Goodbye bird, Hello X: Elon Musk says he's rebranding Twitter to X, as he transforms the social media platform into an everything app. X is a throwback to Musk's early foray into entrepreneurship when he founded X.com as a payments company. X.com eventually became PayPal.
Twitter's owner crowdsourced new logo designs in a series of tweets over the weekend. X.com now points to Twitter.com and Musk said he will soon remove the Twitter logo of a bird.
Twitter's moving towards fintech: In a tweet, newly appointed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said that the X service would be a “global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities.” This would include payments and banking alongside other forms of media. The firm's name has already been legally changed to X.
Leaning in to payments: As Twitter's advertising revenue has cratered, Musk and his team have been applying for payments licenses in US states and designing the software required to introduce payments across the social media platform. As part of his vision for an everything app, akin to Tencent's WeChat, Musk has said X would include peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts, and debit cards.
Tearsheet Take:
As the change in Twitter's brand solidifies some questions around its brand and UX remains unclear. What will happen to "tweeting"? The reference to a chirp doesn't make sense without a bird involved. Over the years Twitter has built quite a story around its product and digital experience, even the notification sound referenced a bird. All of that will now have to be reconstructed, and it is difficult to see what story can one tell about a placeholder alphabet. Right now it is easier to define Musk's Twitter/X with what it has yet to achieve. It is not quite a payments app, with payment licenses only in a handful of states.
It is not a crypto app with functionalities limited to viewing crypto prices on the platform and it is a long way off from offering core banking products like debit cards. For better or worse Twitter is metamorphosing (pun intended), and at least Meta's core product Facebook didn't have to lose its identity for Zuckerberg's great plan to come to fruition.