Twitter’s owner Elon Musk and its new CEO said Sunday that the social media network would ditch its bird logo, be rebranded with the name X and move quickly into payments, banking and commerce.
Founded in 2006, Twitter takes its name from a play on 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 Blog.
He had earlier tweeted that “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 0530 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 also include messaging and mobile payments.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino tweeted 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.
