.
What the company said
Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising executive Musk named chief executive in June, backed the change. “It’s an exceptionally rare thing, in life or in business, that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” she wrote. “Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
She described X as a future centered on audio, video, messaging and payments or banking, and called it “the platform that can deliver, well….everything.” Deadline noted that the idea of a super-app, including banking, was something Musk had talked about before.
The name was not entirely new. Under Musk, Twitter’s corporate name had already become X Corp., sitting under an entity called X Holding, and PayPal, his earlier online banking startup, started out as X.com. “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X,” Musk tweeted.
Not everything was settled. Deadline said there was clear confusion over how the shift would be carried out, and one user pointed to a cost for businesses of changing the logo. Asked what tweets should be called now, Musk answered “x’s.” On retweets, he said that whole concept should be rethought.
A company under pressure
CNN suggested the rebrand could be seen as something of a Hail Mary. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October 2022, then cut staff in mass layoffs. Advertisers, including General Mills and Macy’s, paused or pulled spending, and Musk had recently warned that the company, facing steep losses in ad revenue, was close to bankruptcy. He also disclosed that the platform still had negative cash flow because of a 50% drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt.
Competition had arrived too. Earlier in July, Meta launched its rival app Threads, which passed 100 million sign-ups in its first week. Twitter had 238 million active users before Musk took it private.
Deadline called the renaming by far the biggest and most public-facing change Musk had made since closing the deal.
Sources
- Twitter X logo: Elon Musk rebrands social media platform | CNN Business
- Elon Musk Says Tweets Should Now Be Called X’s
