Twitter’s might soon be rebrand as X

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, began tweeting about the firm’s decision to rebrand to X at 12 a.m. ET Friday night. He continued to do so for hours. X is a one-letter moniker he has used frequently in company and product names for ever. The first tweet read, “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” and was followed by another saying, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”

Musk then made gestures at the transition between other postings and replies over the course of the following few hours by tweeting things like “Deus X” or responding to other users who were discussing it. He once joined a Twitter Spaces discussion titled “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk,” sat in silence for nearly an hour, then unmuted himself to announce that he would be replacing Twitter’s logo the next day, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”

Musk made no explicit comments about the new logo’s design but instead pinned a gif that Twitter user Sawyer Merritt had tweeted. Merritt said that the logo was previously used for his now-defunct podcast.

Almost everything Musk has touched in the past two decades has the letter “X” on it. The initial name of Paypal was X.com; it appears in the name of his SpaceX company; it appears in the name of the Tesla SUV; and he has stated that he intends to make Twitter “X, the everything app.” Maybe he’ll use the X.com domain name he acquired back from Paypal in 2017 for that purpose.

The website’s eventual rebranding will be the most blatant indication yet that it is no longer the same social network that it was before Musk’s acquisition of it last year. But it’s by no means the sole modification to Twitter under Musk.

Most recently, Twitter announced it would cap the number of direct messages (DMs) sent to free users, a hiring feature like to LinkedIn appeared for Verified Organizations, and Musk announced that users would soon be able to upload “very long, complex articles” to the website. You know, the moniker for article site Substack’s Twitter clone, whose launch, as you may recall, was a touch dramatic? The article feature appears to be called Articles, although it was apparently once called Notes.

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