X Marks the Stop

The end of the line for the iconic blue bird

Image: Badly edited by author

The rebrand of HBO to MAX is the worst rebrand in recent times.

Elon Musk, sitting on the toilet, scrolling Twitter at 3 am: Hold my beer.

Honestly, I’m a little tired of writing about the bird app. Stop writing about it then! I hear you gasp. But every week, its overlord does something dumber than the week before, and the fallout is just too juicy not to comment on.

Destroying 15 years of brand legacy in favor of a whimsical obsession with the letter X might just top the list.

Twitter is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Its logo is on nearly every website, product packaging and business card you can imagine. Rival social platforms would kill to create some as unique and renowned as a “Tweet” or “Retweet,” phrases that are baked into the social media fabric alongside the “like.” That kind of brand recognition is nearly impossible to replicate intentionally. Despite the platform struggling to grow its user base beyond the current ceiling and failing to make any decent monetary return for shareholders (well, until Musk came along, but the point stands), its brand legacy kept Twitter afloat, preserving its cultural relevance.

And last night, Musk decided to throw all of that away.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

The tweet popped up at 5 am. Here he goes again, many of us thought, trolling away like an immature child, desperate for some reaction. But quickly, it became apparent that this time he was serious. Without seemingly consulting anyone, he announced that Twitter would rebrand to X, with the domain x.com now pointing to Twitter.com. (I promise you, that is not a link to a porn site.) Then came a half-assed logo, seemingly plucked from nowhere — and not designed in-house — and with that, it was done. A few hours ago, the X appeared.

The bird was dead.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Musk owns a SpaceX company, in which the X makes little sense and is there because he thinks it’s “cool.” And back in 2000, Elon Musk tried to rebrand PayPal as x.com before the board forced him out. He got his hands back on the domain in…