• Following a Tweet storm on Sunday, Musk has made it known that Twitter will soon be known as X.
• The billionaire called for logo ideas to be submitted and eventually a very basic X was selected.
• Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino said X was the “future state of unlimited interactivity”

On Sunday Elon Musk started tweeting which invariably meant that some wild changes were coming to Twitter and indeed, there are changes coming. That change is to Twitter’s very identity online. Granted, Twitter’s name, or rather the company that controlled the website Twitter, Twitter Inc. hasn’t existed for a good few months after X Corp swallowed the company.

An official name change for the Twitter platform was bound to happen eventually and that day has arrived.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Xed Musk on Sunday morning before issuing a call for free logo suggestions.

After thousands of submissions eventually Musk settled on the most boring “interim logo” of the bunch.

The billionaire owner of the social platform announced late on Sunday that X.com now redirects to Twitter. This should prove, interesting, for folks who frequent other domains that begin with “x”.

There is no word on when Twitter’s official logo and name will be changed across the website, but the platform’s official account has changed it’s name and profile picture to the interim asset above.

The new chief executive officer at Twitter, Linda Yaccarino praised the changes coming down the pipeline.

“It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square. X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino wrote in a thread despite having the ability to pen a long-form tweet.

We should point out that Twitter is increasingly becoming a “pay to play” space. While the platform is still free to access, there is a push to get more users to pay for verification, the ability to send more direct messages and two-factor authentication via text message.

“Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine. For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential. X will do that and more. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past 8 months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started. There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything. @elonmusk and I are looking forward to working with our teams and every single one of our partners to bring X to the world,” the CEO added.

Return of the X

For years X has been something of an obsession for Musk.

The billionaire founded a company called X.com back in 2000. This company eventually merged with another software company known as Confinity. This company featured PayPal as a service and it was eventually rebranded to PayPal in 2001.

However, as detailed by Snopes, Musk was kicked out of the merged company – which operated under X.com – in late 2000 during what is described as a coup.

“In June 2001, Thiel rebranded the company as PayPal. The ouster has been widely documented and Musk himself has talked about it, except the company he was ousted from was technically not known as PayPal, but X.com. PayPal was a service offered by the company while Musk was in charge,” wrote Snopes.

Musk eventually reacquired the X name in 2017 and since then he’s seemingly been shopping for a place to use it with Twitter seemingly being that place.

The idea of an “everything app” isn’t new, and Musk has drawn comparisons to how WeChat is used in China for everything from instant messaging to shopping. Whether that idea will take off internationally isn’t clear, especially when such apps already exist in many parts of the world.

Whether it can right the sinking ship that is Twitter remains to be seen, but Musk and his fans appear to be very hopeful.