Elon Musk and Twitter chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino unveiled a logo for the social media platform on Monday that featured a white "X" on a black background as a replacement for the familiar blue bird symbol.
"X is here! Let's do this," tweeted Yaccarino, who also posted a picture of the logo projected on the company's offices in San Francisco.
Both Yaccarino's and Musk's Twitter handles feature the X logo, although the Twitter blue bird is still visible across the platform.
#GoodbyeTwitter was trending on the platform, with reference to the old logo, as several users criticized the new one. Musk said in a post on Sunday he wanted to change Twitter's logo and polled his millions of followers on whether they would favour changing the site's colour scheme from blue to black.
He posted a picture of a stylized X against a black outer space-themed background. He also referred to the "interim X logo," and tweeted that "soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds."
Twitter has dropped the blue bird on its website for an 'X' logo as part of a rebranding. (Reuters)
In response to a tweet asking what tweets will be called under "X," Musk replied "x's." The original Twitter logo was designed in 2012 by a team of three.
"The logo was designed to be simple, balanced and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase 'e,'" tweeted Martin Grasser, one of the designers.
Weeks before completing his Twitter acquisition last year, Musk had said that buying the company would speed up his ambition to create an "everything app" called "X" by three to five years.
Not sure what subtle clues gave it way, but I like the letter X <a href="https://t.co/nwB2tEfLr8">pic.twitter.com/nwB2tEfLr8</a> —@elonmusk
Musk bought x.com back from PayPal in 2017, saying it had "sentimental value." Musk had co-founded x.com as an online bank in 1999, which later transformed into PayPal.
While Twitter's official page on the platform has been renamed as "X," the domain x.com is not active.
"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities," Yaccarino tweeted on Sunday.
Yaccarino, the former advertising chief at NBCUniversal who started as Twitter CEO on June 5, has taken over when the social media platform is trying to reverse a plunge in advertising revenue.
Since the takeover of Twitter, the company has faced tumultuous times with layoffs, a sharp drop in advertisers and the meteoric rise of Threads, Meta's response to Twitter.
badadvice_ca on July 24th, 2023 at 13:09 UTC »
This is one of the dumbest marketing decisions in recent memory. Why would you remove a world-wide recognized bird icon and replace it with an x?
_Dancing_Potato on July 24th, 2023 at 12:48 UTC »
This man is obsessed with this horrid branding. Fun fact, he wanted to call Paypal XPaypal at one point. The other execs did secret focus groups behind his back in which the average response was that they thought it was a porn site.
Evening-Cupcake8286 on July 24th, 2023 at 12:06 UTC »
So is it still called tweeting or a tweet?