Twitter users are sending the bluebird in style, flooding the platform with memes and mockery after Elon Musk announced he would be rebranding it as “X.”
Musk revealed on Sunday that he planned to change the company’s bird logo to an “X,” in another dramatic and ill-received change to the social media platform since he bought it for $44 billion last year. The logo on the site changed early Monday morning.
He unveiled the new logo, the letter X with one stroke thicker than the other, on Sunday night and then shared a photo projected at the company’s headquarters.
Linda Yaccarino, the former NBC Universal executive whom Musk named Twitter CEO in May, praised the move, writing: ”“Twitter made a huge impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global city square.”
Musk has a long-documented fixation on the letter X. He owns a rocket company known as SpaceX and, in 1999, founded a startup called X.com, which became the popular online payment company PayPal. He and singer Grimes also share a son named X Æ A-12.
Last year, he said the purchase of Twitter “is an accelerator to create X, the application of everything.”
Under Musk’s ownership, the company laid off most of its staff, lost many of its advertisers and allowed a spike in hate speech and the return of users banned for misconduct. In a May corporate filing, asset manager Fidelity valued Twitter at about one third why Musk had bought it.
“GoodbyeTwitter” was trending Monday morning as users said goodbye to the globally recognized brand as they knew it, with their own verbs, “tweet” and “retweet,” and offered quintessential Twitter-style comments about the change:
