Global Courant
Elon Musk has long been enamored with the letter X.
Now he’s killing off the Twitter brand and iconic blue bird in favor of X as part of an effort to turn his $44 billion acquisition into something truly his.
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Musk’s vision for X resembles China’s WeChat, a super app that people can use for entertainment and buying goods and services online, in addition to posting updates and messaging their friends. But the rebrand comes after months of erratic behavior by the world’s richest person who turned off users and pushed advertisers away, leaving Twitter in a difficult financial position and increasingly vulnerable to competition.
Killing off an iconic internet brand is “extremely risky” at a time when rival apps like the new Instagram Threads and smaller upstarts like Bluesky lure users, said Mike Proulx, an analyst at Forrester.
Musk has “single-handedly wiped out a brand name for 15 years that has carved its place in our cultural lexicon,” Proulx said in an email.
A spokesperson for the company has not commented on this story.
It’s not entirely a surprise move. Musk had already converted Twitter’s corporate name to X Corp, which itself is a subsidiary of X Holding Corp, as revealed in an April file in court. Musk said last October, just before buying Twitter, that he saw the $44 billion deal as “an acceleration in the creation of X, the everything app.”
The letter X features prominently in the name of Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. And more than two decades ago, X.com was the name of Musk’s payments company that eventually became PayPal through a merger with a rival at the time.
Name changes have become quite common among legendary web companies. became Facebook meta at the end of 2021, and Google adopted the Alphabet nickname six years earlier. In those cases, however, the newly named parent companies kept the branding of their core services, so that Facebook users and Google searchers could continue to do their thing undisturbed.
Musk seems to be betting that he can do away with Twitter altogether. Over the weekend, he introduced the new X logo and said in a tweet that “soon we will say goodbye to the twitter brand and gradually all birds.”
Linda Yaccarino, who hired Musk as CEO in May, said in an email to employees Monday that the company “will continue to delight our entire community with new experiences across audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities.”
Succeeding in that mission is easier said than done.
Musk’s desire to make X a super app requires “time, money and people,” which Twitter “no longer has,” Proulx said. Earlier this month, Musk said Twitter has suffered a 50% drop in ad revenue and that it “needs to achieve positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”
Some advertisers began to worry about promoting their products on Twitter due to reports of an increase in hate speech, racist and offensive comments on the platform, as documented by multiple civil rights groups and researchers.
Musk has tried to offset some ad slump with a premium subscription service. But at $8 a month, the company would need tens of millions of subscribers to make up for the losses.
The advertisers who remain on the platform now have to use a new jargon. People and businesses around the world know Twitter posts as “tweets.” Like Kleenex, Twitter was able to develop a recognizable brand that was immediately known to consumers, an achievement that any company marketing team would celebrate.
Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair, told CNBC last week that his team of analysts “didn’t pick up anything” from advertisers they surveyed as part of a recent investigation. questionnaire in the digital advertising market would indicate that these companies had increased their spend on Twitter. Meanwhile, according to the William Blair survey, there are signs that the overall digital advertising market could improve.
Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg said in an emailed statement that the name change “marks a sad day for many Twitter users and advertisers” and is a “clear signal that the Twitter of the past 17 years is over and not coming back.”
“Twitter’s rebranding reminds us that Elon Musk, not Threads or any other app, is and always has been the most likely ‘Twitter killer’,” Enberg wrote.
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