Musk’s brand overhaul coincides with pressure from new challenger Threads by Meta Platforms Inc. — AFP
Twitter owner Elon Musk said the social media company will change its logo soon, getting rid of the blue bird that’s long been its signature.
"If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow,” Musk tweeted late Saturday (July 22). Roughly six months after he acquired Twitter for US$44bil (RM201.28bil), he merged the company into an entity called X Corp, saying Twitter is an accelerant to building an everything-app called X. An interim X logo is coming on Sunday, he said in a later message.
The X service is envisioned as an AI-powered "global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” recently appointed Twitter Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino added in a note retweeted by Musk Sunday (July 23). It would include payments and banking alongside audio, video and messaging.
"Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote in another post. He didn’t say whether he would try and get users to do away with the term "to tweet,” which has entered the public lexicon. He also changed his bio on the site – where he now has 149 million followers and 111 paying subscribers to his account – to "X.com”. That web address now points to Twitter.
Musk’s brand overhaul coincides with pressure from new challenger Threads by Meta Platforms Inc. Mark Zuckerberg’s offering racked up 100 million users in less than five days after launching at the start of this month. Threads uses people’s Instagram accounts and functions like a simpler, currently advertising-free version of Twitter.
Twitter still has a brand toolkit page on its website calling the light-blue bird its "most recognisable asset.” While that page says the company is protective of its logo and offers guidelines on how to use it, Musk apparently isn’t a fan.
"It should have been done a long time ago,” he said during a brief Twitter Spaces appearance, referring to changing the logo. "We’re cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blowtorches,” he said, potentially referring to the sign he’s already altered on the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Musk’s many changes to Twitter so far haven’t worked out well for stakeholders. Fidelity in May marked down the value of its holding in the company by two-thirds, while Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management has written down its stake by 47%, she told the Wall Street Journal last week.
In March, Musk suggested the company was turning a corner by making its advertising more relevant. He said Twitter had a chance to break even on a cash-flow basis in the second quarter. That prediction was overoptimistic. Musk tweeted earlier this month that Twitter’s cash flow was still negative and blamed a roughly 50% drop in advertising revenue, along with the company’s debt load. – Bloomberg
