- Elon Musk has announced that Twitter will now be known as X.com.
- The new logo has been released, but it is unclear what the rebranding means.
- The move is a return to Musk’s tech startup roots, as X.com was a direct bank he founded in 1999.
- Musk has mentioned wanting to turn Twitter into a ‘super app’, but it is still unclear how he plans to do this.
This weekend, Elon Musk has officially announced that Twitter will be rebranded as ‘X’. Musk announced that X.com now redirects to Twitter homepage, and the new interim logo can be seen across the platform. Unfortunately, X.com does not actually redirect to Twitter right now due to a configuration error.
So why exactly is Musk rebranding as X? That isn’t so obvious, as the announcement took place across the weekend through a series of tweets on Musk’s account. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said that X represents the future state of unlimited interactivity, entered in audio, video, message and payments — creating a global marketplace for ideas. Critics online joked that the X.com rebrand is the culmination of Musk’s plan to undermine every advantage Twitter had over its competitors.
For Musk, the move to X.com is a return to his tech startup roots. X.com was a direct bank Musk launched in 1999, which later became PayPal. The PayPal acquisition by eBay gave Musk the money to found SpaceX and become an early-stage investor in Tesla Motors. Musk has previously mentioned that he wants to turn Twitter into a ‘super app’, with the aim to achieve cultural dominance akin to WeChat in China. How exactly he plans to do that remains unclear, but X.com is at least a more all-encompassing brand to base that off.
