Twitter’s blue bird has flown as Elon Musk unveils new ‘X’ logo

Elon Musk and Twitter chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino unveiled a logo for the social media platform on Monday that featured a white "X" on a black background as a replacement for the familiar blue bird symbol.

"X is here! Let's do this," tweeted Yaccarino, who also posted a picture of the logo projected on the company's offices in San Francisco.

Both Yaccarino's and Musk's Twitter handles feature the X logo, although the Twitter blue bird is still visible across the platform.

#GoodbyeTwitter was trending on the platform, with reference to the old logo, as several users criticized the new one.

WATCH | One of Twitter's original designers reflects on the little blue bird:

One of Twitter's original designers reflects on the little blue bird

12 hours ago

Duration 1:43

Martin Grasser, an artist who was one of three designers who came up with Twitter's original blue bird logo, talks about the thought process behind their work and how it was meant to symbolize 'the best memories of your, of the Internet's, adolescence.'

Musk said in a post on Sunday he wanted to change Twitter's logo and polled his millions of followers on whether they would favour changing the site's colour scheme from blue to black.

He posted a picture of a stylized X against a black outer space-themed background. He also referred to the "interim X logo," and tweeted that "soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds."

In response to a tweet asking what tweets will be called under "X," Musk replied "x's." The original Twitter logo was designed in 2012 by a team of three.

"The logo was designed to be simple, balanced and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase 'e,'" tweeted Martin Grasser, one of the designers.

Weeks before completing his Twitter acquisition last year, Musk had said that buying the company would speed up his ambition to create an "everything app" called "X" by three to five years.

Musk bought x.com back from PayPal in 2017, saying it had "sentimental value." Musk had co-founded x.com as an online bank in 1999, which later transformed into PayPal.

While Twitter's official page on the platform has been renamed as "X," the domain x.com is not active.

"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities," Yaccarino tweeted on Sunday.

Yaccarino, the former advertising chief at NBCUniversal who started as Twitter CEO on June 5, has taken over when the social media platform is trying to reverse a plunge in advertising revenue.

Since the takeover of Twitter, the company has faced tumultuous times with layoffs, a sharp drop in advertisers and the meteoric rise of Threads, Meta's response to Twitter.

WATCH | What is the fediverse?

What is the fediverse?

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CBC News TikTok producer Ashley Fraser unpacks how a federated social network running free open software on computer servers around the world — known colloquially as the fediverse — allows users to connect and communicate with people on other servers.