Billionaire Elon Musk announced yesterday that his social media platform, Twitter, will change its iconic “Blue Bird” logo to “X” effective Monday, July 24. Musk even changed the web address of Twitter to x.com on Sunday. Moreover, he added that the changes would eventually bid adieu to the Twitter brand and all the birds. Musk says the purpose of X is “To embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.”
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The changes are part of Musk’s efforts to rejuvenate the platform into a “super app,” after it lost its sheen since he bought it in October 2022. Following Musk’s tweets, Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, also tweeted, confirming the news and the transformational changes about to happen on the site. Twitter will no longer be just a microblogging site, it will evolve into a global town square for exchanging “goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino said. She added that these functionalities would be driven by artificial intelligence (AI).
The transformation will give Twitter a second chance to impress the masses. The major focus of the change would be to enable financial payments on the platform.
Musk’s History with “X”
Musk’s affection for the letter “X” goes back years, when he co-founded a banking platform called X.com, which later became Paypal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) through a merger. His space exploration company is called SpaceX. Musk even started a new AI venture recently called xAI. Even though Twitter has retained its brand name and logo since Musk’s takeover, the legal name of the company was changed to X Corp., with the parent company called X Holdings Corp.
Multiple challenges have engulfed Twitter since Musk bought it. Advertisers have fled from the site owing to the lax content moderation policy. Plus, Musk fired more than half of Twitter’s employees to trim expenses and save it from bankruptcy. And most recently, Musk introduced a temporary cap on the number of tweets a user could read daily, pushing away many disgruntled users. Twitter faces the most threat from Meta’s (NASDAQ:META) newly launched microblogging app Threads, which garnered over 100 million subscribers within five days of launch.
Musk’s plan to revolutionize Twitter could have two broad outcomes: either the blogging community embraces the new and diversified version with open arms, bringing back higher users and ad dollars to the platform, or it could end up alienating even more users from the platform.
