Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino unveiled a logo for the social media platform on Monday that features a white “X” on a black background as an alternative to the familiar blue bird symbol. “X is here! Let’s do this,” tweeted Yaccarino, who also posted an image of the logo displayed on the company’s San Francisco offices.
Yaccarino and Musk’s Twitter handles feature the X logo, though the blue Twitter bird is still visible across the platform.
“#GoodbyeTwitter” was trending on the platform referring to the old logo with many users criticizing the new logo. Musk said in a post on Sunday that he wants to change the Twitter logo and polled millions of followers on whether they’d prefer changing the site’s color scheme from blue to black.
Post a stylized X image on an outer space-themed black background. He also referred to the “temporary X logo,” tweeting, “Soon we will be bidding for the Twitter brand and, incrementally, all birds.” In response to a tweet asking which tweets would be labeled under the “X’s,” Musk responded with “x’s.” The original Twitter logo was designed in 2012 by a team of three. Martin Grasser, one of the designers, tweeted, “The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase ‘e’.
Weeks before completing the acquisition of Twitter last year, Musk said buying the company would accelerate his ambition to create an “everything app” called “X” by three to five years.
Musk bought x.com back from PayPal in 2017, saying it had “sentimental value”. Musk co-founded x.com as an online bank in 1999 which later morphed into PayPal.
While the official Twitter page on the platform has been renamed “X”, the x.com domain is inactive.
“X is the future state of unlimited interaction – centered around voice, video, messaging and payments/banking – creating a global marketplace of ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” Yaccarino tweeted Sunday.
Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal who took over as CEO of Twitter on June 5, took over the role when the social media platform tries to reverse a decline in ad revenue.
Since the Twitter takeover, the company has faced turbulent times with layoffs, a sharp decline in the number of advertisers and the skyrocketing rise in threads, Twitter’s Meta response. (Reporting by Subanta Mukherjee in Stockholm and Bharat Govind Gautam in Bengaluru; Editing by Barbara Lewis)