New Delhi: Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Iaccarino on Monday unveiled a logo for the social media platform that features a white “X” on a black background as a replacement for the familiar blue bird symbol.
“X is here! Let’s do it,” tweeted Iaccarino, who also posted a photo of the logo projected onto the company’s office in San Francisco.
Both Yaccarino’s and Musk’s Twitter handles feature the X logo, although the Twitter blue bird is still visible across the platform. “#GoodbyeTwitter” was trending on the platform with a reference to the old logo as many users criticized the new one.
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Musk said in a post on Sunday that he wants to change Twitter’s logo, and his millions of followers voted on whether to change the site’s color scheme from blue to black. He posted a photo of a stylized X on a black outer space-themed background. He also mentioned the “interim X logo” and tweeted that “soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand and slowly all the birds”.
In response to a tweet asking what the tweets under “X” should be called, Musk replied “X”.
The original Twitter logo was designed by a team of three in 2012. Martin Grasser, one of the designers, tweeted, “The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at a very small scale, almost like a lowercase “e.” Weeks before he completed his acquisition of Twitter last year, Musk said buying the company would accelerate his ambition to build an “everything app” called “X” in three to five years.
Musk bought x.com back from PayPal in 2017, saying it had “emotional value”. Musk co-founded x.com in 1999 as an online bank that later morphed into PayPal. Although Twitter’s official page on the platform has been renamed to “X”, the x.com domain is not active.
“X is the future state of limitless interactivity – centered around audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, products, services and opportunities,” Iaccarino tweeted Sunday.
Iaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief, who started as Twitter CEO on June 5, takes over as the social media platform tries to take a plunge in ad revenue. Since taking over Twitter, the company has faced tumultuous times, including layoffs, a sharp drop in advertisers, and a meteoric rise in threads, a response to Meta on Twitter.
