On Sunday, Elon Musk announced that his microblogging platform Twitter will undergo a major rebranding, designed to embrace the new X Corp brand which the CEO has described as the foundation of an “everything app.”
On Sunday, Musk tweeted, “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” adding, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live [sic] worldwide tomorrow.”
In a later Twitter Spaces chat, he confirmed the move, noting that the change in logo, “should have been done a long time ago.”
Left unclear was whether Musk was really soliciting user input for the creation of a new logo, or if he has already come up with one. Potential logos poured in from across the platform as of Sunday evening, many of which sought to retain the Twitter bird logo. However other users questioned the wisdom of discarding the bird logo, noting that on its own website, Twitter says that the bird logo is, “our most recognizable asset.”
In April, Twitter was officially merged with Musk’s X Corp, causing the old platform’s corporate structure to cease to exist on paper, despite the platform continuing to use the name, and the bird logo.
Previously, Musk has said that he purchased Twitter with the objective of using it as the foundation for an “everything app,” which within three to five years, would offer multiple services, from communication, to shopping, to texting, to calling, to travel booking, to stock trading, to banking, and other services, similarly to the Chinese app, WeChat.
Musk however is having trouble monetizing the platform, and has spoken of its financial woes. So far, fewer than 200,000 users have signed up for the company’s subscription service Twitter Blue as of April. As the company has announced recently that free users would be limited to only viewing 1,000 tweets per day, in an effort to force users to upgrade their accounts, it has triggered an exodus from the site.
In an effort to increase subscriptions, Musk announced that Blue users would be given a cut of advertising revenues which were made off their posts. Earlier this month users received the first round of checks, with users such as the long-standing anti-Trump poster Brian Krassenstein getting a check for nearly $25,000.
Meanwhile Twitter received new competition when Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, launched its Twitter clone, called Threads earlier this month, which it advertised as a “kinder” version of Twitter with stricter moderation standards. Although almost 50 million people signed up at the outset of the launch, about half of them never returned, according to recently published data from website usage tracker Similarweb.
Musk has threatened to sue Meta for stealing trade secrets from Twitter as well as intellectual property, by hiring many of its former employees to produce an app which is almost a carbon copy of Twitter.
