Bye-Bye Birdie!! We will miss this lil blue bird … Twitter’s years-old identity.
On Sunday, Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that the company’s iconic blue bird logo would be replaced with an X as part of an utterly needed makeover.
After Musk recently admitted that advertising revenue is still about half what it once was, the site underwent a tweak that was not visible on Sunday evening.
Musk has mentioned that the advertisers have hesitated to return. As a result of that and its substantial debt, Twitter’s cash flow has been negative.
He began tweeting around midnight yesterday night about the Twitter redesign to X, the one-letter word he has used repeatedly in company and product names for the entirety of his career.
One tweet read, “Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” and another tweeted, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make it go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk then, intermittently over the next several hours, tweeted things like “Deus X” or replied to other users talking about the shift to indicate the shift and point to it.
According to reports, Musk informed Twitter staff last night that the firm would be rebranding to X and that his final email would be sent from a Twitter address.
Some of Musk’s admirers are happy with the adjustment, but regular messaging service users aren’t.
Musk’s Connection With The Letter X
For twenty-five years, the letter “X” has appeared on nearly every project Musk has worked on. X.com was the initial domain name for Paypal; it features prominently in the names of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
It serves as the basis for his artificial intelligence project X.Ai, and he has stated his intention to transform Twitter into “X, the everything app.” He had been sitting on the X.com domain he acquired back from PayPal in 2017 until now.
He hopes to realize his long-term goal of creating an “everything app” like China’s WeChat, which would consolidate diverse services like mobile payments and social networking into a single platform.
A photo of him drawing an X configuration with his hands accompanied a tweet in which he said, “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X.”
When he bought Twitter in October last year, he wrote: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He had previously brought up ‘X’ in April when he introduced the company’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino.
The Elon Musk Era On Twitter
Since Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, he has made several changes, including the current rebranding. The Twitter makeover is the most significant update to the service since Musk took over its helm.
Thousands of employees have been let go, verification badges hidden behind a paywall, banned users like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump have restored their accounts, and reading quotas have been instituted.
Since he bought the firm, Twitter has lost nearly half of its advertising revenue due to his lax position on moderation. The company is not profitable and has “heavy debt,” as Musk admitted last week.
Some 360–400 million users have left the network to protest his policies and instead joined rivals like Bluesky (supported by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey) and Mastodon.
The most dangerous competitor is the Threads app developed by Meta. When released earlier this month, it gained 100 million users in five days, making it the fastest-growing app.
While its stricter filtering approach has won fans, the app still lacks essential tools like searching for specific topics or hashtags and the flexibility to restrict your timeline to the individuals you follow.
Because of the striking similarities between Twitter and Meta, Musk has criticized the site’s billionaire owner, Mark Zuckerberg, and even threatened legal action. The two tech moguls have discussed the possibility of engaging in a cage match against one another.
The most popular Twitter features are now only accessible to those who pay for a premium “blue” Twitter account. This rebranding effort will allow the corporation to fine-tune the platform to get more people to join the subscription bandwagon.
Musk’s Twitter is up against a formidable foe in Meta’s Thread, a Twitter-like site that has garnered millions of users.
