Elon Musk continues changes at the social media company he bought for $44 billion last year with a rebrand of its bird logo. Musk has long been fascinated with the letter X.
Goodbye, Twitter. Hello, X.
Elon Musk has unveiled a new “X” logo to replace Twitter’s famous blue bird as he follows through with a major rebranding of the social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.
The X started appearing at the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird was still dominant across the smartphone app. At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, meanwhile, workers were seen removing the iconic bird and logo Monday until police showed up and stopped them because they didn’t have the proper permits and didn’t tape off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell.
As of early afternoon, the “er” at the end of Twitter remained visible.
The haphazard erasure of both the physical and virtual remnants of Twitter’s past were in many ways typical of the chaotic way Musk has run the company since his reluctant purchase.
“It’s the end of an era, and a clear signal that the Twitter of the past 17 years is gone and not coming back,” said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with Insider Intelligence. “But the writing was on the wall: Musk has been vocal about transforming Twitter into platform X from the start, and Twitter was already a shell of its former self.”
It’s yet another change that Musk has made since acquiring Twitter that has alienated users and turned off advertisers, leaving the microblogging site vulnerable to new threats, including rival Meta’s new text-based app Threads that directly targets Twitter users.
Musk had asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying it “certainly will be refined.” He replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted Sunday.
The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Musk said.
“I can’t say I’m surprised, but I think it’s a very selfish decision,” said Hannah Thoreson of Baltimore, Maryland, who’s used Twitter since 2009 for work and personal posts.
