(San Francisco) Exit the volatile: Twitter, which means tweet in English and has used a blue bird as its logo since its debut in 2006, launched its new logo on its website on Monday, a stylized black and white capital X.
Elon Musk, the whimsical businessman and owner of the social network, and the company’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, recruited just a month ago, announced this weekend that the platform would abandon the blue bird logo, be rebranded as X and rapidly diversify into payments, banking and commerce.
While the social network’s website is showing the new logo Monday morning, its URL is still twitter.com, the blue “Tweeter” button is still on the site, and some users have seen a blue version of the X logo.
“‘X’ is here!” We’ll do it,” Ms. Yaccarino tweeted, posting a photo of the new logo around 1:50 a.m. EST Monday.
As of Sunday, Mr. Musk had changed his profile picture on Twitter, replacing it with the new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco”. He also changed the link in his bio to X.com, which now redirects to the Twitter site.
On Saturday night, Mr. Musk had said he was considering ditching Twitter’s bluebird. “We will soon be saying farewell to the Twitter brand and gradually all the birds,” he tweeted, before suggesting that the new logo could be an X.
Asked by a netizen, Mr. Musk also indicated that the tweets would be called Xs after the name change.
X is a mathematical symbol that the boss of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and Neuralink is particularly fond of. X.com was the name and website of the online bank founded by the businessman that later became the online payment service PayPal.
It is also found in the first name of one of his children, a boy baptized X Æ A-12.
The change in the logo displayed on the social network’s site comes at the height of difficulties for Twitter, of which Mr. Musk has laid off about half of the staff and whose advertising revenue has fallen by 50%, according to the billionaire.
After buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Mr. Musk changed the company’s name to X Corp last April. He has regularly mentioned since his nebulous project to transform it into a multifaceted application, with financial services, like WeChat in China.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we are only just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted Sunday.
“X is the future state of limitless interactivity – centered around audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” she added.
“There are absolutely no limits to this transformation. X will be the platform that can provide, well…everything,” she continued.
“For years, fans and haters alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, innovate faster, fulfill our potential. X will do that and more, ”assured this former executive of NBCUniversal, recruited by Mr. Musk in particular to try to reassure advertisers.
But Simon Kemp, CEO of digital consultancy Kepios, said he was skeptical of Twitter’s ability to become a super app.
“Given the way Mr. Musk has treated Twitter employees since its acquisition” of the social network, “I don’t imagine that many developers will be rushing” to join the company and “create new” applications, “unless Mr. Musk can offer exceptional incentives”, which “will be even more difficult given the current indebtedness of the company”, judged Mr. Kemp.
However, the platform could become “an excellent aggregator of global and paid information”, he estimated.
The social network faces a myriad of competing apps, including Meta-launched newcomer Threads, which is estimated to have 150 million users.
Twitter has between 200 and 350 million active users, depending on estimates.