Elon Musk announces that Twitter will have its logo changed to an X symbol

Jul 24, 2023

3 min read

In a sequence of posts on his Twitter profile, Musk announced that the social network's logo will become an "X", which will replace the current badge with the blue bird.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk says he will change Twitter's logo - Photo: Reproduction / Internet

Businessman Elon Musk announced on Sunday (23), through a series of publications on his Twitter, that the social network logo will undergo a significant change. According to Musk, the new logo will be an "X" that will replace the current bluebird badge. Furthermore, the entrepreneur asked network users to change the color platform defaults to black. Musk has issued yet another challenge, this time to those who can come up with the most impressive X logo for his latest brand.

"If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, it will go live worldwide tomorrow," he declared.

Change

Twitter Executive Director Linda Yaccarino, officially announced on Sunday the launch of brand X. In a post on her Twitter account, she said that having a second chance to make a big impression in life or business is exceptionally rare. Twitter has already made a big impression by transforming the way we communicate, and now, with the X brand, the company will take this even further, joining the global communications landscape.

Yaccarino also provided details on Brand X's focus, which will center on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking and will be a true global marketplace of ideas, goods, services and opportunities. She highlighted that the X platform will be able to deliver practically everything that users are looking for. The launch promises to bring a new dimension of possibilities and innovations to the market.

Twitter

In April of this year, Musk promoted a change in official company name to X Holdings Corp, in homage to his initial venture, X.com. This change was intended to reflect its vision to create "X, the Everything App", which would operate social media and payment functions similarly to China's popular WeChat.

This is just one of several controversial changes that were integrated on the social media platform since it was managed by Elon Musk. On October 27, 2023, the billionaire bought Twitter after six months of negotiations. Since then, The social network has gone through a series of transformations, which received criticism, resulted in a severe cut in the number of employees and provoked some back and forth in decisions about policies for using the platform.

Despite laying off half of the company's staff following the acquisition, Musk recently revealed that it still faces negative cash flow, carrying a heavy debt load, after losing half of its advertising revenue. This has jeopardized its plans to achieve positive cash flow by June.

Shortly after Musk's acquisition of the company, many advertisers decided to abandon the platform, fearing that their marks would be damaged in the midst of the initial chaos. These advertisers also reduced their ad spend, in part due to concerns about the changes implemented by the new owner, which allowed more hateful content to spread. Faced with this situation, the appointment of Yaccarino, a prestigious advertising executive, became essential to attract back advertisers who had suspended or significantly reduced their investments in the platform.

Controversies

Should the rebranding go through, it would represent the latest example of Musk's penchant for announcing big and controversial site changes, seemingly offhand in his public feed, with mixed results. According to Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce, this change is likely to cause confusion among a large portion of Twitter users, who are already dissatisfied with the platform due to several other major changes promoted by Musk.

The moves already made by Musk were criticized and underwent revisions after negative reactions. An example of this was an attempt to remove "blue ticks" from users verified as genuine, while allowing others to pay for this privilege. However, this measure was later reversed due to the controversy it generated.

Another controversial initiative was the proposal to change the timeline "for you", showing only paid accounts. However, this idea was quickly awaited within days of the announcement, possibly due to public pressure. Musk recently implemented a restriction on the amount of content users can view on a daily basis, as a way to deal with bot accounts. However, this measure was interpreted by many as a boost to the growth of the rival service, Threads, from the company Meta, launched at the beginning of the month.

These service policy changes caused controversy and generated negative repercussions for Musk's platform.

Musk

The initial revelation of the removal of the Twitter logo was made by Elon Musk on his account, as was to be expected. Furthermore, Musk explained that his motivation for changing the symbol was "to embody the imperfections in all of us that make us unique". To illustrate this, he left a photo of himself making an "X" symbol with his arms crossed in front of a Tesla Model X car poster, accompanied by the caption: "Not sure what subtle clues gave him away, but I like the letter X."