Nine months after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk has decided to rebrand the platform. The name Twitter will be gone, as will its iconic bird logo. In their place, Musk is planning on renaming the platform X.
Why X?
That is known only by Musk himself, but he does have a fascination with the letter. It seems to have begun with X.com, the online payments company Musk launched in 1999 and made his fortune from after merging with PayPal. Since then, he has gone on to launch SpaceX, while his electric vehicle company Tesla sells the Model X car, he named one of his sons X Æ A-12 and he recently launched an artificial intelligence venture, xAI.
Musk held a crowdsourced competition to replace the Twitter bird logo with a new one. The winner was Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt, who offered Musk a logo previously designed for a now-discontinued podcast. And this new lick of paint is just the beginning, if Musk and the company’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, are to be believed.
Yaccarino tweeted (or should that now be “xed”?) that “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”
