On Saturday night, Elon Musk took to Twitter to announce that the social media platform would no longer be called Twitter. “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he wrote. He followed up to specify the replacement name: X.
Nearly 24 hours later, a full rebrand was underway. On the platform’s website, Twitter’s iconic bubbly sky-blue bird logos were switched out for slick black-and-white Xs. On Monday, a crane was spotted removing the Twitter logo from the side of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. And the company’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, tweeted—or, uh, xed?—about “a second chance to make another big impression.”
It’s the latest in a series of confounding decisions that Musk has made since purchasing Twitter in October 2022. Considering that the company’s ad sales are down by nearly 50 percent since the billionaire took over, that the platform is suffering from serious operational woes, and that Meta’s newest offering, Threads, is gaining momentum as a competitor, strong brand recognition seemed to be one of the last valuable things Twitter had going for it. And now that’s been, well, x-ed out.
It’s all very confusing! Which is why I’m here to answer all your questions about the rebrand.
So, no more blue bird?
No more blue bird. It’s gone away to live on a farm with the Frito Bandito, the Quiznos Spongmonkeys, and Joe Camel.
Why is this happening?
As with everything involving Musk, that’s an extremely difficult question to answer. But this has been a long time in the making. Back in October 2022, when Musk’s check cleared and Twitter officially became his property, he laid out a vision for turning it into an “everything” or “super” app that allows users to buy stocks, deposit funds, and message people all in one place. A place that Yaccarino says will be “the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” In other words, Tom Haverford’s Entertainment 720 from Parks and Rec.
Amid the chaos of running Twitter, Musk has been inching closer to this goal. In April, he quietly merged Twitter Inc. with an entity called X Corp. That same month, he partnered with the crypto trading platform eToro so Twitter users could browse market charts and buy and sell stocks. Even though this so-called super app is still mostly just conceptual, it now appears Musk has decided to fast-forward to the rebranding.
OK, he’s moving quickly. But why now?
There are two schools of thought for why Musk wants to rebrand now. The first is that Twitter has simply become synonymous with dysfunction. It was mismanaged by its leadership before Musk, and it’s certainly mismanaged now. And just as Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021 to escape all the negative press about its privacy violations and its impact on voter manipulation, Twitter will apparently abruptly rebrand as X.
CEO Yaccarino, who is often left to make business sense out of Musk’s decisions after the fact, put it as diplomatically as possible. “Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate,” she wrote. “Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
The second school of thought is that this rebrand is yet another way for Musk to stamp the company formerly known as Twitter with his own personal brand. After Threads debuted as a less-toxic alternative to Twitter, Musk wrote the “negative feedback” on his platform was “vastly preferable to some sniffy censorship bureau!” (This, just weeks after Musk challenged Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to fight in a “cage match.”) And in encouraging his followers to come up with an X logo, Musk suggested the design should “embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.” So one could interpret the arrival of X as a way to signal the platform is now edgy and dangerous in comparison to a cheery Meta clone.
To the second school of thought: It’s worth reiterating that we’re talking about Elon Musk, a guy who was so butthurt that Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet outperformed his that he woke up his engineers in the middle of the night and directed them to juice the platform’s algorithm so that his posts would receive more engagement. If he’s willing to rejigger the company’s infrastructure to prop up his ego, what’s stopping him from reshaping the platform’s look and feel to mirror the futuristic bro-y aesthetic that defines Tesla and SpaceX?
Sure, but still: What does the letter X have to do with Elon Musk?
Musk’s obsession with the letter dates back to 1999, when he founded an online bank called X.com. That company merged with another to become PayPal, which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 and created a crew of wealthy tech power brokers known as the “PayPal mafia.” (Which includes Musk.) He was attached enough to the company that he bought back the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017.
Over the years, the letter has popped up in the names of his businesses, products, and personal life. There’s SpaceX, the Tesla Model X, and X Æ A-12 (pronounced Ex-Ash-A-Twelve), one of his children with Grimes.
What does the X stand for in this case?
Theoretically, it could stand for a lot of things. Grimes once described it as “the unknown variable,” which I suppose we all know from high school math class. It’s also the letter you might see on a bottle of cartoon poison, or some particularly strong moonshine. It marks the spot on a map where treasure is buried. And X is also, inevitably, gon’ give it to ya.
In reality, though, we don’t know what it stands for here, and perhaps that’s the point. It can stand for anything. Musk may have chosen an enigmatic name because he wants to make Twitter a catchall for whatever pops into his mind at a given moment. X is everything and nothing. It’s a placeholder for an actual idea. And in that way, it’s as much a rebrand of Twitter itself as it is a reframing of how Musk conducts himself at the company.
So, you’re saying this will make Twitter even worse?
Yes. Yes, I am. Godspeed. I’ll see you in the multiverse. (Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon.)