Twitter bids adieu to Bluebird as Elon Musk rebrands platform to X

The popular social media platform Twitter officially rebranded to X after months of teasing by its former CEO, Elon Musk. The rebranding saw the popular social media app ditch its recognizable bird logo and replace it with a simple X. The rebranding also saw the social media app change its color scheme from blue to black.

As part of the rebranding, Twitter’s URL was changed to x.com, a domain name linked to Musk’s 1999 financial services startup, which was sold to PayPal.

X.com was an early online bank, and the company was initially funded by Musk and Greg Kouri, who went on to fund Musk’s later ventures, Tesla and SpaceX.

Musk uses the letter X in several of his business interests, including SpaceX and Tesla car models.

Musk established X Corp in March earlier this year as the parent company of Twitter, making way for Twitter’s rebranding. The rebranding comes as part of Musk’s vision to create a “super app” with multiple functionalities including financial services within the social media platform. In April, Twitter introduced a new feature that allowed users of the app to access the crypto market and other financial market services from within the app.

Musk’s tenure as the head of Twitter had been controversial from the start. However, his plans to transform Twitter into a financial platform began long before the takeover.

In a recent interview, Musk reiterated that the main motive behind rebranding to X was to create an “everything app,” a concept quite popular in China. Chinese social media applications such as WeChat, are not just used for text and video calls, but also have provisions to pay bills, book cabs, book restaurants and other financial activities without leaving the app.

Musk said if done correctly X could become a popular platform for finance: banking, payments, and data, and over time it would have the potential to become “half of the global financial system.”

The rebranding of Twitter, however, didn’t elicit much support from many users of the application who believe ditching the two-decade-long legacy for a new concept is not a good idea.