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Elon Musk Changes Twitter’s name to “X” – Do you think it might be a mistake to kill such a popular name and logo?
Elon Musk announced last Saturday that he is considering renaming Twitter and changing the bird logo to an “X.”
The change is part of Musk’s vision to create an “app for everything.”
The question is… why have you decided to “kill” a name so widely known and so important on the internet as “Twitter”, and also its iconic logo of the little bird.
If you ask a lot of experts, it sounds like an awful rebranding exercise.
X.com is a notorious company in Musk’s career, as it is one of his first successful startups. Musk founded X.com in March 1999. It was an online payment and financial services company, the forerunner of the PayPal online payment system. In 2000, X.com bought Confinity, a company that had launched a payment service called PayPal. Back in 2001, X.com changed its name to PayPal to reflect the company’s focus on payment services.
By 2017, Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal for reasons not initially disclosed. Given Musk’s affection for the domain, which represents his first major business success, there was much speculation about what he might do with it – and in the end it looks like he’s going to use it for his social network, Twitter, to replace the name. X.com currently redirects to Twitter.com and the birdie logo has already disappeared.
Only Elon Musk himself knows what he wants to do with what until now has been Twitter, the highly successful short message social network, which seems to want to transform it into something different. We’ll see what the future holds for it.
