On Monday, Twitter unveiled its new logo, which replaces the blue bird with a white X on a black background as the Elon Musk-owned firm prepares to rebrand as X.
The social media network’s website displayed the company’s new logo, but the URL remained twitter.com and the blue “Tweet” button was visible, indicating that the rebranding was not yet complete.
Musk and the business’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, announced the renaming on Sunday, stating that the company would be renamed X and will eventually expand into payments, banking, and commerce.
Twitter was founded in 2006 and gets its name from the sound of birds chattering. The firm has utilized avian branding since its early days, when it purchased a stock symbol of a pale blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.
Musk changed his profile picture late Sunday to the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco,” and updated his Twitter bio to “X.com,” which now redirects to twitter.com.
He also tweeted that under the site’s new identity, a post would be called “an X.”
Musk had already designated Twitter’s parent business as the X Corporation, and he has stated that his acquisition of the social media behemoth was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” — a reference to the X.com company he created in 1999, a later version of which went on to become online payments giant PayPal.
Such an app could still function as a social media platform and also include messaging and mobile payments.
Musk had previously said he wanted to create a super-app modeled on China’s WeChat, a social media platform that also offers messaging and mobile payments.
“You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” he told a company town hall meeting in June last year.
The new logo was projected onto the facade of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Sunday night.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted earlier.
Yaccarino, a former advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk hired last month to be Twitter’s CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.
“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
Simon Kemp, CEO of digital consultancy Kepios, said he was skeptical that Twitter could evolve into a super-app.
“Given how Musk has treated Twitter’s own employees since the acquisition, I don’t imagine many developers will rush to build third-party apps to integrate into the Twitter ecosystem unless Musk can offer outstanding incentives, and that’ll be extra tricky given the company’s existing debt.”
But he also said the platform had the potential to become “a great (global and paid) news aggregator.”
New revenue streams
Since Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform’s advertising business has partially failed as marketers became dissatisfied with Musk’s management style and the company’s mass firings, which weakened content control.
In response, SpaceX’s billionaire CEO has moved toward offering payments and commerce through the network in order to generate fresh money.
Twitter is estimated to have 200 million daily active users, but it has experienced numerous technological difficulties since Musk fired much of its personnel.
Many users and advertisers have expressed dissatisfaction with the social networking site’s additional fees for formerly free services, changes to content monitoring, and the reinstatement of previously banned right-wing accounts.
Musk stated earlier this month that Twitter had lost about half of its advertising revenue since he took over the company.
This month, Facebook parent Meta also launched Threads, a text-based platform with up to 150 million members, according to some estimates.
However, according to Sensor Tower statistics, the amount of time users spend on the competing app has decreased in the weeks since its launch.