Around 12:00 PM ET yesterday, Twitter owner Elon Musk started tweeting — and did so for hours — about renaming Twitter X, a one-letter name he repeatedly uses in company and product names. It started a tweet he said: “Soon we’re saying goodbye to the twitter brand and gradually to all the birds,” followed by the second tweet and added that “if a good enough X logo is released tonight, we’ll roll it out worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk then gestured to the switch between other posts and replies over the next few hours, tweeting things like “Deus X,” or answering to other users talking about it. At one point ka joined Twitter Spaces sessions he called out “Nobody’s talking until we call Elon Musk,” and sat in silence for nearly an hour before he muted and confirmed that he would be changing the Twitter logo tomorrow, adding “we’re going to cut the Twitter logo off the building with flashlights.”
The letter “X” has been on almost everything Musk has touched over the past two decades. X.com was the original name for Paypal; it’s in the name of his company SpaceX; it’s in the name for the Tesla SUV; and said he wants to turn Twitter into “X, app everything.” Maybe it will do it with the X.com domain name bought back from Paypal in 2017.
Finally, the site’s rebranding will be the clearest statement yet that this is no longer the same social network it was before Musk bought it last year. But it is far from the only change in The Musk era of Twitter.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment. The automated response was, “We’ll get back to you soon.”
