“Soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and, little by little, to all the birds,” he expressed on the network around midnight on Saturday, implying the end of the association from which the very word “tweet” (tweet) derives, the sound emitted by these animals in the humming.
“Like this, but X,” said the billionaire head of the aerospace company SpaceX over an image of Twitter’s traditional blue bird on a black and white marbled background.
“To embody the imperfections in us and everything that makes us unique,” he responded to his post.
Twitter, founded in 2006, has used the winged image mark since its inception, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to design website Creative Bloq.
The 52-year-old founder of electric car maker Tesla previously said his takeover of Twitter last year was “an accelerator to create X, the app for everything,” a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which became PayPal.
Such an app could still function as a social media platform and also include mobile messaging and payments.
“If a good enough X logo gets out there tonight, we’ll make it work around the world tomorrow,” he said.
Twitter is estimated to have around 200 million daily active users, but it has suffered repeated technical failures since the mogul bought the app for $44 billion in 2022 and laid off much of his staff.
The parent company of social media giant Facebook, Meta, earlier this month launched its own text-based platform to rival Twitter, called Threads, which has up to 150 million users, according to some estimates.