Farewell bluebirds! The Twitter logo will be changed to the letter X. What chess is Musk playing?
On the 23rd local time, the current CEO of Twitter, Musk, said that he will replace Twitter’s famous “blue bird” logo with an “X”.
According to US media reports, Musk sent an email to Twitter employees that night, telling them that the company would become Company X. This was the last time he used the Twitter suffix to send emails.
Musk has previously admitted that Twitter’s advertising revenue is only nearly half of what it used to be, and as a result, the company’s cash flow has been negative and it has a heavy debt burden. Musk said he would do more to take the social media company in a new direction with a rebrand. Replacing the brand logo is one of them.
Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, later echoed that it is very rare to have the opportunity to impress others again, “X will go one step further and change the world’s downtown squares.”
　　why x
After announcing the name change, Master said, “Not sure what the subtle reason is that gave me that feeling, but I just love the letter X.” He also posted a photo of himself in an “X” pose with his arms crossed.
Jacarino explains more about X. X, she said, will be “the future state of infinite interaction, centered around audio, video, messaging, payments/banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities”.
Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce, said the change wasn’t surprising given Musk’s long history with the “X” name.
In fact, almost every one of Musk’s products contains an “X” element.
When Twitter was acquired in October last year, Musk also wrote: “The acquisition of Twitter is an accelerator for the creation of X, X is a super application (the everything app).”
In March of this year, Musk created X Corp (X Corp), which owns the Twitter social networking service. Musk has announced Twitter as the basis for other products. Some British media commented that this reflects Musk’s vision of creating a “super app” like China’s WeChat.
However, Adamson believes that this change will be very confusing to a large part of Twitter’s audience who have come to resent the social platform due to a series of other major changes made by Musk.
Mike Proulx, director of research at Forrester, an independent research consulting firm, also said that this move will further alienate Twitter’s original loyal user base. “You could say he’s going to get rid of an iconic brand. But he’s also showing that the company is going in a different direction, with a different user base,” he said.
　　What did Musk do after the acquisition?
This is not the first time Musk has made drastic changes to Twitter.
After Musk acquired control of Twitter for $44 billion, he quickly fired Twitter’s executive leadership and dissolved the board. The company then carried out four rounds of massive layoffs, reducing its headcount by about 80% from about 7,800 to about 1,500.
In the first few months after Musk took over the Twitter platform, many advertisers pulled their funds out of fear of chaos, resulting in a significant decrease in Twitter advertising revenue.
Earlier this year, Musk began to shift some of Twitter’s operational focus to the subscription business, launching Twitter Blue, an $8 monthly subscription service, to provide paying users with additional services such as editing functions. The company also recently began sharing advertising revenue with certain creators, but only if they are Twitter Blue users.
Earlier this month, as part of the Twitter Blue service, Musk announced that Twitter would limit the number of tweets that ordinary accounts could read each day. This quickly sparked sharp criticism from users and marketing experts, who believed it could drive away more advertisers and weaken Twitter’s cultural influence.
And that seems to be the case. Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, launched Twitter’s competing product, Threads, on July 5, and within five days of its launch, the number of registered users exceeded 100 million.
In March, Musk told employees that Twitter’s valuation had fallen to less than half of what it was when he bought the company, but remained optimistic, saying he believed one day Twitter would be worth more than $250 billion.
