For those who came in late, Musk decided that rather than fixing Twitter’s problems he would change the name from a decade-old internationally recognised symbol with sky-high brand awareness value to the more anonymous letter ‘X.’ X was the name of a company that Musk helped found but was fired from and the name replaced with the more memorable “Paypal.”
Yesterday workers had moved in to start dismantling the building’s giant Twitter sign however Musk forgot to secure the correct permits for the crane which blocked the street.
Officers with the San Francisco Police Department quickly arrived and started “shutting it down. ” The half-finished removal operation left only the sign reading just “er” which we feel says so much about Musk’s genius. Still we think “er” is a better name for a social networking site run by Musk than anything else.
Then the internet started to wade into Musk’s X idea and branding.
“Devoid of colour, bland, generic… BORING!” one user tweeted. “This is branding suicide.”
Others thought it was the sort of branding you get from a porn site, another said it was like “a bad Call of Duty game battles team from 2008 another thought it could be “an app for a membership-only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest.”
“It’s nothing but a cheap, meaningless play to get his name in the press,” comedian Adam Conover observed.
After Musk tweeted about wanting “a good enough X logo” early Sunday, his followers flocked to offer their suggestions. An acolyte named Sawyer Merritt posted several designs in his replies, with Musk selecting a “minimalist art deco” icon. “Probably changes later, certainly will be refined,” the billionaire added.
The crowdsourced logo closely resembles a generic Unicode character, an international symbol that would be impossible to trademark, according to Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins.
Making matters even more chaotic, both Meta and Microsoft own the trademarks for similar versions of the X symbol, portents of potentially lengthy and bloody legal scraps to come. The revamp may be just as much of a legal headache overseas, with Japanese users noting that the rights to the term “X Japan” are owned by a popular J-rock group.
According to a New York Times report Musk has been carrying out a Stalinist-like purge of bird-related imagery. Projections of the X logo were blasted into the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed things like “eXposure” and “s3Xy.”
Twitter persisted in other ways. The “Tweet” button and search bar prompting users to “Search Twitter” remained on the site’s homepage. The URL Twitter.com still reliably directed users to the site, while the domain X.com redirected some users, including former company owner Jack Dorsey, to an empty GoDaddy portal.
“Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app," Musk tweeted Monday night. “This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.”
He added users should expect additions including “comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world.” on the platform in the months ahead. "The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” Musk said.