The popular social media platform Twitter officially rebranded to X after months of teasing by CEO Elon Musk. The rebranding saw the popular social media app ditch its recognisable bird logo after two decades and replaced it with “ X” after two decades. The rebranding also saw the social media app change its colour scheme from blue to black.
As part of the rebranding, Twitter’s URL has also been changed to “x.com.” a domain name linked to Musk’s 1999-founded financial services startup that sold to PayPal is now redirecting to Twitter.
https://t.co/bOUOek5Cvy now points to https://t.co/AYBszklpkE.
Interim X logo goes live later today.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
X.com was an early online bank and the company was initially funded by Elon Musk and Greg Kouri, who went on to fund Musk’s later ventures: Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk’s association with the brand name ‘X’ began as early as 1999 when he first established the company. However, it wasn’t able to transform into a stand-alone company and later became a part of Paypal. Musk used the letter X in his space firm, SpaceX, as well as featuring as part of several of Tesla’s car model names. The rebranding of Twitter means the character is finally transforming into a stand-alone brand after three decades.
Musk established X Corp in March earlier this year as the parent company of Twitter, making way for Twitter’s rebranding. The rebranding comes as part of Musk’s vision to create a “super app” with multiple functionalities including financial services within the social media platform. In April, Twitter introduced a new feature that allowed users of the app to access the crypto market and other financial market services from within the app.
Musk’s tenure as the head of Twitter had been controversial from the start. However, his plans to transform Twitter into a financial platform began long before the takeover.
In a recent interview, Musk reiterated that the main motive behind rebranding to X was to create an “everything app,” a concept quite popular in China. Chinese social media applications such as WeChat, are not just used for text and video calls, but also have provisions to pay bills, book cabs, book restaurants and other financial activities without leaving the app.
Musk said if done correctly X could become a popular platform for finance: banking, payments, and data, and over time it would have the potential to become “half of the global financial system.”
X is finally arriving!
X will be an “everything app” i.e. super app for U.S. (like WeChat of China)
• Social: network, msgs, video, content
• Finance: banking, payments, data“Overtime it would be HALF of global financial system” – Elon Muskpic.twitter.com/wWywAdYRZR
— Brandon Hoffman (@BrandonHoffman_) July 14, 2023
The rebranding of Twitter, however, didn’t elicit much support from many users of the application who believe ditching the two-decade-long legacy for a new concept is not a good idea.