Twitter is now X
In another step towards the transformation of Twitter, which Elon Musk bought last year for $44 billion, the short-messaging platform was rebranded yesterday as ‘X’. The ‘blue bird’ logo disappeared.
X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, although the social media platform still invites users to ‘tweet’.
In June, in a company-wide email a few weeks after she took over, the Musk-appointed CEO of Twitter, or X, Linda Yaccarino, wrote that the company/brand intends to provide “new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities”. In other words, become a so-called super-app, something akin to China’s WeChat.
‘X’ is the latest aspect of that transformation.
In a series of tweets yesterday, she partly repeated what she had written in that email, about Twitter wanting to become a centre of audio, video, messaging, payments and banking, and used words like ‘innovate’, ‘potential’, ‘transformation’ and ‘looking forward’ to drive home the message of further crucial changes.
An article on cbsnews.com wrote how “Musk appears to have a longstanding fixation on the letter X, dubbing his very first startup X.com”. It says how, after buying Twitter, Musk “reportedly texted Isaacson that he was ‘very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!’”
The article goes on to list Musk’s properties with ‘X’ in it: “The letter X surfaces throughout Musk’s other endeavors as well, including his space-exploration venture SpaceX, his recently launched artificial-intelligence app xAI and the Model X, one of electric car company Tesla’s earliest models. Musk even refers to his son with singer Grimes, by the name X.”
