Elon Musk finally pulled the trigger on an idea he’s been pushing for two decades now, X.com, the “everything app” which he has launched by rebranding Twitter, the “post funny little sentences app,” erasing one of the most well-known brands in the entire tech industry overnight.
Slowly, the X rebrand is populating the platform, which is currently using a logo that has either been taken from Elon’s crowdsourcing of his acolytes or just…a special font character, depending on who you ask.
Special Alphabet 4
Even the usual Musk-defending crowd, advocates of his crusade for what he believes is “free speech,” seem to be recognizing the absurdity of this move, which feels entirely pointless and like he’s setting something on fire he paid $44 billion for. It’s one thing to implement features you think are good that are actually bad. At least you still own an extremely well-known brand. But now? He doesn’t even have that.
It remains to be seen how an app that had to limit people to viewing 600 tweets a day few weeks ago plans to build an “everything” app ranging from video streaming to international banking. Here’s Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino saying…words about the rebrand and its goals:
The transition has been rolling out awkwardly. X.com was briefly linking to a GoDaddy parked domain page. Musk has claimed “tweets” and now called “Xs” but all the old Twitter terminology, tweets, retweets, etc is still all over the site.
And then there’s the problem with calling your site “X” in the first place, and jokes have been pouring in about how it sounds like some sort of escort finder app, or that videos posted on the site would technically now be “X videos,” quite literally the name of a popular porn site.
While nothing about Musk’s tenure at Twitter has made much sense, this is the move that perhaps seems the most baffling at all. Even when Facebook renamed its overarching corporation Meta, forever tying it to the the insta-failure of the Metaverse, it still kept its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp brands intact separately from that.
Elon could have split the difference, just made X his overall corporation for all his companies. He even could have just named it TwitterX, keeping SpaceX branding, signifying some sort of “transformation” and most importantly, not torching the brand (Musk has said he will literally be blowtorching the Twitter logo off the headquarters building).
It is desperately unclear how a site that fired 70% of its staff and can barely keep a site with a scrolling text feed functional is going to revolutionize the future of banking and commerce and make it “powered by AI.” This may be a long term project for Musk, and yet there is nothing about his tenure at Twitter that says he understands this portion of the tech space whatsoever. That does not seem likely to change the more areas he expands “X” into.
And no, we’re not calling it that.
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