For more than 10 years, Twitter has been known for its blue and white bird logo, which has become a symbol of the unique culture and lexicon of the social network. “Tweet” has become a verb. A “tweet” refers to a post. “Tweeps” has become a moniker for Twitter employees.
On Sunday, Elon Musk started removing everything.
The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X.com on its website and began replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet.
Inside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Monday, X logos were projected onto the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed with words that had X in them, including “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times. Workers also began removing bird-related paraphernalia, such as a giant blue cafeteria logo. Outside the building, workers removed the first six letters of Twitter’s name before being stopped by the San Francisco Police Department for doing “unauthorized work,” according to an alert sent out by the department.
Mr. Musk has long said he might change the name, but he’s speeding up the process a bit tweet early Sunday when he stated that “soon we will announce the brand on Twitter and, gradually, all the birds.” He said he hopes to turn Twitter into an “everything app” called X, which will include not only social networking but also banking and shopping.
Earlier on Monday, Mr. Musk too shared a photo of a giant X projected onto Twitter’s San Francisco office building with the caption: “Our headquarters tonight.”
The moves – which are ongoing – are the most visible changes Mr. Musk on Twitter since he closed the deal to buy the company in October. Behind the scenes, he has taken several steps to overhaul the company, eliminating thousands of employees and changing parts of the platform, including the badges intended to authenticate users, as well as the rules that govern what can and cannot be said on the service.
Yet the name and logo changes are impossible to ignore. By starting to remove the name on Twitter, Mr. Musk is an entrenched brand that has existed since 2006 – when the company was founded – and has delighted and frustrated artists, politicians, athletes and other users in equal measure. Twitter introduced its blue bird mascot in 2010 and updated it two years later.
Many Twitter users, who have spent years tweeting and building their presence on the site, appear isolated by the transition. “Has everyone seen the (eXecrable) new logo yet?” the actor Mark Hamill Tweet on Monday, using the hashtag #ByeByeBirdie. Others saw the move as the latest blow by Mr. Musk on the site, with adamant that they will still call the site Twitter and continue to “tweet.”
When brands become verbs, it’s the “holy grail,” says Mike Proulx, a vice president and director of research at Forrester, because it means they become part of popular culture.
“The app itself has become a cultural phenomenon in every way,” he said. “In one fell swoop, Elon Musk essentially wiped out 15 years worth of brand value from Twitter and is now starting from scratch.”
Mr. Musk risked the wrath of Twitter users even though he was unable to anger them. His company is facing financial difficulties and growing competition, with rival Meta releasing an app this month for real-time, public conversations called Threads. The new app quickly gained 100 million downloads in less than a week, even as the app’s usage was scrutinized.
Mike Carr, a co-founder of the branding company NameStormers, said that the X logo of Mr. Musk can be interpreted as having a bad “Big Brother” tech overlord vibe. Unlike the blue bird, which he described as warm and classy but perhaps a bit dated and weighed down by bad press, the new logo is “very cool,” he said.
However, it creates phrases like “X marks the spot” and helps Mr. Musk that the platform is different from his luggage on Twitter, Mr. Carr said.
“If they make this mistake and it’s anyone other than Elon Musk, he has a higher risk because people might start making fun of it,” Mr. Carr, who helped build names for thousands of clients, including CarMax, the used car company.
Mr. Musk has long been interested in the X name. In 1999, he helped found X.com, an online bank. The company changed its name after it merged with another startup to form what would become PayPal.
In 2017, Mr. Musk said he repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal. “There are no plans right now, but it has a lot of sentimental value to me,” he said Tweet at that time.
Tesla, the electric automaker of Mr. Musk, also has a sport utility vehicle called Model X. One of the children of Mr. Musk, X Æ A-12 Musk, often called X for short. The holding company created to complete the acquisition of Twitter is named X Holdings. Mr. Musk also heads an artificial intelligence company called xAI.
“I like the letter X,” he said posted on Sunday.
Mr. showed Musk has a disdain for Twitter’s previous corporate culture. He questioned the number of bird references in the names and products of the company’s internal team. At one point, he changed the name of a crowdsourced fact-checking feature to “Community Notes” from “Birdwatch.” He also recently had one cover the w in Twitter’s name at its headquarters in San Francisco.
Among those not worried about the change is Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder and former chief executive. He said in a tweet on Monday that while a rebrand was not “essential” to achieving Mr. Musk, there is an argument for this.
“The Twitter brand carries a lot of baggage,” Mr. Dorsey WRITES. “But what matters is the function it provides, not the name.”
Martin Grasser, a former San Francisco artist part of a team in 2011 who helped design Twitter’s latest bird logo, saying it was meant to convey “simplicity, brevity and clarity.” The goal is to have a logo as memorable as Apple or Nike, he said.
Mr. Grasser said that Mr. Musk can do whatever he wants with the brand, but “I hope that the bird occupies a cultural space that is a happy memory or becomes one of the logos that belongs to the culture rather than a company.”