Elon Musk said he was about to make one of the most visible changes to Twitter since taking control of the social media company last fall: replacing its widely known bird logo.
in a tweet Early Sunday morning ET, Musk said, “Soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand, and gradually saying goodbye to all the birds.”
he Add to Soon after, “if a good enough X logo is released tonight,” it will “go live globally tomorrow.”
“X” is Musk’s term for what he describes as an “everything app” that could combine social media, instant messaging and payment services, similar to the popular Chinese app WeChat.
Mr Musk explain Buying Twitter was “an accelerator for the creation of X,” and the corporate entity he created to buy and control Twitter was called X Holdings.
Earlier Sunday, Musk said in a Twitter audio livestream that he was changing Twitter’s logo. “This should have been done a long time ago,” he said. “Sorry for taking so long.”
Hours later, Musk said in an email to Twitter employees that “we’re literally transitioning to X” and that it’s happening “just today.” “This is my last Twitter email,” he wrote, before closing with a salute emoji.
After Musk took the company private as part of acquiring the company, there were few barriers to making such changes to the company. But he could still run into resistance from the banks that lent him billions of dollars and the private investors he brought in in the deal, who might be wary of giving up one of Twitter’s most high-profile assets.
The company’s ad revenue has plummeted A sales executive left and there were concerns the site was more prone to questionable content. Now it faces well-funded rival Threads, the Twitter-like service recently launched by Facebook owner Meta.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk has a long-standing fondness for the letter X. In 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online bank that later merged with another startup to create PayPal. In 2017, he stated Repurchased the X.com domain name from PayPal.
Mr. Musk does not always deliver on his public statements, such as when he tweet The company will set up a content review committee to determine what kind of speech is acceptable on the site.
But he has been working to change some of Twitter’s practices, such as ending free verification of important user accounts (indicated by a white and blue checkmark) and charging users a subscription fee for a checkmark.
