San Francisco: Twitter launched its new logo Monday, ditching the blue bird on its website for an X as part of a wider rebranding.
The social media network's site now shows the company's new logo: a white X on a black background.
Musk replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture on Monday of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
The X started appearing on the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird was still dominant across the phone app.
Musk had asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying it “certainly will be refined.”
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," Musk tweeted Sunday.
And in 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.
The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Musk said.
In response to questions about what tweets would be called when the rebranding is done, Musk said they would be called Xs.
The abrupt change comes as Twitter faces a steep decline in advertising dollars and a new rival in Meta Platforms Inc.'s Threads, a service that racked up 100 million users within five days of launching this month. The debut of Threads was greeted with derision by Musk, who's accused it of being a copycat service due to its similarities to Twitter.
The billionaire's stated intentions for Twitter have fluctuated over time, having initially started as a quest to eliminate bots on the service and preserve free speech. He has since talked about Twitter as an accelerant for delivering X, his vision for an everything-app akin to Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat.
In supporting tweets on Sunday, recently-appointed Yaccarino explained that X is envisioned as an AI-powered "global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities." It would include payments and banking alongside audio, video and messaging.
