Twitter rebranding: What ‘X’ means for the future of the app

Twitter, the internet’s micro-blogging destination for years, has gone through a lot of changes in the past year. Since SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk took over the company in 2022, the platform has seen several changes, from its content policies to its verification system.

However, days after Twitter saw its biggest competitor in the space rise in the form of Instagram’s Threads app, Twitter is set to witness its biggest change yet – a complete rebranding.

Musk announced earlier today that Twitter’s logo will soon change from its iconic ‘Blue Bird’ to an ‘X’ icon. Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino also took to the platform to announce that the app’s future will include “unlimited interactivity” via elements like audio, video and messaging. Additionally, there will also be new additions like banking and payments. Yaccarino further mentions in her tweet that the new X app will be “powered by AI.”

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Musk, meanwhile, has repeatedly tweeted about the change, even changing his profile picture to an X that may eventually be the new logo for the app. The letter ‘X’ is a recurring element in Musk’s ventures, being a part of the SpaceX brand name, as well as the name for one of Tesla’s cars. The x.com domain was purchased by the billionaire from PayPal back in 2017, and now, the domain redirects to Twitter.

What the change means for Twitter users

After mass-layoffs in the company, a subscription-based verification model, and numerous smaller changes and technical issues since Musk took over, Twitter is now anything but the platform it was before 2022. The platform also saw restrictions on the number of posts both verified and unverified users could see in a day, as well as plans to limit the number of DMs (direct messages) users could send.

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This has led many to leave the platform for rival apps like Mastodon and the more recent Threads, which saw one of the internet’s quickest adoptions – the app saw 100 million sign-ups within a week of launch.

At the time of writing this story, Twitter still retains its old logo, but with that changing soon and Musk’s vision of the ‘Everything app’ going strong, the future remains more unclear than ever.