Twitter is now called “X” after its owner, Elon Musk, changed the logo of its famous bird on Monday. This is the latest big change since Musk took over the social media site. As of early Monday morning, Twitter.com was still up and running, and the branding on the app version of the platform didn’t seem to have changed.
The well-known bird sign for Twitter, on the other hand, was changed into an X. Early on Sunday morning, Musk put up a short video of a flashing “X.” When asked in a Twitter Spaces audio chat if the logo would change, he said “yes,” then told an unknown speaker, “We’re cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blow torches.”
Early on Monday, Musk sent out a tweet with a picture of the X logo being shown all over Twitter’s offices. Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday that the idea behind changing the logo to an “X” was to “represent the flaws that make us all unique.” “Soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand, and then all the birds,” he wrote.
Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023
By Sunday afternoon, x.com was sending people to what used to be Twitter. The name was given back to Elon Musk in 2017 after it was given up as part of the PayPal merger. Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, it has gone through a lot of big changes. The change from a bird to an “X” is the latest big one.
“Another Chance”
Musk made Linda Yaccarino, a former marketing executive at NBCUniversal, CEO of the company in June. She said on Twitter Sunday afternoon about the name change, “It’s very rare in life or in business to get a second chance to make a big mark.
Twitter made a huge impact and changed the way we talk to each other. Now, X is going to go further and change the global town square.” As the new business starts up, it faces problems. Musk recently said that the platform still has a negative cash flow.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
This is because advertising income has dropped by 50% and the platform has a lot of debt. Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and said he wanted to buy Twitter to make it easier for people to talk freely on the platform. He has criticized the exit or pause of advertisers like General Mills (GIS), Macy’s (M), and some car companies that compete with Tesla.
Musk said this to explain his view on free speech: “Can someone you don’t like say something you don’t like? And if that’s true, then we have the right to say what we want.” He also said that Twitter would “be very reluctant to delete things” and would try to let all legal speech happen on the site. Many people worry that this could lead to more hate speech.
Meanwhile, the original excitement about a competitor called Threads seems to have died down. This is likely because Threads is full of spam and doesn’t have some of the user-friendly features that Twitter, or now X, has.
Adam Mosseri, who is in charge of the Threads launch for Meta, has said that they might add an edit button, a desktop version of the app, and a feed of only the accounts a user watches. So far, it hasn’t shown that it can get advertising money.