No X and O`s for Twitter rebranding

Elon Musk, aka Space Karen, aka Chief Twit, waded into further controversy as his Twitter rebranding to X has so far taken a resounding L. Soon after the announcement, that cute little bird from Twitter's logo was replaced with an X, leaving many users disappointed.

The X, which would once conjure images of aliens, is now more likely to resonate with seedy websites. But the alphabet is one Musk has long been enamoured with. The rebranding must also not come as a surprise for many. Afterall, Elon did once famously name his child X Æ A-12 Musk.

Before getting into the criticism the new name has generated, a history lesson is in order. The X.com – a website for everything à la an episode straight out of Black Mirror – is something Musk has always pushed for.

A Business Insider report says that at the turn of the century, Musk had wanted to use the name X.com for the company now known as PayPal. Although Musk was very much into the rebranding, his fellow executives disagreed. "Focus groups showed that the name http://X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company," Walter Isaacson, the author of an upcoming biography on Musk tweeted.

In his Peter Thiel biography "Contrarian," Max Chafkin wrote about the same response from focus groups. "X has conducted a series of focus groups showing that customers had disliked the brand name, because it reminded them of porn," Chafkin wrote.

As of now, there are countless tweets on the platform criticising this move and turning the overall transition into a meme. One such user leederca shared a screenshot of the rebranding Tweet by Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino and marked all the places where the names "Twitter" and "Tweet" were visible.

"Welcome to X. Now this is how you do a rebranding," the tweet wrote.

What the user pointed out makes it obvious that Musk basically changed the logo and left the rest of the site unchanged. Meanwhile, lillcrawf wrote that the entire transition looks like returning to Barbieland only to find the Dreamhouse turning into the Mojo Dojo Casa House.

HailEternal explained it very simply, though. According to the user, "It's called Twitter because we tweet like little birds." Meanwhile, satishacharya has a much more fun thing to share.

Some users also found Twitter's new logo very close to the logos of adult web pages. "It's brand suicide," said Jenn Takahashi, the public relations agency Takahashi PR founder.

Takahashi has been tracking Twitter's steady demise under Musk under the Best of Dying Twitter profile. "It will probably be the dumbest thing he's done since taking over, and considering everything he's done over the past few months, that's saying a lot," he told Fast Company, a monthly American Business maganize.

Meanwhile, True Ventures partner emeritus Om Malik tweeted the move "makes no sense.""I mean, what is the name 'Twitter' then. And why should you 'tweet?'" he continued.

Malik told Fast Company the rebrand makes even less sense than Facebook's rebranding to Meta. "At least Facebook believed in Metaverse," he said. "X has no correlation with Twitter and the verb that goes with it—tweeting. All I can say is this is yet another step in the ongoing self-mutilation of a brand and a company that is far less valuable today when Elon paid for it. And a lot of it is no one's fault except for his own."

"Musk has been trying to do X as a company since the last century, since before PayPal," said Anil Dash, an entrepreneur and board member for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Dash says that with a name change or not, things don't look good for the future of Twitter—or X. "They took one of the best-known brands, with a logo that's literally painted onto buildings or printed on billboards around the world . . . and they're going to replace it with something completely unbranded except for Musk's ego," he said.

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