Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk launched a long-teased website X.com on Sunday, redirecting the domain to Twitter, and said he will relabel the social media platform’s iconic blue bird logo as the letter “X,” the latest step in a massive rebranding effort toward what Musk has described as an all-in-one “everything app.”
Key facts
- Elon Musk tweeted Sunday afternoon the interim “X” logo for Twitter will go live on Sunday, while the site X.com now directs to Twitter.
- When asked in an early Sunday morning tweet if Twitter would remove its branding and logo, Musk responded: “Sorry it took so long.”
- Musk tweeted the platform will change the name of “tweets” to simply the letter “X” and said Twitter will be operated using the domain X.com, which Musk purchased from PayPal in 2017, saying the name had “great sentimental value”—Musk also owns the space technology company SpaceX, named a model of Tesla the “X” and co-founded an online banking company called X.com (that company merged with Confinity and changed its name to PayPal).
- Musk also posted a cryptic video of the letter X as well as a photo of himself crossing his arms in an X formation in front of a poster of a Tesla X, writing, “Not sure what subtle clues gave it [away], but I like the letter X,” adding that the platform “shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
- The move comes three months after Twitter informed its corporate partners it had started conducting business under the name X Corp., telling its partners to use the new name, rather than Twitter, Inc., in all official communications—an April 4 court filing in California definitively stated the name Twitter Inc. “no longer exists.”
Key background
Elon Musk, who agreed to a massive $US44 billion acquisition of Twitter last April, has been hinting at a rebrand since he took over the company, part of a slew of transitions as Musk looks to create a so-called marketplace of ideas.
Some of those changes included loosening Twitter’s moderation policies and reinstating formerly banned accounts on the platform—including controversial former kickboxer and reality TV star Andrew Tate, who was charged last month with rape in Romania, and former President Donald Trump—though Musk’s new policies sounded the alarm to advertisers, who led a mass exodus off the platform last fall.
Musk has since attempted to recapture lost revenue through a series of moves, including by introducing a $US8 per month Twitter Blue feature and by paying verified users for advertisements in their replies.
Surprising fact
Amid a string of massive layoffs since Musk’s $US44 billion takeover in October, the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla owner also led an effort to sell off Twitter merchandise, including a four-foot bust of Twitter’s bird logo that sold at auction for $US100,000 in January.
Twitter also sold a neon version of the bird logo for $US17,000, as well as a trio of kegerators, a food dehydrator and pizza oven, during its auction of “surplus corporate assets.”
Tangent
In addition to rebranding Twitter and incorporating the letter X into both his space technology and electric vehicle companies, Musk also formed an artificial intelligence company earlier this year in Nevada called X.AI Corp, billed as an anti-”woke” alternative to burgeoning ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which Musk helped found in 2015.
He left the company in 2018 and earlier this year penned a letter calling for a temporary pause on AI development. Musk tweeted ahead of the X.AI’s website launch last month, saying tersely its intention is “to understand reality.”
News peg
After briefly recapturing the well-sought-after title of world’s richest person, Musk once again lost the No. 1 spot Friday amid a price decline in shares of Tesla.
Forbes estimates Musk’s net worth fell to $US236.5 billion—below LVMH mogul Bernard Arnault—after Musk lost $US18 billion on Thursday largely as Tesla’s stock tanked more than 9% following pessimistic investors’ reactions to a quarterly earnings report released after the market closed Wednesday.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
