Twitter logo changes to X as Elon Musk bids to 'cross' Meta's Threads

Twitter Monday launched its new logo, killing the blue bird on its website and replacing it with a stylised "X" in a bid to rebrand the microblogging website as its rival, Meta's Threads is giving the Elon Musk-owned social media messaging service a mighty run for its money.

Elon Musk and Twitter's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, Monday jointly revealed a new logo for the social media platform.

 The logo showcased a white "X" on a black background, replacing the well-known blue bird symbol.

"X is here! Let's do this," tweeted Yaccarino, and also posted a picture of the logo projected on the company's offices in San Francisco.

Both Yaccarino and Musk incorporated the X logo into their Twitter handles, while the traditional Twitter blue bird symbol remains visible throughout the platform.

In a post on Sunday, Musk expressed his desire to alter Twitter's logo and conducted a poll among his millions of followers, seeking their preference on changing the site's colour scheme from blue to black. 

He shared an image of a sleek X on a space-themed black background and referred to it as the "interim X logo."

Yaccarino, the former advertising chief at NBCUniversal who started as Twitter CEO on June 5, has taken over when the social media platform is trying to reverse a plunge in advertising revenue.

Musk had already named Twitter´s parent company the X Corporation and has said his takeover of the social media giant was "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app" — a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become online payments giant PayPal.

Such an app could still function as a social media platform and also include messaging and mobile payments.

"Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we're just beginning to imagine," Yaccarino tweeted on Sunday.

Yaccarino, a former advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk hired last month to be Twitter's CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.

"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity - centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities," Yaccarino tweeted.

New revenue streams 

Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform's advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on Musk's management style and mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation.

In response, the billionaire SpaceX boss has moved toward introducing payments and commerce through the platform in a search for new revenue.

The platform is thought to have around 200 million daily active users, but it has suffered repeated technical failures since Musk sacked much of its staff.

Many users and advertisers alike have responded adversely to the social media site´s new charges for previously free services, its changes to content moderation and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts.

Musk said this month that Twitter had lost roughly half of its advertising revenue since he took control.

Facebook parent Meta also this month launched its text-based platform, called Threads, which has up to 150 million users, according to some estimates.

But the amount of time users spend on the rival app has plummeted in the weeks since its launch, according to data from market analysis firm Sensor Tower.