Elon Musk has unveiled a rebranding of Twitter with a large X logo. “X.com now points to twitter.com,” the Tesla chief executive tweeted Sunday afternoon. “Interim X logo goes live later today.”
The company’s chief executive Linda Yaccarino “tweeted” an image of the apparent new logo beamed on the side of its headquarters in San Francisco, California. “Lights. Camera. X!” she wrote.
Lights. Camera. X! pic.twitter.com/K9Ou47Qb4R
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 24, 2023
Musk also posted an image of the new logo on the company’s HQ – and when asked what tweets would now be called, he said: “x’s”.
It comes after the world’s richest man spent the weekend teasing an imminent rebranding of the social media platform he bought last October for $44bn.
The official company name, Twitter Inc, had already been changed to X Corp back in April.
Musk and his desire to launch “X, the everything app”
Musk has long spoken of his desire to launch “X, the everything app”, even before purchasing Twitter.
He has previously compared his plan with China’s WeChat, which combines familiar features like messaging, payments, a marketplace, and public posts in one place.
Yaccarino appeared to confirm that was the strategy on Sunday.
“X is the future of unlimited interactivity,” she said, centred on “audio, video, messaging, payments/banking” and “powered by AI”.
Musk launched his own artificial intelligence start-up earlier this year, dubbed xAI, which would work with his existing companies – including Tesla and Twitter.
Despite laying off half the company’s staff after acquisition, Musk revealed in recent days that it remains cashflow-negative with a heavy debt burden, after losing half of its advertising revenue, scuppering his plans to become cashflow-positive by June.
Many advertisers left the platform shortly after Musk took over the company, fearing damage to their brands in the early chaos.
They have cut back on ad spending partly because of concerns about changes the new owner has made that have allowed for more hateful content to flourish.
A key rationale behind the appointment of Yaccarino, a well-respected advertising executive, was to woo back advertisers who have either paused spending on the platform or reined it in significantly.
Musk’s moves – such as scrapping the legacy “blue ticks” of users whose accounts were verified as genuine, while allowing others to pay for the privilege – have often received criticism and been revised or reversed after a backlash.
A plan to change the “for you” timeline to show only paid-for accounts was scrapped within days of its announcement.
Meanwhile, its recent switch to limit the amount of content users can view each day to tackle bot accounts has been seen as bolstering the growth of Meta’s rival service, Threads, which launched earlier this month.
Threads, which is being billed as a text-based version of Meta’s Instagram that the company said offers “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations”, picked up 100 million sign-ups in its first five days.
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