Move along Twitter and the blue bird: X is here

The well-known blue bird logo of Twitter will be replaced with an X, the platform’s owner Elon Musk said. The company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed the change.

The billionaire Musk said in a Sunday post that he wanted to change Twitter's logo and polled his millions of followers whether they would favor changing the site's color scheme from blue to black. He posted a picture of a stylized X against a black outer space-themed background.

"And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," said Musk who also changed his Twitter profile picture to the new X logo.

Late Sunday afternoon, Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, also tweeted: "It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square."

Yaccarino followed this with a post, saying: “X is here! Let’s do this!” The company’s old bird logo is already gone from its headquarters in San Francisco. On a Twitter Spaces session Musk joined on Sunday, he said: “We’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”

The blue bird, which is now being retired, is called Larry. This, Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone said in 2011, is a tribute to basketball star and Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.

Musk loves the letter “X”. X.com was the original name for Paypal. It’s in his SpaceX company name, it’s also in the name for the Tesla SUV, and Musk has previously said he wanted to turn Twitter into “X, the everything app.”

Now he’s finally doing something with the X.com domain he bought back from Paypal in 2017. The domain X.com already redirects a user to the Twitter homepage, and the social media site is now adorned with the X logo as of Monday morning.

However, Musk acknowledged earlier that advertisers have been slow to return to Twitter so the planned change was expedited. Ad revenue remains at nearly half of what it once was, and Twitter’s cash flow has been negative.

But there are risks. Consumers are still used to Twitter’s original name and branding – even though many have been complaining about what Musk has done with the platform, for instance, limiting how many tweets per day various accounts can read.

Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday that the move would further alienate Twitter's original, and once fiercely loyal, user base.

"On the one hand, you can make the argument he would be getting rid of an iconic brand. On the other hand, he is signaling it is a new day for what was once Twitter and that the company is heading in a different direction with a different user base,” said Proulx.