Billionaire Elon Musk is replacing the bird-shaped logo of his social network Twitter with the letter X. The abrupt rebranding is meant to reflect Musk’s grand ambitions for the app. But the experts are scratching their heads!
With a series of late-night tweets, billionaire Elon Musk announced his latest take on Twitter, the social network he bought for $44 billion last year. The bluebird has been the platform’s logo for a decade. Since Monday afternoon, it has been replaced by a black and white logo with the letter X, provided by a Twitter user. It’s the end of an era.
Musk replaced his social media profile picture with the new logo, and Twitter’s corporate accounts got a makeover. The logo in Apple’s and Google’s app stores has also been replaced, although it retains the Twitter name. The URL remains Twitter.com, but now the X.com URL also redirects to the Twitter web page.
All references to Twitter should be changed to X. Musk indicated in reply to a user’s tweet that he planned to rename tweets “X” from now on. The fact that he mentioned in an email to surprised staff that it was his last email sent from a Twitter address reinforces this hypothesis.
Love For A Letter
It has long been known that Musk has a thing for the letter X. The payment company with which he had his first success was called X.com before becoming PayPal. His space company is called SpaceX, and automaker Tesla has a Model X. The billionaire’s new AI start-up is called X.AI and he named his son X Æ A-XII, who goes by the name X.
He also wants to give a role within Twitter that has been clear for some time. Musk has already named the holding company above Twitter X Corp. And he’s owned the X.com domain name for years, which he bought from PayPal in 2017. “This one has great sentimental value to me,” he said at the time.
An “app For Everything”
Twitter’s rebranding is in line with Musk’s vision of what Twitter should be. The billionaire has previously said he sees the social network as a springboard to something bigger. According to him, the platform has the potential to become an “app for everything”, like the Chinese app WeChat. This app is used by Chinese people for just about everything, from communicating with each other to online shopping to banking. The rebranding to X should reflect this larger vision than the bluebird, which simply symbolizes the online conversations that take place on Twitter today.
End Of The Honeymoon For Threads
Twitter has been suffering competition from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, for several weeks. The new app, which is almost a copy of Twitter, got off to a flying start. Within days, it had more than 100 million users.
But the enthusiasm has since waned. According to figures from the data company Sensor Tower, which the Wall Street Journal was able to consult, some 13 million people are still active daily on Threads. This represents a drop of 70%.
This isn’t to say Threads is doomed. It is normal for the start-up to be somewhat boosted by curiosity. Only then can we see if users remain loyal to the platform? This should be verified in the coming months.
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