Rebranding the social network as X marks the billionaire’s latest gamble to reinvent the company, after buying it last year for $44 billion.
Twitter has flown away
Bye-bye, blue bird: Twitter overnight began rebranding itself as X, replacing its longtime logo with a stylized symbol that was projected onto its San Francisco headquarters.
The move underscored Elon Musk’s ambition to make the social network a key part of his longtime goal of creating an “everything app.” But it is also another risky gamble to reinvent a business that has struggled since he paid $44 billion for it last year.
“Lights. Camera. X!” wrote Linda Yaccarino, the company’s C.E.O., as the social network starting rolling out its new branding. Gone is the stylized bird, once dubbed Larry T. Bird by the Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, which became one of the most famous internet logos — and which the company has described as its most recognizable asset.
The platform’s about page hasn’t yet been updated, but Ms. Yaccarino repeatedly referred to X in a series of tweets outlining the company’s ambitions. Expect X to more fully pervade the company: Mr. Musk described an internal message to employees over the weekend as the last he’d send from Twitter, and he told a user that a post should be called an “x” instead of a tweet.
Mr. Musk was very clearly behind the makeover, having long been fascinated by the X identity. His second start-up was X.com, which eventually became PayPal. (The writer Walter Isaacson shared tantalizing snippets of his coming Musk biography about that.) Mr. Musk incorporated “X” into the name of SpaceX and Tesla’s first car model, and he recently named his new A.I. start-up xAI.
It’s more than a branding exercise. As Twitter has struggled under Mr. Musk — a pivot to relying on subscriptions hasn’t made up for a 50 percent drop in ad revenue, negative cash flow, and a new threat from Meta’s Threads — he has increasingly emphasized the company’s importance in what he calls X.
The billionaire has long dreamed of creating a super-app that could serve as a platform for everything users could do online, much as WeChat does in China. But as third-party data suggests user numbers are falling, it’s not clear how much runway Mr. Musk has to get a reborn X airborne.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
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