This weekend, Elon Musk has officially announced that Twitter will be rebranded as “X.” Musk announced that X.com now redirects to Twitter homepage. The new interim logo can be seen above, and will roll out across the Twitter platform today.
Somewhat awkwardly, X.com does not actually redirect to Twitter right now — instead users see a GoDaddy landing page due to a configuration error.
But why exactly is Elon Musk rebranding as X? That isn’t so obvious, as the announcement took place across the weekend through a series of tweets on Musk’s account. He even invited fans to submit their own “X” logos to be used by the company. It’s not yet known if one of those submissions will be selected though; Musk merely refers to the current symbol as an “interim” choice.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said that X represents the future state of unlimited interactivity, entered in audio, video, message, and payments — creating a global marketplace for ideas.
In other words, it’s clear as mud right now.
Top comment by Mercer Eric
Elon should instead rebrand it to “Y”… bc rebranding away from Twitter makes no sense.
Critics online joked that the X.com rebrand is the culmination of Musk’s plan to undermine every advantage Twitter had over its competitors. The discontinuation of the Twitter logo successfully removes all brand recognition that the service has built up over 10 years!
For Musk, the move to X.com is a return to his tech startup roots. X.com was a direct bank Musk launched in 1999. It later became PayPal. The PayPal acquisition by eBay gave Musk the money to found in SpaceX and become an early-stage investor in Tesla Motors.
Musk has previously mentioned that he wants to turn Twitter into a “super app,” with the aim to achieve cultural dominance akin to WeChat in China. But how exactly he plans to do that remains unclear. X.com is at least a more all-encompassing brand to base that off of.
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