Don’t know if you heard, but Twitter is X now.
X like the games. X like triple. X like Patrick Stewart playing a professor.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk, who, as a reminder, bought the platform last year for $44 billion, announced the company would be ditching the name Twitter and the tie-in bird branding. “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he tweeted on Sunday, in a perhaps unintended threat to avian creatures everywhere.
The next day Musk tweeted a photo of the X logo projected onto the company’s HQ.
Wait, he didn’t tweet it. He, uh, x-ed it? Musk also tweeted — sorry, I won’t stop using the verb — announcing tweets will now be called X’s. A decision that isn’t linguistically confusing at all.
Typing X.com into your browser will now bring you to the website formerly known as Twitter. It has a new logo, too. It’s the letter Z. I’m kidding. It’s obviously an X. (Reportedly it’s just a generic Unicode character.) Styles editor Stella Bugbee wrote a lovely essay on why we — Musk included — are all so obsessed with the letter X.
“For marketing purposes in the 1990s, X had a certain cool. It conferred a rejection of authority — you could imagine Bart Simpson with a marker writing X’s on the walls of his bedroom — while also being co-opted by mass consumerism. X was the symbol for generic products, so X could be both rebellious and mass-produced,” she writes. (Read the whole thing here.)
As further proof of his X obsession, she points out Musk, a Gen X-er himself, is also CEO of SpaceX and in the 90s founded a financial start-up called X.com. You know it now as PayPal. He has a son with the musician Grimes named X Æ A-XII. They call the child X for short. Tesla makes a Model X.
Conference rooms inside X’s San Francisco headquarters — are you happy, I used the new name!— have been rebranded to names with the letter in them, my colleagues Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu reported. There’s now rooms called “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy.” That last one definitely isn’t a workplace lawsuit waiting to happen. (I also loved this piece from Lora Kelley at The Atlantic who interviewed a bunch of semioticians about Musk’s X obsession.)
Marketing experts and brand analysts have been quick to point out the obvious: That in changing Twitter to X and ditching the iconic branding Musk has potentially cost his company a pretty penny in brand value.
I liked what Bloomberg’s Matt Levine had to say on the matter:
Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away); he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did!
Casey Newton of Platformer described the rebranding, and Musk’s entire Twitter project, as “an extended act of cultural vandalism. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings; and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns; so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.” (Musk’s bid to buy Twitter came in at $54.20 a share.)
Still, getting away from Twitter’s established Twitteriness might be a smart move if Musk actually makes good on his plans to turn the platform into “the everything app.”
“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Linda Yaccarino, the company’s recently installed CEO, X-ed.
Whether those ambitions come to fruition remains to be seen in the coming weeks and months. Just know X tried to remove the old Twitter logo from the exterior of the building and only got through the first six letters before they were stopped by the police for doing “unauthorized work.”
In the meantime, I’ll be unintentionally opening a zillion X.com tabs on my desktop browser because I am still looking for that familiar Twitter blue. (It’s still holding out on mobile, for now.)
XX,
Madison
Internet Candy
Here’s what else is happening online this week.
