Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as ‘X’

On Sunday night, Twitter’s headquarters were lit up with the company's new ‘X’ logo, which has now replaced the company’s iconic bird on the website, and the profile badges of company employees.

Elon Musk, the company’s owner, and Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s new CEO, have both discussed plans to transform the social media platform into an “everything app” that would eventually provide payments, banking and commerce services. 

Twitter’s official company name was changed to X Corp in April 2023, but the company had not yet rebranded on the platform. 

This changed on Sunday evening, when Musk announced the company’s plans to rebrand the following day, saying that “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.

He added: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [it] go live worldwide tomorrow.”

Following the announcement, the billionaire changed his profile picture to the new logo and added ‘X.com’ to his Twitter bio. He also revealed that tweets will be renamed ‘Xs’ as part of the rebranding.

The day before the rebranding, Yaccarino laid out her vision for X at a meeting with top marketers in Napa, California, as she aimed to recover the trust lost following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company. 

The Financial Times reported that Yaccarino told the board of the Mobile Marketing Association of plans to transform Twitter into a platform that integrated audio, video and payments features, enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. 

On Monday morning, Yaccarino confirmed the rebranding by writing “X is here! Let's do this” and then tweeting a picture of the logo projected onto the company’s headquarters.

She added: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

“There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything.”

As part of this process, Twitter also aims to work closely with Musk’s new AI company, xAI, the company said, and employ user data to train the AI algorithm. In turn, xAI’s technology could be used to improve Twitter.

The Twitter rebranding is only one of the many controversial changes Elon Musk has made since his $44bn (£38bn) takeover of the company in October 2022. These include dissolving the company’s board of directors, making significant changes to the platform’s content moderation policies, and firing more than half of the company’s workers along with a number of additional contractors.

Earlier this month, Musk sparked a backlash after announcing that the social media platform was putting temporary limits on the number of posts users are able to view.

As a result of these controversies, Twitter has lost roughly half of its advertising revenue in less than a year. The company has not yet reached positive cash flow.

“We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load,” Musk wrote on July 14. 

Twitter originally took its name from the sound of birds chirping, and the firm's bird logo was described on the company website as Twitter’s “most recognisable asset”. It was nicknamed ‘Larry T Bird’ by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in 2011, after Larry Bird, the former basketball player.

This is not the first time Twitter’s logo has been changed. In April, the company replaced its bird logo with a Shiba Inu dog, a reference to the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Musk was then accused of insider trading by a group of Dogecoin investors, who said he had profited from driving up the cryptocurrency’s value.