Goodbye bird, hello X?
Elon Musk wants to change Twitter logo
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Twitter without the blue bird? Hardly imaginable. However, Elon Musk has a different opinion. He wants to get rid of the trademark surprisingly. The birdie should give way to an X tomorrow – assuming his followers come up with something.
Twitter owner Elon Musk wants to change the short message service’s well-known bird logo – and possibly the name too. “And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and gradually to all birds,” the billionaire surprisingly announced on his social media platform.
“If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we will have it operational worldwide tomorrow,” Musk wrote, posting an image of a flickering “X.” Later, in an audio chat on Twitter Spaces, he answered “yes” when asked if the Twitter logo would change. This “should have happened a long time ago,” he added. The company initially did not comment on this. On its website, Twitter describes the bird logo as its “key identifying feature.” “That’s why we protect it so much,” it says.
The logo change would be the next surprise at Twitter under Musk’s turbulent aegis. The head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla took over the company last October for $44 billion. Since then, he has turned the company inside out. One of his first acts in office was to fire management and half of the workforce, setting an aggressive cost-cutting course. He also repeatedly announced innovations, some of which he cashed in on shortly afterwards. He also renamed the company X Corp.
Musk scares advertisers
Musk recently caused a stir when he limited the number of tweets that could be read every day. This gave Twitter’s new rival Threads a boost: Facebook parent Meta’s short messaging service recorded more than 100 million registrations in the first five days after its launch at the beginning of July.
Twitter said it had around 240 million users last summer. However, Musk had repeatedly offended users and advertisers in recent months. Musk recently reported a slump in advertising revenue. Musk, who is also the head of the space company SpaceX, also recently founded an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up called xAI.
