Elon Musk surprised the people who used his social network on July 23, 2023, when he told them that the Twitter name and the blue bird logo would soon be gone. Some people thought it was fake news or one of Elon Musk‘s usual controversial comments, but what seemed like a far-off story was quickly put to rest when the new logo, the X, showed up this morning.
Twitter turns into X
All of this started when the businessman asked his fans to make a new logo for the social network. He said that if “a good enough X logo” was made, it would be the new face of Twitter. An hour after Musk’s fateful first tweet, it was clear that his fans would do what he asked. Sawyer Merritt, a user, replied with a short video of a wobbly “X,” which seemed to be a version of a mark he had shown before. The businessman Elon Musk then pinned this tweet to the top of his account and changed his profile picture to a “X” on a black background. Shortly after that, Linda Yaccarino, who is the CEO of Twitter, changed the name to Platform.
READ MORE: Elon Musk Buys Twitter
Yaccarino says that the goal of those in charge is for Twitter to be almost impossible to recognize after the brand change. “This change can go on forever,” says Yaccarino. He says that X will be a platform for just about everything. “Fans and critics have been telling Twitter for years that it needs to be more bold, come up with new ideas more quickly, and use its great potential. “X will do all of that and much more,” said the company’s CEO. At the time, we don’t know what other changes will happen or what they mean by “potential.” We can only think that this is a call for help to put out the blazing fire that is Mark Zuckerberg’s new app, Threads.
A few hours later, Musk tweeted a picture of the big X on the front of Twitter’s offices in San Francisco. Musk has also added the web address X.com to the description of himself on his Twitter profile, which still shows up under the Twitter.com name. Also, the businessman has owned the domain for a long time. With this move, Musk is closing a loop in his life story, since X.com was one of the first online banks in the world. In 1999, he and three other people in Silicon Valley started this. A year later, it combined with a competitor called Confinity, and the new company was called PayPal. In the end, his sale to eBay in 2002 set Musk on the path to becoming (on paper) the richest man in the world.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
Even though the old Twitter image can still be seen in some places online. Users have already started saying goodbye to the much-loved blue bird, which has sealed the social network’s fate. It’s official: Twitter was already on its way out, but the launch of X only signaled that an age was coming to an end and that Elon Musk would be in charge of a new, blind, and uncertain future.
ALSO READ: Meta Threads: A New Social Media App to Compete with Twitter
The switch has, of course, made people wonder if Musk and Yaccarino are making a fatal mistake by giving up such a strong brand with a multibillion-dollar value and going with a generic Musk-X instead. By making this change, the break with Twitter that has been known since its start in 2006 (despite some changes in its visual identity) will become official. Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk will merge the social network with his company X Corp—Heard of Space X?