Elon Musk Claims Twitter Will Soon Be Renamed ‘X’

Todd Spangler
·3 min read
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Goodbye Twitter, hello X?

Elon Musk, the multibillionaire who controls Twitter, said the social network he took over in October 2022 will be renamed “X” — relegating the cute little blue birdie to the scrap heap of internet history.

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“Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote in a late-night Saturday post. He also said the platform’s website will be run off the x.com domain name, and posted a poll asking whether it should “Change default platform color to black” (with about 75% votes in favor as of Sunday morning).

“If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [it] go live worldwide tomorrow,” Musk tweeted (or should tat be “x’d”?). Musk about an hour later posted what appears to be a logo for X:

In April 2023, the company disclosed that Musk had changed the company’s name from Twitter Inc. to X Corp., which is incorporated in Nevada with its main place of business San Francisco.

The name change to X has been on Musk’s mind since before he officially got his hands on Twitter. On Oct. 4, 2022, in the tech mogul’s first comments after the news of his decision to proceed with the Twitter deal, he wrote in a tweet, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He didn’t elaborate, but had previously praised apps like TikTok and WeChat as models for what Twitter should become. Meanwhile, X.com was the original name of the an internet bank Musk co-founded in 1999 before it changed its name to PayPal a year later.

Twitter, launched in 2006, has used a bird as it mascot since 2008 and the current design of the Twitter Bird logo was introduced in 2012.

Musk is the most-followed user on Twitter, with 149 million followers on the platform. Barack Obama is second, with 132 million. “Not sure what subtle clues gave it [away], but I like the letter X,” Musk posted early Sunday. One of Musk’s children with the musician and artist Grimes is named X Æ A-XII, who goes by the nickname “X.”

After Musk assumed control of Twitter in a $44 billion deal, he fired Twitter’s executive leadership and dismantled its board. Twitter then conducted four rounds of broad employee layoffs, slashing its headcount by about 80%, from an estimated 7,800 to about 1,500.

Musk hired ex-NBCUniversal ad exec Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO, hoping to reverse the company’s dramatic drop in ad revenue. A week ago, Musk posted that Twitter’s cash flow remains negative because of an approximately 50% decline in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load.

Musk has been trying to boost subscription revenue through Twitter Blue ($8/month), whose primary benefits include a “verified” blue-check mark (previously available only to celebs and other notable accounts). The company recently began sharing ad revenue with certain creators; to be eligible to receive payments, users must be Twitter Blue subscribers.

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