New Delhi:
Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo, which has symbolized the platform for more than a decade, is set to be replaced with an “X” logo, Elon Musk announced on Sunday. Mr Musk tweeted, “X.com now points to Twitter.com. Interim X logo going live later today.”
Mr Musk has repeatedly expressed his ambition to develop a “one-stop shop” app that would integrate features of social media and payment apps similar to China’s WeChat, which is owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent.
WeChat is a staple of Chinese society, with more than 1 billion users relying on it for a variety of tasks from social media and messaging to ordering food and paying for cabs. It is so essential to everyday life that it is often referred to as the “app for everything”.
Mr Musk has previously said that his controversial acquisition of Twitter last year was “a catalyst to build X, the Everything App”.
The SpaceX and Tesla chief’s fascination with the letter X dates back to the 1990s. But why is the 52-year-old man so obsessed with the 24th letter of the English alphabet?
In 1999, Mr. Musk launched the X.com domain, an online banking services platform that is a predecessor to PayPal. In 2017, Mr Musk re-purchased the X.com domain and it was held as one of his unused assets until his big announcement on Twitter’s future on Sunday.
After the purchase, Mr. Musk tweeted that the domain held a lot of “sentimental value” to him, possibly a tribute to his early entrepreneurial days.
Thank you PayPal for allowing me to buy back https://t.co/bOUOejO16Y, No plans yet, but it has a lot of emotional significance for me.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 11 July 2017
Tesla’s CEO has a well-documented habit of naming things with the letter X. His company SpaceX, his electric car Model X and even one of his children, X AE A-XII, all contain the letter X in their names.
Mr Musk has already named Twitter’s parent company X Corporation. “If a cool X logo is posted tonight, we’ll be doing it live around the world tomorrow,” he tweeted on Sunday.
He further mentioned that Twitter’s new symbol should be Art Deco-style and that posts on the site would be called “One X” under the new identity.
Earlier this month, Mr Musk launched his own artificial intelligence company, XAI, with the aim of challenging OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. He added that the new artificial intelligence company would operate independently from their other businesses, however, adding that xAI’s innovations could be beneficial to those businesses, such as Twitter.
And the way things are progressing, many believe that eventually, X Corporation could integrate Mr. Musk’s many ventures, including Twitter, under one banner.
featured video of the day
“Never seen such killing”: cousin of slain Manipur tribal woman tells NDTV