After Elon tweeted about it all night, the bird site is shedding its feathers.
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X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and an “interim X logo” will replace the Twitter bird logo later today. Leading up to the change, Musk spent a lot of time tweeting about it.
Around 12AM ET last night, he started tweeting — and did so for hours — about the Twitter rebrand to X, the one-letter name he’s used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with a tweet saying “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” followed by a second tweet adding that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk then, over the next several hours, gestured at the change in between other posts and replies, tweeting things like “Deus X,” or replying to other users talking about it. At one point, he joined a Twitter Spaces session called “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk,” and sat silently for almost an hour before unmuting and confirming he would be changing Twitter’s logo tomorrow, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”
Musk also reportedly sent an email last night to Twitter employees telling them the company would become X, and that it was the last time he would email from a Twitter address, according a Threads post from Platformer managing editor Zoe Schiffer. She added that she assumes he was talking about the logo, since Twitter’s business was already renamed X corp.
As for what the new logo will look like, Musk didn’t comment specifically, but pin a gif that was posted by Sawyer Merritt, a Twitter user who offered the logo, which he said was used for his discontinued podcast.
The letter “X” has been on just about everything Musk has touched for the last two-plus decades. X.com was the original name for Paypal; it’s in his SpaceX company name; it’s in the name for the Tesla SUV; and he has said he wants to turn Twitter into “X, the everything app.” Now he’s finally doing something with the X.com domain he bought back from Paypal in 2017.
Finally rebranding the site will be the clearest declaration yet that this is no longer the same social network that it was before Musk purchased it last year. But it’s far from the only change in the Musk era of Twitter.
Most recently, Twitter said it would limit the number of DMs for non-paying users, a LinkedIn-like hiring feature showed up for Verified Organizations, and Musk said the site would soon let users post ”very long, complex articles” to the site. The article feature seems to be called Articles, but at one point was apparently called Notes — you know, the name for article site Substack’s Twitter clone, the debut of which, you may remember, was a little dramatic.
We have reached out to Twitter for comment. An auto reply said, “We’ll get back to you soon.”
Update July 23rd, 2023, 3:31PM ET: Added that Musk reportedly emailed Twitter employees overnight to inform them of the change. Also added that X.com now redirects to Twitter.com.
