Elon Musk rebrands Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo after nearly 17 years
Bye-bye, birdie.
Elon Musk and Twitter chief executive officer Linda Yaccarino have ditched Twitter’s iconic blue bird after nearly 17 years as the company’s logo.
“X is here! Let’s do this,” Yaccarino tweeted Monday morning with a picture of the company’s new logo.
To solidify the rebranding, the billionaire entrepreneur tweeted out a picture of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco with the company’s new “X” logo cast by light on the building.
Yaccarino’s and Musk’s Twitter handles now both feature the “X“ logo — although the blue bird is still present across the social platform.
On Sunday night, Musk changed his profile picture to the company’s “interim X logo” — a white X on a black background — after prompting his 149 million followers to share with him a “good enough X logo” earlier that morning.
“It should have been done a long time ago,” Musk said during a Twitter audio livestream early Sunday when asked why he was considering the shakeup. “Sorry it took so long.”
The Neuralink founder went with a logo shared by Sawyer Merritt — with the creator explaining that the design was inspired by a similar logo made by Alex Tourville for the “now discontinued” X Pod.
“I created the video above using the font logo, adding a glow and little lines in the logo to make it look ‘imperfect,'” Merritt replied under the video of Twitter’s new logo tweeted by Musk on Sunday.
Musk said “X” is in coordination with his “everything app,” an instant messaging and payment service similar to the widely used Chinese app WeChat — which has evolved into one of Asia’s most dominating apps due to its range of services and number of users.
WeChat — also known as Weixin in China — is the world’s fifth-most popular social media app.
The platform has an estimated 1.6 billion monthly users as of July 2023, with a valuation of $62 billion, according to Bank My Cell.
“It’s an exceptionally rare thing — in life or in business — that you get a second chance to make another big impression,” Yaccarino tweeted Saturday with the big news of the logo change looming.
“Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
Musk — who paid a staggering $44 billion to acquire Twitter — also changed the name of the business to X Corp back in March as the billionaire continues transforming the social media platform after taking control in October 2022.
Musk has long been familiar with the letter “X” — co-founding X.com in 1999 as an online bank that merged with competitor Confinity to create PayPal in 2000.
The bird itself has changed its look four times since 2006 but has stayed as is after it was redesigned by Twitter’s former creative director Doug Bowman in 2012, according to the New York Times.
Twitter’s now-retired blue bird logo is called Larry as a tribute to Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird, Twitter’s former co-founder Biz Stone revealed in 2018.
The bird was temporarily changed in April by Musk to the Shiba Inu dog used by Dogecoin — a meme currency with which the South Africa native has previously been associated.
Since Musk acquired the social media platform, the company has laid off more than half its workforce to cut costs.
Yaccarino, the former advertising chief at NBCUniversal, was named Twitter’s CEO in June.
