Elon Musk on Monday explained his decision to strip Twitter of its famous blue-bird logo as a move to remake the business into a broad platform for communications and financial transactions, a target he’s described as the everything app.
“This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing,” Musk said about the apparently spontaneous move over the weekend to crowdsource a logo from fans and adopt it as Twitter’s new insignia. “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting.”
Read more: Musk Makes Fan-Created ‘X’ Twitter’s New Logo in Abrupt Change
The billionaire owner’s envisioned X app — which will connect Twitter’s underlying infrastructure with x.com, a web address that now functions as a routing service to Twitter — is one that layers communication, multimedia and “the ability to conduct your entire financial world.”
In messages posted in support of Musk’s overhaul, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino said X would include fintech features like payments and banking. A recent arrival at the company, Yaccarino has the task of restoring trust with advertisers and users alike following a series of abrupt and seemingly arbitrary changes executed by Musk.
Twitter’s advertising revenue has fallen in half, Musk recently tweeted, and bigger rival Meta Platforms Inc. this month rolled out a direct competitor with its Threads app. The move to rebrand Twitter into X has brought attention back to the social platform, though that’s unlikely to offset the potential billions of dollars in lost brand value, according to media experts and analysts.
Read more: Twitter Turning Into X Is Set to Kill Billions in Brand Value
Musk has talked about modeling X on WeChat, the Tencent Holdings Ltd. super-app used by the majority of Chinese for everything from payments to messaging, along with online financial services such as consumer loans. It’s unclear what the billionaire intends for X specifically.
