Srinagar: Twitter has replaced its recognisable bird logo with the letter “X” as its new official mark marking the latest major shift since Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform.
Owner Elon Musk and the company’s CEO had revealed the new logo on Sunday, saying the company would be renamed X and move later into payments, banking and commerce.
Founded in 2006, Twitter takes its name from the sound of birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.
Tweeting a picture of the company’s new logo Sunday night, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino said “X is here! Let’s do this.”
Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation, and has said his takeover of the social media giant was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” — a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become online payments giant PayPal.
Such an app could still function as a social media platform, and also include messaging and mobile payments.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted on Sunday.
Notably The bird was temporarily replaced in April by Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu dog, which ended up helping add as much as USD 4 billion to the meme coin’s market value.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform’s advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on Musk’s management style and mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation.
The platform is thought to have around 200 million daily active users, but it has suffered repeated technical failures since Musk sacked much of its staff.
Many users and advertisers alike have responded adversely to the social media site’s new charges for previously free services, its changes to content moderation and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts.
Musk said this month that Twitter had lost roughly half of its advertising revenue since he took control.
Facebook parent Meta also this month launched its text-based platform, called Threads, which has up to 150 million users, according to some estimates.
