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And Finally Business News Digital
Elon Musk undertakes a Twitter rebrand via Twitter – or via X if you prefer
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 24 July 2023
I don’t know how you spent your weekend, but Elon Musk spent his rebranding Twitter by seemingly crowdsourcing a new logo on, well, Twitter. Or X if you prefer.
“Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”, he initially tweeted. With the Twitter company now known as X Corp – it having been acquired by Musk last year via an entity called X Holdings – he then confirmed that any new branding for the social media firm would use the letter X. But not the X that features in the logo for his other company, SpaceX. No, a new X was clearly needed.
“If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow”, he then tweeted. Or “X-ed”, maybe? “If X is closest in style to anything, it should, of course, be art deco”, he X-ed on, before later X-ing a stylised ‘X’ he has seemingly opted for.
Among all that, he also confirmed that X.com now points to Twitter.com. Musk was involved in an online bank back in the late 1990s called X.com which later morphed into PayPal. He reacquired the domain name from PayPal a few years ago.
The on-the-fly rebrand is also seemingly linked to Musk’s previously stated plans to develop a new everything app akin to Tencent’s WeChat.
Amid Musk’s rebranding tweets, X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine”.
So that’s all fun, isn’t it? But will X – centred as it is on “audio” and “video”, among other things – get itself those music licences that Twitter Inc never quite got around to securing, despite all the music posted to its platform? That’s the question the music industry probably wants to know the answer to.
Oh, that, and should every artist, label, venue and festival website that has button linking to a Twitter feed – and which uses the old Twitter bird logo – now update that button to the stylised X that Musk shared yesterday?
Or is he likely to change his mind about the new logo ‘x times’ in the next few weeks? I don’t know. Probably wise to wait before updating any buttons.
