Elon Musk confirmed today that he is changing the Twitter logo on Monday, after posting on Twitter early Sunday that "soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand." In its place, the letter X, the name of Musk's long-envisioned "everything app."
Musk answered a Twitter Spaces invitation from a Twitter Blue subscriber named Greg (@greg16676935420), and when asked if he was really changing the logo, answered simply, "Yes."
"It should have been done a long time ago," Musk said when asked why the change was happening now. "Sorry it took so long."
"We're cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blow torches," he added. "Well, it's got to come off somehow, really—it's more dramatic that way."
The casual confirmation—delivered while he was playing Diablo 4 and not drinking a Diet Coke—comes after the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX asked his followers for suggested designs for a new logo featuring the letter X.
"I like the letter X," he explained, posting a photo of himself standing in front of a Tesla X logo while forming the letter X with his arms.
X is also the name of Musk's planned "super app," similar to WeChat, a dominant messaging, social media, and payment app in China—a platform he has openly stated he wishes to copy. Dubbed a "WeChat for the west," it's a goal shared by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat, it does everything—it's sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of other things, and all rolled into one," he said on the All In podcast. "We don't have anything like that outside of China."
On the payments front, the tech billionaire has been busily applying for money transmitter licenses, And the transition of Twitter to X was the stated goal of his decision to bring Linda Yaccarino on board as Twitter CEO in May.
Today, Musk turned to his Twitter followers for logo design help.
"If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow," he tweeted. The challenge was answered with dozens of submissions—some serious, some not. He appeared to settle on a submission from Twitter user Sawyer Merritt, who credited his co-host Alex Tourville for the design for their now discontinued Official X Podcast.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
Zoe Schiffer, managing editor for Platformer, reported on Threads that Musk also sent an email to Twitter employees confirming the change.
This won't be the first change Elon Musk has made to Twitter’s logo. Late last year, he swapped the blue bird for the iconic Shiba Inu dog that represents meme crypto Dogecoin.
Not only did that move cause the token to soar by more than 20%, but also earned him a $258 billion class action lawsuit that is currently underway in which he is being accused of racketeering and insider trading.