No More Birds: Elon Musk Teases Plans to Rebrand Twitter as X

Soon instead of logging onto Twitter, you might instead use X.

At midnight last night, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually all the birds.” A follow-up tweet suggested that if someone posted “a good enough” X logo, he would make it go live worldwide on Sunday.

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After responding to other’s tweets and making a few of his own about the potential change over several hours, he eventually joined a Twitter Spaces session called “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk(Opens in a new window),” where he confirmed plans to change the name and logo for the company, as well as plans to cut “the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”

Formally, this move has already happened. In April, Twitter, Inc. was merged into X Corp., Musk’s umbrella company. Twitter, Inc. “no longer exists,” lawyers for the social media platform wrote in a legal filing at the time. But the Twitter brand remains, of course.

Musk has long had a fascination with the letter X, a point he highlighted in a separate tweet.

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Musk co-founded online bank X.com in 1999, which later became PayPal. It’s also the name of a Tesla SUV, and in the name for SpaceX. His newest startup, which aims to create a ChatGPT rival, is called xAI.

It’s possible Musk found the logo he’s after. Currently, he has a GIF of an X image pinned to his Twitter feed. The GIF was posted by Sawyer Merritt, who said(Opens in a new window) it was designed for his now-discontinued OfficialXPod.

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Musk’s tweets come at a time of change at Twitter. On Friday, the official Twitter Support account tweeted that the company plans to limit the number of tweets unverified accounts can send each day. The move allegedly is to help cut down on spam on the platform, but it doesn’t limit the number of DMs a “verified” Twitter Blue user can post, even if those are spam.

Last week, Twitter implemented a new DM setting to filter messages from unknown accounts, presumably in part to tackle spam messages being sent by Twitter Blue users.