Twitter to Be Renamed X, Get Big Makeover: Mask

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, and the CEO he hired a month ago claim that the social media network will do away with its bird emblem, rename its platform X, and soon enter the payment, banking, and commerce sectors.

"Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we're just beginning to imagine," Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino tweeted Sunday afternoon.

Musk said he intends to do rid of Twitter's blue cartoon bird emblem late on Saturday night.

Around midnight, he tweeted, "Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," implying an end to the imagery from which the name "tweet" originates.

The billionaire SpaceX CEO wrote, "Like this but X," over a photo of the Twitter bird on a black and white striped backdrop.

Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal advertising sales executive whom Musk hired last month to lead Twitter, claimed the social media company is about to enlarge its reach.

"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities," Yaccarino tweeted.

"There's absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well... everything," she said.

Since Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October of last year, the platform's advertising revenue has largely failed as marketers lost faith in both Musk's management style and the platform's mass firings that destroyed content moderation.

In response, the businessman has started working on integrating payments and commerce into the site in an effort to generate more income.

According to the design website Creative Bloq, Twitter, which was established in 2006 and whose name is a play on the sound of birds chirping, has employed avian branding since its inception. At that time, the firm purchased a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15.

The 52-year-old Tesla founder has previously said that his rocky takeover of Twitter last year was "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app," a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become PayPal, a payments giant.

Such an app could still function as a social media platform, and also include messaging and mobile payments.

Musk has already named Twitter's parent company the X Corporation.

"If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow," he said.

Musk went on to make several other X-related comments, saying a new emblem should be "of course, Art Deco" style and that under the site's new identity a post would be called "an X."

Twitter is estimated to have 200 million active users per day, but since Musk purchased the service and fired the majority of its workers, it has experienced several technical issues.

Since then, the social networking site's additional charges for formerly free services, adjustments to content control, and the re-instatement of previously banned right-wing accounts have received negative feedback from both users and advertisers.

Since he took over in October, Musk claimed earlier this month, Twitter had lost around half of its ad income.

The company that owns Facebook, Meta, debuted its own text-based network, dubbed Threads, earlier this month. According to some estimates, Threads has up to 150 million members.

But the amount of time users spend on the rival app has plummeted in the weeks since its launch, according to data from market analysis firm Sensor Tower.