Elon Musk has revealed that Twitter has ditched its bird logo and rebranded with the name X in the latest controversial shake-up of the social media company under his ownership.
Tweeting the image of the company’s new insignia, a white X on a black background, late Sunday night, Twitter’s new chief executive Linda Yaccarino said: ‘X is here! Let’s do this’.
Linda Yaccarino tweeted that X would be powered by AI and would connect them in ways they’re just beginning to imagine.
The recent changes are a step closer to Elon Musk’s previously stated idea for an ‘everything app’ that would incorporate social media, instant messaging, banking, and other ventures.
Elon Musk has since changed his profile picture to the company’s new logo which he described as minimalist art deco, and his Twitter bio to ‘X.com’, which now redirects to twitter.com.
Established in 2006, Twitter takes its name from the sound of birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.
In a late-night email, Elon Musk wrote to Twitter employees confirming that they were indeed changing to X that day, and this was his last message from a Twitter email, he added before signing off with a salute emoji.
Also, late Sunday night, revealing the changes, Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino confirmed that the social media app would proceed quickly into payments, banking and commerce.
Elon Musk earlier tweeted that if a good enough X logo was posted that night, then they would make it go live worldwide the following day.
He’d earlier addressed the Twitter logo’s departure and said that soon they would bid adieu to the Twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.
Elon Musk also tweeted that under the site’s new identity, a post would be called ‘an X’.
The changes weren’t observable on the website as of 03.30 ET Monday.
The Tesla and SpaceX owner also spoke on Twitter Space, an audio live stream on the platform, stating that the changes should have been done a long time ago and that he was sorry it took so long.
Elon Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation and previously said his takeover of the social media colossus was an accelerant to creating X, the everything app, a reference to the X.com company he established in 1999, a later version of which went on to become payments giant PayPal.
So, actually what he’s really bought is a database full of half a billion people’s data, and this is extremely scary – data harvesting to the extreme and those who don’t think they share their information, you do!
The fact is that almost all of us have relinquished control of our data anyhow, and most people are past caring, and now Elon Musk has broken something that wasn’t even broken, and is it really a good idea to link banking directly to social media, given how some banks have been behaving of late.
He really does seem like he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing because inwardly he’s a ferocious wolf.
The insignia looks like something out of one of those dystopian movies where a company owns everything and they make everything, and of course, this is how you destroy a trademark in record time. The blue bird is iconic, it would be like coca cola ditching its name and font, and I would never use Elon Musk’s platform for any monetary transaction, he’s too unpredictable.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 