Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday that he plans to change the logo of Twitter to an “X” from the famous blue bird, posting a short video teasing what the new logo may look like. In a series of posts on his Twitter account starting just after 12 a.m. ET, Twitter’s owner said that he’s looking to make the change worldwide as soon as Monday, writing: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” Musk later tweeted: “Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X” and later posted: X.com now points to https://twitter.com/. Interim X logo goes live later today.”
The change isn’t surprising given Musk’s long history with the name “X.” Musk’s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is commonly known as ‘SpaceX.’ And in 1999, Musk founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal. In fact, the billionaire Tesla CEO tweeted last October that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Musk’s news is just the latest big change to Twitter since he bought the social media platform for $44 billion last year. The logo change on Twitter, however, was met with sharp criticism on the social media platform, who felt it would be confusing to a huge chunk of the Twitter’s audience. Revenue has dropped sharply since Musk took over the company and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to slash costs and avoid bankruptcy. He hired longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO in May.
Musk’s latest move comes shorty after Twitter faced new competition from Meta’s new app, Threads, launched earlier this month. Threads is being billed as a text-based version of Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram that the company has said offers “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.” In the first five days of its launch, 100 million people had signed up for Threads.
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