The billionaire entrepreneur announced the rebranding of Twitter’s iconic bird logo on Sunday. What does this mean for the platform?
Following a bold move by its owner Elon Musk announced on Sunday (July 23), Twitter has ditched its famous blue bird logo for a minimalist X. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who acquired the social networking platform for $44 billion last November, said he intends to phase out the Twitter brand and all of its bird-related elements.
He has been vocal about his dissatisfaction with the platform’s performance and direction since acquiring it last year. He has blamed the company’s negative cash flow on a “50 percent drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load” and also named Meta’s rival platform Threads as one of the many causes. Threads, which launched on July 5 this year, bears a close resemblance to Twitter, with Musk calling it a “copycat” app.
Read more: What is Threads and will it be a gamechanger?
According to news sources, Musk decided to rebrand Twitter to X after he bought the social media platform. The billionaire has also expressed his ambition to transform Twitter into an everything app.
Musk’s obsession with the letter X is well-known. In 1997, he founded X.com, which eventually became PayPal. His spacecraft manufacturing company, SpaceX, has the letter in its name and logo. And he named his son with singer Grimes X Æ A-12.
Musk said he chose X as an interim logo for Twitter and that it might change or be refined later on. On Tuesday, two days after his announcement, the logo was replaced with one that has slightly thicker lines. Not long after, however, Musk tweeted, “I don’t like the thicker bars, so reverting.”
He also hinted that users should refer to tweets as “X’s.” He crowdsourced the logo design from his followers on Saturday and picked one of the fan-created graphics on Sunday. He then changed his profile picture to the new logo and confirmed the update with a tweet that said: “as promised.”
Read more: Why do Elon Musk and other tech leaders want to pause AI experiments?
Commenting on the logo change, Kelvin Tang, co-founder and CEO of Pons.AI said, “I think it’s a very sensible and ambitious move for Elon to signal to the world how he is going to transform the waning ‘Twitter’ and take it to the next level as a ‘WeChat-like’ super app—combining social media, financial services and cutting-edge AI.”
He notes that Elon Musk is also making his presence felt in the AI space with his newly launched artificial intelligence company xAI—another example of his obsession with the letter X—which seeks to compete with OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
“Given Musk’s history and style of management, the name change was not a surprising move at all to me,” added Tang who runs the generative AI art marketing Software-as-a-service platform.
Another Gen.T honouree, Melvin Poh, who founded the open-access knowledge-sharing platform Empirics Asia, believes that while Twitter was a cornerstone of modern internet culture, the company has stagnated in innovation compared to other social media platforms. “Musk came in with his vision to do a complete overhaul of the essence of the entire platform and what it fundamentally offers; it makes sense that he renamed it to something completely different to signal a total transformation.”
Poh adds: “Even a golden brand which enjoys the comforts of long-time recognition can become irrelevant with time. Evolution is important even if it means transforming to prepare for future challenges.”
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