NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk said Sunday he plans to change Twitter’s logo to an “X” of the famous blue bird, marking what would be the latest major change since buying the social media platform for $44 billion last year.
In a series of posts to his Twitter account that began just after 12 a.m. ET, the Twitter owner said he’s looking to make the switch worldwide as soon as Monday.
“And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and gradually to all the birds,” Musk wrote on his account.
The change is not surprising given that Musk long history with the name “X”, says Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce. Tesla’s billionaire CEO tweeted last October that “buying Twitter is an accelerator to create X, the app of everything.”
Musk’s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is commonly known as SpaceX. And in 1999, Musk founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.
“Not sure what subtle hints they gave it but I like the letter X,” Musk tweeted Sunday.
Hours later on Sunday, Linda Yaccarino, the longtime NBC Universal executive, designated Musk as Twitter. CEO in May, weighed in motion.
“It is an exceptionally rare thing, in life or in business, that you get a second chance to make another great impression,” he wrote in your Twitter account. “Twitter made a huge impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global city square.”
yaccarino wrote on Twitter that X would be “the future state of unlimited interactivity, centered on audio, video, messaging, payment/banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
But the change on Twitter was met with skepticism on the social media platform.
The change will be very confusing for a large part of Twitter’s audience, which has already been deteriorating on the social platform due to a number of other major changes Musk has made, Adamson said.
“They won’t understand,” he said. “It’s a fitting end to a phenomenal development of an iconic brand and business.”
Earlier this month, Musk put new curfews in the plaza of its digital city, a move that has been harshly criticized as potentially scaring off more advertisers and undermining its cultural clout as a trendsetter.
The upper threshold for viewing tweets is part of a $8 per month subscription service which Musk launched earlier this year in an attempt to boost Twitter’s revenue. Revenue has fallen sharply since Musk took over the company and laid off roughly three-quarters of the workforce to reduce costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Attracting advertisers is essential for Musk and Twitter after many fled in the first months after their takeover of the social media platform, fearing they would damage their brands in the encircling chaos. Advertisers have cut spending in part because of changes Musk has made that have allowed more hateful content to flourish, and that has insulted a broader part of the platform’s audience.
Musk said in late April that the advertisers had returnedbut did not provide details.
Musk’s decision to change Twitter’s logo to an “X” also comes as Twitter faces new competition from the new Meta app, Threads, released earlier this month. It has been seen as an alternative for those who have been upset with Twitter.
Threads is billed as a text-based version of Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram, which the company says offers “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”
In the first five days of its launch, 100 million people had signed up for Threads, according to a post on Threads by Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.