Elon Musk said he was about to make one of the most visible changes to Twitter since taking control of the social media company last fall: replacing the widely recognized bird logo.
In a tweet Early Sunday morning Eastern Time, Mr. Musk said that “soon we will say goodbye to the twitter brand and gradually all birds.”
He added soon after: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight”, it would “go live worldwide tomorrow”.
“X” is a term for what Mr. Musk has described as an “everything app” that could combine social media, instant messaging and payment services, similar to the popular Chinese app WeChat.
Mr Musk said that buying Twitter is “an accelerator for creating X,” and the corporate entity he created to buy and control Twitter is called X Holdings.
Mr Musk spoke on a Twitter audio live stream early Sunday to say he was changing Twitter’s logo. “It should have happened a long time ago,” he said. “Sorry it took so long.”
A few hours later, Mr. Musk said in an email to Twitter employees that “we are indeed moving to X” and that it would happen “today”. “This is my last message from a Twitter email,” he wrote, before closing with a salute emoji.
Mr. Musk has few barriers to making such changes to the company after taking it private as part of his takeover of the company. But he could still face resistance from the banks that have lent him billions of dollars and from the private investors he has brought into the deal, who could raise concerns about jettisoning one of Twitter’s most visible assets.
The company saw its advertising revenue plummet amid the departure of sales executives and concerns that the site had become more susceptible to problematic content. It now faces a well-funded rival in Threads, the recently launched Twitter-like service from Meta, the owner of Facebook.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk has had an affinity for the letter X for a long time. In 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online bank, and later merged it with another start-up to create PayPal. In 2017 he said he bought back the X.com domain from PayPal.
Mr. Musk has not always followed through on his public statements, such as when he tweeted that the company would create a content moderation board to review what kind of speech is acceptable on the site.
But he has continued to change certain Twitter practices, such as ending free verification of prominent users’ accounts, indicated by a white-and-blue checkmark, and instead charging users a subscription fee for the checkmark.
