Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, and its new CEO announced on Sunday that the social media platform would get rid of its bird logo, change its name to X, and quickly enter the payment, banking, and commerce sectors.
Twitter, which was founded in 2006, gets its name from the sound of birds chirping. The company has used avian branding ever since purchasing a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15.
Late Sunday night, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted a picture of the brand’s new logo, which is a white X on a black background. Let’s do this.”
Also late Sunday night, Musk changed his profile picture to the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco,” and changed his Twitter bio to “X.com,” which now redirects to twitter.com.
Musk previously tweeted, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we will make (it) go live globally tomorrow.”
Musk also tweeted that a post would be referred to as “an X” under the site’s new moniker.
The changes were not visible on the website as of 0630 GMT Monday.
Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation and previously said his takeover of the social media giant was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app—a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become payments giant PayPal.
Such an app could still serve as a social media platform while also offering messaging and mobile payments.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted earlier on Sunday.
Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal advertising sales executive who Musk hired as Twitter’s CEO last month, said the social media platform was on the verge of expanding its scope.
“X is the future state of limitless interactivity centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino wrote on Twitter.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform’s advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation — as well as Musk’s management style.
In response, the billionaire SpaceX boss has moved towards introducing payments and commerce through the platform in a search for new revenue.
Twitter is estimated to have 200 million daily active users, but it has experienced numerous technical failures since the 52-year-old Tesla founder purchased the app and fired much of its staff.
Many users and advertisers have reacted negatively to the social media site’s new charges for previously free services, changes to content moderation, and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts since then.
Musk stated earlier this month that Twitter has lost roughly half of its advertising revenue since his takeover in October.
Facebook parent Meta also this month launched its own text-based platform, called Threads, which has up to 150 million users, according to some estimates.
However, according to Sensor Tower data, the amount of time users spend on the competitor app has decreased in the weeks since its launch.
