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Photo collage of Elon Musk and the Twitter logo: Soon everything on "X"?
Photo: imago stock / IMAGO/NurPhoto
Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to change the logo of the short message service – at least one of his recent statements on the platform is to be believed. There he wrote: "And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and gradually to all birds." Twitter's logo is a blue bird.
Musk also announced, "If there's a good enough X logo posted tonight, we'll make it live worldwide tomorrow." He posted a picture of a flickering "X", but did not give any further details.
Musk bought Twitter last October, and the company has been turbulent ever since. For example, Musk has laid off about half of the workforce to cut costs. On Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed in a U.S. court alleging that the company owed former employees at least $500 million in severance pay.
Now Musk seems to want to enforce the letter "X" on his companies: He changed the name of the Twitter company to X Corp, and his new artificial intelligence development company is called X.AI. The fascination with the letter is not entirely new, one of his children, which he had with singer Grimes in 2020, is called "X AE A-XII".
Twitter calls logo "most important distinguishing feature"
Twitter's website, on the other hand, states that the logo with the blue bird is "our most important distinguishing feature" and "that's why we protect it so much". However, it had already disappeared for a short time: In April, the bird was temporarily replaced by Dogecoin's Shiba Inu dog, which increased the market value of the meme coin by up to four billion dollars.
Whether and when a permanent new logo will come is therefore unclear. Musk is known for introducing big changes to Twitter quite spontaneously and causing chaos (as happened with the new blue verification checkmark system). Most recently, the maximum number of tweets that users can see per day was restricted. However, it is also conceivable that Musk's announcement that he wants to change the logo in the short term is a smokescreen.
Because things aren't going well on Twitter. Competitor and Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is attacking Musk with the app "Threads". (There is also a curious debate about a possible show fight between the two billionaires, more on that here). Twitter, on the other hand, is shrinking, according to analysts. Just last week, Musk announced poor business figures: advertising revenues had fallen by almost 50 percent, and debts remained high. Cash flow is therefore still negative – in March, Musk had stated that he expected Twitter to be able to achieve positive cash flow by June.
kko/Reuters