The social media network’s website displayed the business’s new logo, but twitter.com’s URL and the blue “Tweet” button were still clearly visible, indicating that the rebranding wasn’t yet complete.
The company will now be known as X, and Musk and Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO, announced the rebranding on Sunday. They said the company would later expand into payments, banking, and commerce.
According to the design website Creative Bloq, Twitter was founded in 2006 and gets its name from the sound of birds chirping. The company has long used avian branding, purchasing a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15 in the early days.
Late on Sunday, Musk updated his Twitter bio to “X.com,” which now reroutes to twitter.com, and his profile picture to the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco.”
Additionally, he tweeted that a post would be known as “an X” under the site’s new name.
Musk has referred to his acquisition of Twitter as “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 online payments giant PayPal. Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation.
Still capable of serving as a social media platform, such an app might also offer messaging and mobile payments.
Musk had previously declared his intention to develop a super-app that would be based on WeChat, a social media platform that also supports mobile payments and messaging in China.
“You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life,” he said at a company town hall meeting in June of last year. “I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success.”
On Sunday night, the new logo was displayed on the exterior of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
In a tweet earlier, Yaccarino said, “Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.
Yaccarino, who Musk hired as Twitter’s CEO last month and was formerly an advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal, claimed that the social media platform was about to expand its capabilities.
According to her, “X is the future state of unlimited interaction, centered on audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, products, services, and opportunities.”
Simon Kemp, the CEO of the digital agency Kepios, expressed his skepticism about Twitter’s potential to develop into a super-app.
I don’t think many developers will rush to create third-party apps to integrate into the Twitter ecosystem unless Musk can offer outstanding incentives, and that’ll be especially difficult given the company’s existing debt, given how Musk has treated Twitter’s own employees since the acquisition.
However, he added that the website had the potential to develop into “a great (worldwide and paid) news aggregator.”
Since Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter last October, the platform’s advertising revenue has partially declined due to marketers’ dissatisfaction with Musk’s management style and the company’s mass firings, which destroyed content moderation.
In an effort to generate new revenue, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX has responded by moving toward integrating payments and commerce through the platform.
Though it has an estimated 200 million active users every day, Twitter has experienced numerous technical issues ever since Musk fired a large portion of its staff.
The social media platform’s new fees for services that were previously free, its adjustments to content moderation, and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts have all drawn criticism from both users and advertisers.
This month, Musk claimed that since he took over, Twitter had lost about half of its ad revenue.
This month saw the launch of Threads, a text-based platform from Facebook parent company Meta, which some sources estimate has up to 150 million users.
However, data from market research firm Sensor Tower shows that users are spending significantly less time on the competing app than they were in the weeks prior to its release.