Musk rebrands Twitter, replacing bird logo with X
Elon Musk killed off the Twitter logo on Monday, replacing the world-recognised blue bird with a white X as the tycoon accelerates his efforts to transform the floundering social media giant. Musk and the company's new chief executive Linda Yaccarino announced the rebranding on Sunday, scrapping one of technology's most iconic brands in the latest shock move since the tycoon took over Twitter nine months ago. Musk's connection to the letter X goes back nearly 24 years when he founded X.com that later was renamed PayPal despite his objections. His space company is called SpaceX and the parent company of Twitter was changed to X earlier this year. He described the logo as "minimalist art deco," and updated his Twitter bio to "X.com," which now redirects to twitter.com. The Tesla CEO also tweeted that under the site's new identity, a post would be called "an X." Musk has said his takeover of the social media giant was "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app" – an app inspired by China's WeChat that functions as a social media platform and also messaging and payments. The new logo was projected onto the facade of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters on Sunday night. "Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we're just beginning to imagine," Yaccarino tweeted earlier. Yaccarino, a former advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk hired last month to be Twitter's CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope. "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities." The logo change was greeted with criticism as well as nostalgia for an image that had become a symbol for the social media age. Martin Grasser, one of the original designers of the blue bird logo, wrote on social media that the emblem was intended to be "simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes." Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who signed off on the design in 2012, replied to Grasser with an emoji of a goat, meaning "greatest of all time." (AFP)