Elon Musk has hurried through the process of rebranding Twitter to X, replacing the widely recognised blue bird — Larry — on its official account and website. The ‘X’ matches Musk’s early payment processing company X.com and the recently named parent company of Twitter, X Holdings.

Musk’s fascination with the name X.com goes back a long way and will have a mention in the forthcoming biography of Musk, written by Walter Isaacson. The author has tweeted: “When his cousin Peter Rive visited in early 1999, he found Musk poring over books about the banking system. ‘I’m trying to think about what to start next,’ he explained. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded X.com.”

Ultimately, X.com merged with Confinity, a competing software company. In 2001, Peter Thiel, one of Confinity’s founders, replaced Musk as X.com’s chief executive, and the company was renamed PayPal. In 2017, Musk bought the domain for X.com from PayPal.

The idea of the X app is to be an all-inclusive, a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. WeChat, run by Tencent, is the biggest super app in the world, with over a billion users. Yes, it’s that big and anyone planning to move to China, should know about the app. “There’s no WeChat equivalent outside of China. You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success,” Musk said in June last year.

Having a WeChat equivalent is one thing but giving up the brand equity that Musk is doing is quite unfathomable. Like tech journalist Walt Mossberg has pointed out: “I know he wants to add many functions and services to it, but why did that require a name change?”

The team behind the original logo

The iconic Twitter logo was designed in 2012 by a team of three — Todd Waterbury, Angy Che and Martin Grasser. “The logo was designed to be simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes, almost like a lowercase ‘e’, Grasser has tweeted.

There was no brief given to the three, “other than we want a new bird, and it should be as good as the Apple and Nike logo”. In a Twitter thread, Grasser said: “Twitter had made some sort of flying goose but Jack wanted something simpler.” In the quest to capture the motion of birds, “we liked using circles to construct our drawings, it felt like the bird should have an underlying neutrality and simplicity about it”. "Sometime in March we had an approved bird and it launched in May 2012."

The new logo has been picked from a design submitted by Sawyer Merritt, who says he based his submission on a font found online.

Asked what tweets would now be called, Musk said: “x’s.” As for a retweet, he said: “That whole concept should be rethought.” And that may mean, he still doesn’t have a clue.

File picture of Twitter logo

Some have pointed out that few people refer to Alphabet, Google’s parent company since 2015. Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021, but its collection of apps — Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook — still retain their own brands and logos. Apple Computers simply became Apple Inc in 2007 and Jobs announced that the company was dropping the word ‘Computer’ from its name to better reflect their move into a wider field of consumer electronics. “The Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone. Only one of those is a computer. So we’re changing the name,” he said. But that was more of a corporate name change and nothing drastic.

Responding to a Twitter thread from Grasser, explaining the approach to designing the iconic bird logo, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey responded with a single goat emoji, meaning GOAT, or greatest of all time.

Will the name X work? Already popular users on Twitter, like MKBHD and iJustine, have said they will continue to call the platform Twitter.

Peter Thiel (left) and Elon Musk hold VISA credit cards branded with the X.com company logo on October 20, 2000 Picture: AP