Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,59,100 crore), is rolling out changes and updates to the microblogging site. The latest upheaval is the complete change of its name and brand logo from Twitter to X. And the billionaire announced In a tweet, the X.com domain now redirects users to Twitter. From monetizing Twitter through premium subscriptions and paid verification badges, Musk’s changes at the company speak to how he plans to steer the platform and make it one of his X Group companies.
When Musk first acquired Twitter in October of last year, he was clear about his plans for the microblogging site. The Tesla CEO also tweeted at the time, “Buying Twitter is an acceleration to create the X, everything app.” This “everything app”, as he explained, will be a super all-in-one app like WeChat that can be used for multiple things, including booking rides, sending money and payments, apart from facilitating daily communications.
Now, Musk has changed Twitter to X in name, domain and even its logo. However, it is not yet a super app. On Sunday, July 23, he Posted by About changing Twitter’s logo to an X. He did more than just that in the hours that followed made x.com redirects users to Twitter’s home page.
Elon Musk and his love for ‘X’
The rebranding to X is recent, but Musk’s love of the alphabet isn’t so coincidental. In fact, it has been around for years now. The concept of X first emerged in 1999, when the billionaire introduced x.com as a finance platform, which later became Paypal in 2000 after merging with software company Confinity. Article At the time, Musk was ousted as CEO of PayPal in 2000 and later sold to eBay in a $1.5 billion deal.
While this reportedly hurt Musk, he bought x.com back from PayPal in July 2017. explains “It has great sentimental value.” Later that month, Musk relaunched x.com, which started Visitors are redirected to The Boring Company in December 2017.
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has decided to put his plans for X, his “everything app,” into action. In conversation with new Twitter boss Ron Baron announced His ambition is to make Twitter the “world’s most valuable financial institution” by April 2023.
In addition to Twitter, Musk has also used the letter X in the name of his space exploration company, SpaceX; His latest AI venture named xAI; And also the first SUV model released by his company Tesla called Model X.
Changes at Twitter after Elon Musk took over
Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, has seen various changes since the firing of its then-CEO Parag Agarwal and other top executives. In the months that followed, several banned celeb accounts were allowed to return to the platform.
Less than a month after his multi-billion dollar purchase, Musk tried to monetize Twitter by reinventing Twitter Blue. The company saw job cuts and layoffs across offices, including the layoff of the company’s entire AI ethics team.
Blue ticks for officially verified accounts and subscriber accounts started appearing in November. However, the tick marks on the paid accounts disappeared within a few days. Musk also introduced different colored tick marks based on account ownership status to identify news media.
All of these changes resulted in a nearly 50 percent drop in Twitter’s ad revenue. Musk tried to engage users by introducing multiple new features, including Ive Tweeting, Community Notes, and Twitter Blue for Business. To keep the business on track, Musk recently announced he is stepping down as CEO, but is still heavily involved, pushing new features like view counts and the ability to upload longer videos.
The next big news came in April 2023, when Musk announced Twitter’s merger with X Corporation. In May this year, Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. He indicated that he would give her the reins and step back to focus on his other companies.
Take a look at Twitter’s name and history of the blue bird
Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. Earlier, Twitter was planned to have different names like Smssy and Twttr. According to CreativeBlock. The first official Twitter logo was just the name written in light blue in a sans serif shape, designed by Linda Gavin.
Twitter’s relationship with the blue bird began shortly after its inception. It was created by British graphic designer Simon Oxley. According to a NYT Article, he offered the design for sale on the iStock website in 2006, and Twitter bought it for $15. The name Larry was a tribute to the basketball star and Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.
The design changed three times in 2009, 2010 and 2012. The current Bluebird design was created by Doug Bowman, the company’s former creative director, who said, “Twitter is the bird, and the bird is Twitter.” Since then, Larry Bird has been known simply as the Blue Twitter Bird.
In 2023, new owner Musk not only changed the logo, but Twitter’s name and domain. The company will now be known as X with the X logo. According to A Tweet The new logo was created by Paris Marks, an in-house designer using the font Monotype. Another Twitter user has also chimed in Credit For Design, the history behind how it all began is revealed.
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