Twitter will officially be rebranded as X

According to Elon Musk, the signature blue bird icon of Twitter and Twitter itself will be a thing of the past as it is rebranded to X. 

Twitter head honcho and the epitome of a man who does everything on a whim, Elon Musk, took to Twitter yesterday to ironically announce the demise of the platform. Well, sort of. The entrepreneur and Mark Zuckerberg’s No. 1 Fan said that the app will undergo a rebranding and a “re-logoing” within the day as it transforms into his planned “everything app” he’s dubbing as X.

[Hero image: Twitter @elonmusk]

Twitter is being rebranded to X

pic.twitter.com/IwcbqMnQtA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023

When Musk was in the process of buying the platform back in October, he tweeted that it was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”. A user replied that it would have been better to “just start X from scratch”, to which Elon responded, “Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong.”

If the CEO is to be believed, he was off by a lot, because the advent of X seems to be upon us. Yesterday, Musk took to Twitter to announce that it’s going bye bye like a father who told his child that they were suddenly going to boarding school indefinitely. Everyone, of course, was a little shocked, considering it all came out of the—ahem—blue.  

And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023

Because Musk has a tendency to just say stuff, Twitter CEO—or I guess X CEO now, which sounds weird—Linda Yaccarino went on the platform to confirm the news and went on to say a bunch of pretty vague stuff about how X will work. For example, she said that X will be run by AI. What that means, only time will tell.  

It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 23, 2023

Aside from changing the platform’s name to X, the iconic blue-and-white bird logo is also being done away with. Musk tweeted yesterday, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make [sic] go live worldwide tomorrow.”

Musk envisions X to be an all-inclusive platform that has social media and payment capabilities, which The Guardian has likened to China’s WeChat. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out since Musk has put a lot of limitations on non-paying subscribers of Twitter like taking away the verified check marks. Another limitation, this time for all users, was to limit the amount of content users can see on their feed, which Musk claimed to be for the purpose of battling bots. 

Will X also have these features behind paywalls? We’ll know soon. For now, Musk has announced that X.com now redirects to Twitter (do double check that in case you go to a, um, different site), has changed his profile picture to what is suspected to be the incoming official logo, and has also tweeted that what I know guess is the X Headquarters showing off the logo. 

Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023

Linda Yaccarino has also tweeted X’s arrival, though at the time of writing, the icon and layout of the app haven’t changed here in Singapore.

X is here! Let’s do this. pic.twitter.com/1VqEPlLchj

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) July 24, 2023

Meanwhile, if you’re planning to migrate away from the Twitter/X platform, we do have some suggestions, and we’ve also weighed in on whether the newly released Threads app will last or not.