Fresh on the heels of the “rate limit” debacle, Elon Musk has rolled out yet another Twitter “improvement” that seems aimed at systematically destroying his $44 billion purchase. This one is a rebrand: Henceforth, Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore; it shall be known simply as “X.”
From one point of view, this is Musk’s most audacious move yet. But looking at it another way, Musk has simply added to a long list of pointless, chaotic messes on the platform, and things haven’t really changed that much. Here’s a guide to how, exactly, X differs from Twitter.
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The logo is an X now, not a bird.
Early on Sunday morning eastern time, Musk announced that Twitter’s iconic bird logo would soon be no more:
It seems that Musk, who bought Twitter last year, didn’t put much thought into what the new logo would be — or he just wanted to seem edgy. The original bird logo was carefully designed by a team of three creative professionals:
But Musk suggested the new logo could be something submitted by users:
He also mused, nonsensically:
Within a few hours, he dramatically unveiled the new X logo by posting a flickering image to his feed and projecting it onto the side of Twitter headquarters. He said the X was meant “to embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique,” whatever that means.
The revamp wasn’t totally out of the blue. Musk changed the name of the company from Twitter Inc. to X Corp in April, and as the New York Times noted, he’s been really into the letter for years:
Mr. Musk has long been interested in the X name. In 1999, he helped found X.com, an online bank. The company changed its name after it merged with another start-up to form what would become the online payments company PayPal.
In 2017, Mr. Musk said he repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal. “No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me,” he tweeted at the time.
Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric automaker, also has a sport-utility vehicle called the Model X. One of Mr. Musk’s sons, X Æ A-12 Musk, is often called “X” for short. The holding companies created to close the acquisition of Twitter were named X Holdings. Mr. Musk also leads an artificial intelligence company called xAI.
The design of this particular X isn’t anything special. It looks oddly similar to a Unicode character known as “mathematical double-struck capital X,” according to Business Insider.
Musk said in another message that the logo “Probably changes later, certainly will be refined,” so don’t get too attached.
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You can get to the site from X.com (and Twitter.com).
On Sunday afternoon, Musk announced that X.com now redirects to Twitter. But on desktop the URL at the top of the page was still https://twitter.com/home as of Monday afternoon.
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Branding across the platform is wildly inconsistent.
On Monday morning, users who signed into Twitter on desktop found that the 11-year-old blue bird logo had been replaced by a black and white X. But multiple references to “Twitter” and “tweets” remained:
As of Monday afternoon, the mobile app showed the bird, not the X logo, and both symbols and names appeared on the log in page:
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Tweets are Xs now.
Yes, Musk has found a name for “short messages posted online” that’s even stupider than “truths.” It seems doubtful that people will adopt it anytime soon.
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The new name for retweets is TBD.
You don’t want to overthink things before you make major changes to one of the world’s most recognizable brands.
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Someday X may be something else entirely.
Musk’s longtime ambition has been to create an “everything app,” like the app WeChat, which is used in China for everything from messaging to mobile payments to shopping. Back in October, Musk tweeted, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino tried to shed more light on Twitter’s rebrand in a series of … Xs? … posted on Sunday. She said more words than Musk, but didn’t clarify much:
So in Musk’s dreams, the site once known as Twitter will soon be something entirely different. But for now, it’s just Twitter with confusing, Musky new branding to reflect its confusing, Musky new soul.
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