Elon Musk and the new CEO of Twitter said that the social media platform would undergo a rebranding process, including a new name and logo, and will look into payments, banking, and commerce.
Twitter which was founded in 2006, takes its name from the sound of birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.
Tweeting a picture of the company’s new logo – a white X on a black background – late Sunday night, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino said, “X is here! Let’s do this.”
Also, late Sunday night, Musk changed his profile picture to the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco,” and changed his Twitter bio to “X .com,” which now redirects to Twitter.com.
Musk tweeted, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk also tweeted that under the site’s new identity, a post would be called “an X.”
The changes were not visible on the website as of 0630 GMT Monday.
Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation and previously said his takeover of the social media giant was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” — a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become payments giant PayPal.
Such an app could still function as a social media platform and include messaging and mobile payments.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted earlier on Sunday.
Yaccarino, an advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk poached last month to become Twitter’s CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.
“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino tweeted.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform’s advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation and Musk’s management style.
