Twitter’s blue bird replaced with new X logo

LONDON –

Goodbye, Twitter. Hello, X.

Elon Musk unveiled a new “X” logo to replace Twitter’s famous blue bird as he pursues a major overhaul of the social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.

X began appearing on top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird is still dominant in the smartphone app. At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, meanwhile, workers were seen removing the iconic bird and logo on Monday until police showed up and stopped the removal because the workers didn’t have the necessary permits and failed to tape the sidewalk to protect pedestrians in case someone fell.

By early afternoon, the “er” at the end of Twitter remained visible.

The pointless erasure of physical and virtual remnants of Twitter’s past is in many ways typical of the chaotic way Musk has run the company since his reluctant purchase.

“This is the end of an era, and a clear signal that the Twitter of the last 17 years is gone and is not coming back,” said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. “But the writing is on the wall: Musk has been vocal about transforming Twitter into platform X from the beginning, and Twitter is now a shell of its former self.”

It’s another change Musk has made since acquiring Twitter that alienated users and killed advertisers, leaving the microblogging site vulnerable to new threats, including rival Meta’s new text-based app Threads that targets Twitter users directly.

Musk asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying it was “definitely refined.” He replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture of the design planned for Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

“And soon we will video the brand on twitter and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted on Sunday.

The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Musk said.

“I can’t say I’m surprised, but I think it’s a selfish decision,” said Hannah Thoreson of Baltimore, Maryland, who has used Twitter since 2009 for work and personal posts.

“There are a lot of small businesses and a lot of nonprofits and a lot of government agencies and things like that around the world that have relied on Twitter for years to push their message and reach people,” he said. “And they all have a Twitter icon on everything from their website to their business cards.”

Changing it all costs time and money, he added, not to mention the confusion that comes with an unknown brand name.

“I mean, would you want to remove the Coca-Cola brand if you were Coca-Cola? Why would you do that?” said Thoreson, who now primarily uses Mastodon.

Musk, CEO of Tesla, has long been fascinated by the letter X and has changed the name of the Twitter corporation to X Corp. after he bought it in October. In response to questions about what the tweets will be called when the rebranding is complete, Musk said they will be called Xs.

The billionaire is also the CEO of the rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX. And he started an artificial intelligence company this month called xAI to compete with ChatGPT. In 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.

In addition, he called one of his sons, whose mother is the singer Grimes, “X.” An actual baby name is a collection of letters and symbols.

Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter is part of his strategy to create what he calls an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, which combines video chats, messaging, streaming and payments. Musk has made several major changes since taking over Twitter, including shifting focus to paid subscriptions, but he hasn’t always followed through on his new policy statements that have garnered attention.

Linda Yaccarino, the longtime NBC Universal executive Musk tapped to become Twitter CEO in May, posted the new logo and weighed in on the change, writing on Twitter that X is the “future state of limitless interactivity — centered on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

But ad industry analysts are less certain about X’s prospects.

“Musk supporters will likely celebrate the rebrand, but it’s a sad day for many Twitter users and advertisers,” Enberg said. “Twitter’s corporate brand has become intertwined with Musk’s personal brand, with or without the name X, and much of Twitter’s established brand equity has been lost to users and advertisers.”

Some predict that the new name will confuse much of Twitter’s audience, which has grown accustomed to the social media platform following Musk’s other changes, including limiting the number of tweets users can read per day. The new threshold is part of an $8-a-month subscription service Musk launched earlier this year in an attempt to boost Twitter’s revenue.

Whether advertisers return depends on how successful the rebranding is and whether Musk can achieve his goal of creating an “everything app.” That remains to be seen, said ad expert Mark DiMassimo.

“Advertisers care what they’re buying. So if his strategies work, I don’t think advertisers will care much about his call on it,” DiMassimo said.

“I think the name change is just a way for him to say, ‘Stop expecting Twitter, it’s a new thing, judge it as a new thing,'” he added. “And you know, that only works if the new thing works.”

Twitter users also pointed out that some people were referring to Alphabet, the parent company of Google since 2015. Facebook changed its own Meta in 2021, but the collection of apps – Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook – still kept their own brands and logos.

Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo went live more than a decade ago in 2012, replacing an earlier bird logo before the company’s Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company.

“I’m sad to see it. It’s going so well,” said the designer of the logo, Martin Grasser. “But 11 years, 12 years is too long for a corporate identity to stay. It seems that the platform is changing and they have a new direction and it is reasonable” that they choose a new logo to announce those changes.

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AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, AP Business Writer Mae Anderson in New York and AP Video Journalist Haven Daley in San Francisco contributed to this story.