Twitter Rebrands as X.com

Twitter officially rebranded to X last week, with Twitter.com now redirecting to X.com. The iconic blue bird has flown away for good and a minimalistic black and white logo has taken its place. The rebrand is part of Musk’s vision to transform Twitter into the “everything app.”

Elon Musk, the company’s owner, announced the changes in a series of posts. He sparked the conversation with a cryptic message: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” followed by a second message posted just minutes later: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go [sic] live worldwide tomorrow.”

Sawyer Merritt offered an “X” logo from his discontinued podcast and Elon Musk took the podcaster up on the offer as the logo matched the minimalist aesthetic he was going for, but said he would probably alter the design in the future. The new logo already serves as Musk’s and X.com’s profile photo.

The domain X.com was originally associated with an online banking startup co-founded by Musk that would later evolve into the globally recognized PayPal.com. Musk bought the domain back from PayPal six years ago.

Musk has been obsessed with the letter “X” for decades now. Back in April, he changed Twitter’s legal business name to X Corp. The letter “X” is also present in many of his company names, including SpaceX and X.Ai. He even named one of his sons X Æ A-Xii.

Twitter’s rebranding to X might be the most visually obvious change introduced since Musk bought the company last year, but it’s likely not the last one. In a post on the platform, CEO Linda Yaccarino described X as “the future state of unlimited interactivity,” hinting at new audio, video, messaging, and payments/banking features. Earlier, Musk announced that the site will soon allow users to post long-form pieces.

The Twitter rebrand has divided users of the text-based social platform. Some applauded it, while others were deeply disappointed. One developer even offered an extension that allows users to revive the iconic bird logo.

Despite the dissatisfaction among users, Twitter seems to remain strong. Even the so-called Twitter-killer, Instagram’s text-based app Threads – which had a widely successful launch attracting 100 million users in 5 days – hasn’t managed to steal Twitter’s audience. Threads lost 75% of its users 15 days after launch.