A worker removes letters from the Twitter sign that is posted on the exterior of Twitter ... [+]
Elon Musk hastily renamed Twitter on Sunday, changing the social media platform’s brand to X as part of an effort to build an “everything app” that also processes payments. And while branding experts have warned a complete rebranding has wiped as much as $20 billion from the company’s value, Musk is still confident. In fact, the billionaire seems to believe X could become the most important brand on the planet.
“X will become the most valuable brand on Earth. Make [sic] my words,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.
Musk made the bold proclamation in response to a story from Bloomberg News that quoted brand agencies and analysts who estimate getting rid of the Twitter brand will likely wipe anywhere from $4 billion to $20 billion off the company’s value.
While some analysts point out that Musk has long been obsessed with the brand name X—even trying to change the name of PayPal to X before he was pushed out of the company—the rollout has been haphazard and piecemeal. Musk announced the change on Sunday by asking Twitter users to submit logos for X, a rather unconventional way to simultaneously go about a complete rebranding of the site. By Sunday night, the logo for Twitter had changed to the X, and yet days later there are still large elements of the site that still contain the Twitter brand.
As one example, the upper right corner that users see when using the site on a desktop computer still says “Search Twitter” rather than “Search X.” Words like “tweet” are still prominent on the site, though it’s not clear whether Musk has plans to change the terminology used for the social media site’s posts. A viral tweet on the site falsely claimed X was changing the word tweet to Xeet, though that’s simply not true. At least not yet.
Musk purchased the social media platform back in October 2022 and immediately instituted a number of controversial changes. Twitter fired thousands of workers and granted a kind of amnesty to allow users who had been previously banned to come back to the site. Users like musician Kanye West, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and former president Donald Trump were welcomed back. But it didn’t take long for West and Fuentes to be banned again for hate speech. Trump has yet to rejoin Twitter, instead opting to stick with the social media platform he started called Truth Social.
Musk also made a number of comments that were highly controversial since buying the platform, including a defense of Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams, who was proposing a new form of racial segregation. Musk called the media racist after every major newspaper dropped Adams. The billionaire has also been vocally against trans rights and has championed Matt Walsh, arguably the most vocal anti-trans bigot on Twitter, who produced a documentary called What Is A Woman?, hosted on the social media site.
Those controversies have made major advertisers nervous about returning to Twitter in the Musk era, with some executives even nervous about appearing anywhere near Musk in public. Musk hired NBC Universal’s ad chief Linda Yaccarino to be CEO of Twitter in an effort to calm major brands, but Musk is still clearly steering the ship.
Will X become the biggest brand on the planet? Nobody can say for certain. But given the exodus of major brands from the site, combined with the soaring popularity of alternative social media platforms like Bluesky, it’s hard to believe many people are ready to give Musk their banking information.
