For more than 10 years, Twitter has been recognizable by its blue and white bird logo, which has come to symbolize the social network’s unique culture and vocabulary. “Tweet” became a verb. A “tweet” referred to a post. “Tweeps” became the nickname for Twitter employees.
late on sunday, Elon Musk started getting rid of everything.
The tech billionaire who bought Twitter last year, the social platform renamed X.com on its website and began replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet. At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, X logos were projected into the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to include X’s, including “eXposure,” “eXult,” and “s3Xy,” according to photos from The New York Times.
Mr Musk had long said he could make the name change, but he rushed the process tweet Early Sunday morning, he declared, “Soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand and little by little to all birds.” He said he hopes to transform Twitter into an “everything app” called X, which includes not only social networking but also banking and shopping.
Early Monday, so did Mr Musk shared a photo of a giant X projected onto Twitter’s San Francisco office building with the caption: “Our headquarters tonight.”
The moves — which are ongoing — are the most visible changes Mr Musk has made to Twitter since he signed the deal to buy the company in October. Behind the scenes, he has taken many steps to reform the company. remove Thousands of Twitter employees and changing the platform’s features, including badges meant to verify users and the rules governing what can and can’t be said on the service.
Nevertheless, the name and logo change could not be overlooked. And by beginning to remove the Twitter name, Mr Musk discarded an established brand that had been around since 2006 – the year the company was founded – that had delighted and frustrated celebrities, politicians, athletes and other users alike.
Many Twitter users who have tweeted and built their presence on the site for years seemed alienated by the change. “Has everyone seen the (eXecrable) new logo?” actor Mark Hamill tweeted on Monday, with the hashtag #ByeByeBirdie. Others saw the move as Mr Musk’s latest swipe at the site. Some adamantly claimed they would continue to call the site Twitter and continue to “tweet”.
When brands become verbs, that’s the “holy grail,” said Mike Proulx, vice president and director of research at Forrester, because it means they’ve become part of popular culture.
“The app itself has become a cultural phenomenon in many ways,” he said. “Elon Musk wiped out 15 years of Twitter brand equity in one fell swoop and is now basically starting from scratch.”
Mr Musk risked the wrath of Twitter users even if he can hardly afford to upset them. His company is facing financial difficulties and increasing competition, and competitor Meta is releasing an app for real-time public conversations this month named threads. The new app quickly racked up 100 million downloads in less than a week, although usage of the app is under scrutiny.
Mike Carr, co-founder of the brand company NameStormers, said Mr Musk’s X logo could be interpreted as a menacing “Big Brother” tech-overlord vibe. Unlike the blue bird, which he described as warm and cuddly but perhaps a bit dated and weighed down by bad press, the new logo is “very tough,” he said.
Still, it has conjured up phrases like “X marks the spot” and could help Mr Musk differentiate the platform from his Twitter baggage, Mr Carr said.
“If they get that wrong and it’s someone other than Elon Musk, he would be taking a higher risk because people might start making fun of it,” said Mr Carr, who has helped come up with names for thousands of clients including CarMax, the used car maker.
Mr. Musk has long had an interest in the X name. In 1999, he helped found it X.com, an online bank. The company changed its name after merging with another startup to become online payments company PayPal.
In 2017, Mr. Musk said he bought back the X.com domain from PayPal. “Right now I don’t have any plans, but it has a lot of sentimental value to me,” he said tweeted at that time.
Tesla, Mr Musk’s electric car maker, also has a sport utility vehicle called the Model X. One of Mr Musk’s sons, X Æ A-12 Musk, is often called “X” for short. The holding companies formed to complete the acquisition of Twitter were named X Holdings. Mr. Musk also runs an artificial intelligence company called xAI.
“I like the letter X,” he said Posted on Sunday.
Mr Musk has shown a contempt for Twitter’s corporate culture to date. He has been annoyed by the number of bird references in the company’s internal team names and products. At one point, he changed the name of a crowd-sourced fact-checking feature from “Birdwatch” to “Community Notes.” He also recently had someone at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters cover up the “w” in Twitter’s name.
Among those who didn’t seem to mind the change was Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder and former CEO. In a tweet on Monday, he said that while a rebrand is not “essential” to realizing Mr Musk’s vision, there are arguments for it.
“The Twitter brand carries a lot of baggage,” said Mr. Dorsey wrote. “But all that matters is the value it offers, not the name.”
Martin Grasser, a San Francisco-based artist part of a team In 2011, who helped design Twitter’s latest bird logo, he said it should convey “simplicity, brevity, and clarity.” The goal is to have a logo that’s as memorable as Apple’s or Nike’s, he said.
Mr Grasser said Mr Musk can do whatever he wants with the brand, but “I’m hoping that the bird takes a place in the culture that’s a nice reminder, or that it becomes one of those logos that’s more of a culture than a company.”
