Marking one of the biggest major shifts since his takeover of the social media platform since he acquired it in October of 2022 for $44 billion, Elon Musk changed Twitter to X.
The rebranding of one of the most popular social media platforms began on Sunday night, nixing its familiar blue bird logo and replacing it with an X.
The rebranding of Twitter is part of a projected complete overhaul of the platform to turn it into an “everything app” that will not only be an app for social networking, but also banking, shopping and pretty much any online service you might need.
But Why X?
The Tech Billionaire has had a bit of a thing for the letter X for quite a while. The founder and CEO of SpaceX and the newly launched xAI, has a son he named X Æ A-12 – anyone else detecting a pattern here?
Back in 1999, Musk had launched an online payment company called x.com, which became PayPal. He bought back the x.com URL in 2017 before Paypal was acquired by eBay in 2002 in a deal worth $1.5 billion in stock, with Musk receiving $165 million as part of the arrangement.
The x.com domain now redirects to the former Twitter platform, now called X.
Social media platforms, like the former Twitter, now X, use AI-based tools to collect, analyze and tag large amounts of user-generated data for both advertising and moderation purposes. But it’s expected that the X platform will be working much more closely with Musk’s other companies xAI, and Tesla as it moves forward to create a “super app” in which AI is expected to play a much bigger role.
A work crew on a crane began to remove the Twitter sign from the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Monday, as if to make it abundantly clear that this is no longer the same social network that he’d purchased last year.
In a twist of fate, they only got as far as removing the “Twitt” on one side of the sign before SFPD put a halt to the sign removal as there was some confusion as to the whether the proper permits had been acquired.
But at the end of the day, sign or no sign, X or bird, it is pretty much the same social network it was a couple of days ago.
This is not the first hiccup with his social media platform. The rebranding, though it’s been some time in the making, comes just on the heels of Facebook and Instagram parent Meta releasing their new text-based app Threads that directly targets Twitter users.
Some are questioning if the rebranding of a household name was the best marketing strategy right now as it’s expected to be a few years before the new services are up and running on the platform.
