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Bye-Bye Blue Bird: Elon Musk to ‘bid adieu’ to Twitter logo in exchange for an ‘X’

July 23, 2023 | | Print Article

The internet may soon bid farewell to the bird as Elon Musk encouraged a crowdsource campaign to accelerate his vision.

The wealthy tech entrepreneur may have purchased Twitter last year for around $44 billion, but his personal engagement with the platform and suggestions about its potential have intimated that its perceived value may be far higher. The same could not be true for the brand itself as Musk set a fire Saturday night teasing an imminent end for the famed blue bird.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” tweeted the social media company’s owner after grabbing the attention of users with another post that read, “Paint it Black.”

Social media users seemed a little skeptical of the move:

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Having also posted an interactive poll asking if the platform’s default color should be changed to black, garnering nearly three-quarters of a million votes at the time of this post, Musk later prompted his almost 150 million followers, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”

Developing X had long been a goal of the entrepreneur who has expressed his interest in it ultimately becoming an everything app. Toward that end, Twitter Inc. had been renamed X Corp. earlier this year.

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As a mix of serious and comical responses were posted, the onetime CEO latched onto one idea that featured the current logo in white on a black background and said, “Like this but X” before expanding the idea was “To embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.”

He would later share another users three-second graphic that showed the bird getting swapped out for a stylized X, but without a comment as to whether it satisfied his criteria as a “good enough” logo to fulfill his earlier promise.

However, he did join a Twitter Spaces chat where, when asked if the logo would change, he said “Yes” and “It should have been done a long time ago.”

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The latest move from the world’s richest man followed his announcement from earlier in July when he officially launched his own company geared toward “growing” a new artificial general intelligence (AGI) named xAI that would utilize Tesla engineers and Twitter posts in “trying to understand the universe.”

Musk’s efforts to improve the social media platform included a recent fulfillment of an earlier announcement that creators who met certain benchmarks, like being a paid subscriber, would be able to share in Twitter’s ad revenue.

As many of those who received payments that in some cases reached five figure sums posted their considerable earnings, an eagerness to interact and reap the benefits seemed to have been spurred.

To that end, there continued to be a high level of interactivity with Musk’s post seeking a “good enough” logo, having been viewed over 16 million times in six hours time with more than 17,000 replies ranging from artistic to sarcastic.

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Kevin Haggerty
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