The letter X has long been Elon Musk’s favorite.
To make his $44 billion acquisition truly his, he is wiping off the Twitter brand and the iconic blue bird in favor of X.
Like China’s WeChat, Musk’s idea for X is a super software that users can use for entertainment, online shopping, chatting with pals, and posting updates. However, the world’s richest person’s unpredictable behavior over several months turned off users and drove away advertisers, putting Twitter in a precarious financial situation and making it more susceptible to rivalry.
Killing a well-known online brand is “extremely risky” since that people are drawn to rival apps like the brand-new Instagram Threads and more niche challengers like Bluesky, according to Forrester analyst Mike Proulx.
Musk has “single-handedly wiped out over fifteen years of a brand name that has secured its place in our cultural lexicon,” Proulx wrote in an email.
The action is somewhat unexpected. According to a court filing from April, Musk had already changed Twitter’s corporate name to X Corp, which is a division of X Holding Corp. Just before he purchased Twitter, Musk stated in October of last year that he saw the $44 billion transaction as “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Musk’s rocket firm, SpaceX, prominently contains the letter X. More than 20 years ago, Musk’s payments business went under the name of X.com before merging with a rival to create PayPal.
Among illustrious web companies, name changes are now very typical. In late 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta, and Google did so six years earlier. However, in those instances, the newly renamed parent firms maintained the branding of their primary services, allowing users of Facebook and Google to continue using those platforms as usual without interruption.
Musk seems to gamble that he can completely replace Twitter. The new X logo was unveiled over the weekend, and he tweeted that “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
In an email to staff members on Monday, Linda Yaccarino, whom Musk recruited as CEO in May, stated that the firm would “continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
That mission’s success is more easily declared than accomplished.
According to Proulx, Twitter “no longer has” the “time, money, and people” that Musk needs to transform X into a super app. Musk stated earlier this month that Twitter’s advertising revenue has decreased by 50% and that the company must “achieve positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”
Because of reports indicating a spike in hate speech and racist and abusive comments on the network, as documented by numerous civil rights groups and researchers, some advertisers have grown wary of marketing their products on Twitter.
Musk has attempted to counteract some of the drop in advertising using a paid subscription service. The corporation would require tens of millions of users at $8 per month to offset the losses.
The platform’s remaining marketers now need to learn a new language. Tweets are the term for Twitter messages known to people and businesses worldwide. Like Kleenex, Twitter established a recognizable brand that people recognized immediately, an accomplishment that any corporate marketing team would be proud of.
In a recent survey on the digital advertising market, Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair, told CNBC that his team of analysts “didn’t pick anything up” from advertisers that would suggest that these companies had increased their expenditure on Twitter. The William Blair poll shows that the entire digital advertising market may improve.
According to Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg, the name change is “a gloomy day for many Twitter users and advertisers” and a “clear signal that the Twitter of the past 17 years is gone and not coming back.”
Elon Musk, not Threads or any other app, is and has always been the most likely “Twitter killer,” according to Enberg. Twitter’s rebranding serves as a reminder of this.
