On Sunday, Elon Musk announced that Twitter’s distinctive blue bird logo would be replaced with its new logo: an ‘X’. The decision is the latest in a series of controversial changes to the social media platform post Musk’s purchase, such as introducing a limit on how many tweets a user can view.
“X.com now points to twitter.com,” the CEO of Tesla tweeted on Sunday afternoon. “Interim X logo goes live later today.”
He tweeted: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.
Musk posted an image of a flickering “X”, and later in a Twitter Spaces audio chat replied “Yes” when asked if the Twitter logo will change, adding that “it should have been done a long time ago”.
Many users have found Musk’s recent decisions regarding the platform contentious, to say the least. Some of his decisions were scrapped within days of its announcement, including scrapping the verified account “blue ticks”, while still allowing others to pay for verification. Or his plan to change the “for you” timeline to only show paid-for accounts.
The amount of criticism and backlash the billionaire’s stewardship of Twitter has received would make anyone second guess their decision. But not Musk. His decision to buy the social media platform last October, for an entire $44 billion, was spurred by his vision of creating a “super app”.
When Musk bought Twitter, he changed the company’s official name in April to X Holdings Corp, after his early venture X.com. Musk has a vision to create ‘X, the everything app’, an application that performs social media and payment functions, similar to China’s WeChat.
When he bought Twitter last October, he said the decision was “an accelerant” to creating ‘X’. Musk’s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp, is commonly known as SpaceX. And in 1999, Musk founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.
As a predictable consequence of another one of his many controversial Twitter-related decisions, users are irked. As one user pointed out “there’s probably a bit of brand value in the fact that a significant % of the world’s population knows what a “tweet” is.”
Another one pleaded Musk to “leave Twitter alone”, referring to a poll the CEO himself published in December 2022, asking the public if he should step down as the head of Twitter. 57% of the poll voted ‘Yes’, but it seems Musk has no intention to abide.