Musk’s Twitter Rebranding as X Is Off to a Confusing, Haphazard Start

Over the weekend, Elon Musk issued the unexpected fiat via late-night/early-morning tweetstorm (x-storm?) that Twitter would now be known as X — complete with a new X logo that has replaced the bonny blue birdie on the service’s website.

Per Musk, you won’t be posting tweets on his social platform, you will be throwing up… “x’s.”

Musk’s hand-picked new CEO Linda Yaccarino, late of NBCUniversal, tried to explain the situation. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” she, uh, x’d on Sunday. “Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

But the only evident changes for Twitter, as of now, are that Musk is insisting everyone call it X, and the introduction of the new X logo (which is “so generic that it appears almost identical to the Unicode character ‘Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X,'” as the Verge observed) — but only on the web interface.

Still unchanged are the Twitter name, the term “tweet” and other elements of the overall Twitter brand. The company launched x, but that redirects to twitter. The button on the website for creating a post still says “Tweet” and the search bar still says “Search Twitter.” And tweets embedded on third-party sites still carry the blue bird logo (see below). Meanwhile, the Twitter apps for iOS and Android appear to be entirely the same, including the iconic blue bird.

The main Twitter account has changed the name to X along with the new logo, but it’s still at twitter/twitter. Right now, the @x handle on the site is a private account, created in 2007, with a bio that currently reads “Very interesting times.”

All of the company’s corporate pages still refer to Twitter (i.e., its help section and about page) and include the highly recognizable blue bird logo introduced in 2012: “Twitter is what’s happening and what people are talking about right now,” the company’s website says as of Monday. The only X factor reflected on the pages is that the company’s official corporate name is now X Corp.

It’s par for the course for Musk’s mercurial management style, where the cart often comes before the horse.

To be sure, the X name didn’t come out of left field. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk tweeted, without elaboration, prior to the close of his $44 billion buyout in October 2022. And Musk is obviously a huge fan of X ambiguous variable — i.e., SpaceX; the Tesla Model X; his new artificial intelligence venture, xAI; the original name of PayPal as X; and even one of his kids, nicknamed X (short for “X Æ A-XII”).

But why change Twitter to X now? One possibility: Musk wants to recapture headlines and steer the conversation away from how Twitter compares with meta’s Threads, which debuted as a direct competitor to Twitter earlier this month. While Threads is positioned as a “text-based conversation app,” X aspires to be far more than that. “There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything,” Yaccarino wrote.

Of course, not everyone thinks scrapping Twitter’s 17-year brand equity is a terrific move. “Rebranding HBO to Max was the dumbest rebrand in recent history. Elon: Hold my beer and/or whatever is being partaken at 3 am,” tech journalist Kara Swisher snarked on Twitter about the X pivot.

“I’m still gonna call it Twitter,” YouTube creator Marques Brownlee posted Sunday. Replied Musk, “Not for long.”

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