Twitter Scraps Iconic Blue Bird, Officially Rebrands As ‘X’

Twitter officially rebranded as X on Monday, replacing the iconic blue bird image with a black and white X logo.

The social media site’s webpage was rebranded with the new name after Elon Musk shared an image of the X logo projected on the side of the company’s San Francisco headquarters shortly after midnight.

Branding had not yet changed on the mobile app for many users.

On Sunday Musk, who bought Twitter last year for $44 billion (£34bn), said in a tweet that the firm would soon “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.

‘Everything app’

He said tweets would be renamed x’s, but when asked what retweets would be called he said the “concept should be rethought”.

The rebrand is part of Musk’s vision to transform Twitter into an “everything app” inspired by the likes of China’s WeChat, which includes functions ranging from communications to e-commerce and payments.

Twitter chief executive Lina Yaccarino said X would be “centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking” and added it would be powered by artificial intelligence.

“Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate,” she wrote. “Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”

Musk, who changed the name of the Twitter business officially to X Corp in April, said the rebrand “should have been done a long time ago”.

Recurring theme

The entrepreneur said in a post on Sunday that he likes the letter “x”, and it has appeared prominently in his other business ventures, including X.com, a payments platform that was one of his first ventures and later merged with another firm to form PayPal.

Musk repurchased the X.com domain name from PayPal in 2017 and as of Monday it redirects to Twitter.

He is also the founder and chief executive of SpaceX and recently launched xAI as a competitor to OpenAI and its popular ChatGPT product.

Musk and recording artist Grimes in 2020 named their first child X Æ A-12, but Grimes explained that the X was her contribution, saying the letter represented the “unknown variable”.