More changes are coming to Elon Musk's Twitter, as the billionaire owner of the site announced plans to replace the company's iconic blue bird logo with the letter "X."
An interim new logo was expected to go live sometime on Sunday, Musk said, as he announced that the URL "X.com" would now automatically redirect users to Twitter.
Taken together, the two changes mark the latest and arguably most dramatic changes for the social platform since the billionaire's purchase last year. It may signal a new era for the platform — which Musk has long envisioned as a super app that will offer a variety of services from online banking to video messaging.
Musk tweeted the platform will change the name of “tweets” to simply the letter “X” and said Twitter will be operated using the domain X.com, which Musk purchased from PayPal in 2017, saying the name had “great sentimental value”—Musk also owns the space technology company SpaceX, named a model of Tesla the “X” and co-founded an online banking company called X.com (that company merged with Confinity and changed its name to PayPal).
The change will be very confusing to a huge chunk of the Twitter’s audience, which has been already souring on the social platform given a slew of other major changes Musk has made, Adamson said.
“They won’t get it,” he said. “It’s a fitting end to a phenomenal unwinding of an iconic brand and business.”
Earlier this month, Musk put new curfews on his digital town square, a move that met with sharp criticism that it could drive away more advertisers and undermine its cultural influence as a trendsetter.
Musk is the most-followed user on Twitter, with 149 million followers on the platform. Barack Obama is second, with 132 million. “Not sure what subtle clues gave it but I like the letter X,” Musk posted early Sunday. One of Musk’s children with the musician and artist Grimes is named X Æ A-XII, who goes by the nickname “X.”
The planned removal of Twitter’s logo was first revealed, as might be expected, on Musk’s account, when he tweeted: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
A subsequent post added: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [it] go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk further stated that his reasoning for changing the symbol was “to embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique”. He also posted a photo of himself making an “X” symbol with crossed arms in front of a poster for the Tesla Model X car, with the caption: “Not sure what subtle clues gave it away, but I like the letter X.”
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