Elon Musk, along with Twitter's CEO Linda Yaccarino, unveiled a new logo for the social media platform on Monday. The logo featured a white "X" on a black background, replacing the long-familiar blue bird symbol that had represented Twitter for the past 17 years. The transition to the new logo began reflecting on the website for some users at the time of writing.
Yaccarino excitedly shared the news on her Twitter account, declaring, "X is here! Let's do this," and posted an image of the logo projected on Twitter's San Francisco offices.
Both Musk and Yaccarino updated their Twitter profiles with the new "X" logo.
The change prompted a trending hashtag, "#GoodbyeTwitter," as some users expressed their dissatisfaction with the new logo.
Musk had teased the logo change a day prior, asking his millions of followers whether they preferred changing Twitter's color scheme from blue to black. He shared a stylized "X" against a black outer space-themed background and mentioned an "interim X logo," indicating the eventual phase-out of the Twitter brand.
In response to a question about what tweets would be called under "X," Musk simply replied, "x's."
The original Twitter logo, designed in 2012 by a team of three, was intended to be simple, balanced, and legible at small sizes. One of the designers, Martin Grasser, commented on the logo's history via Twitter.
Musk's interest in Twitter was not solely about the logo change; he had previously mentioned that acquiring the company would accelerate his plans to create an "everything app" called "X" by several years. In 2017, Musk repurchased the domain x.com from PayPal, a company he co-founded and later transformed into PayPal.
While Twitter's official page on the platform now goes by the name "X," the domain x.com remains inactive.
Yaccarino, who took over as Twitter CEO on June 5, expressed her vision for "X" as a future state of unlimited interactivity, with a focus on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking, and the creation of a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.
She stepped into the role during a challenging period for Twitter, marked by layoffs, a decline in advertising revenue, and the rise of Threads, Meta's response to Twitter.
The unveiling of the new logo and the company's rebranding indicate a new direction for Twitter as it moves towards realizing Musk's ambitious vision for the future of social media.
(With inputs from Reuters)