I wouldn’t be on Twitter anymore had it not been for Elon Musk and his pro-free speech attitude. I was banned from the platform for roughly nine months before he took over and I got amnesty. Turning Twitter into a genuine free-speech platform has been great. Still, I haven’t agreed with everything he’s done with Twitter. My biggest issue is how the value of verification has become diluted now that anyone can be verified by paying a small monthly fee.
But his next move might be even worse as it looks like Musk intends to phase out Twitter’s branding.
“Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted late Saturday night.
That’s right. Goodbye blue bird, hello… X. That’s right, Musk wants to rebrand Twitter as “X”, in an apparent effort to transform the platform into a “super app” that offers multiple functions, such as direct messaging, payments, and video streaming. According to Musk, the X will “embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.”
Musk even encouraged Twitter users to submit their own designs for the new “X” logo.
Axios noted that “Musk has spent months trying to retool Twitter to meet his own vision, but the changes have caused a slew of business problems compounded by growing competition.”
Related: Can Twitter Compete with Fox and Traditional News Media?
Is this really a good time for Musk to be tinkering with a world-famous brand? So far, Twitter has remained the undisputed champion of the microblogging platform. Since Musk ended the practice of censoring conservative views on Twitter, many on the left have been trying hard to move to other platforms — but with little success. Mastodon became the go-to alternative service, but even some of the most well-known Mastodon users still rely on their Twitter accounts to reach a wide audience.
The media has made a huge deal out of Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, propping it up as a major threat to the original microblogging platform. Threads managed to get 100 million users in its first week. The media quickly pronounced Twitter dead, although it appears that interest in Threads has waned significantly. Its rapid growth at launch shows that it still has the potential to compete with Twitter, and I dare say that rebranding won’t help Twitter in the long term.
Musk is taking a significant risk that could impact the platform’s competitive advantage. Twitter has become deeply ingrained in the digital landscape over the past decade or so, and its name and logo are instantly recognizable to hundreds of millions of users globally. These visual elements serve as powerful brand identifiers, evoking familiarity, trust, and a sense of community among its longstanding loyal users. That advantage will be gone if Musk rebrands Twitter and strips it of all the visual elements people associate with it. You wouldn’t ever see McDonald’s lose the Golden Arches or Nike drop the iconic swoosh.
I get that Musk has big plans for Twitter to make it bigger and better than it was before, but changing its identity could do more damage to it than Threads ever could on its own.
