Elon Musk has revealed that he is renaming Twitter, and altering the platform’s recognisable blue bird logo to the letter X.
The rebranding of the social media platform comes just weeks after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced threads for Instagram.
As we all know, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are reportedly set to battle it out in the ring, and there’s been a lot going on between the pair over the last few weeks.
Zuckerberg was snapped alongside UFC fighters following an intense training session for the hotly anticipated fight between himself and Musk.
Although there is still no official confirmation or date of a fight between the tech billionaires, the pair are clearly taking their upcoming bout very seriously, as Musk has also been getting some training sessions in.
After a few taxing sessions with St. Pierre, who is widely considered as one of the best fighters in MMA history, Musk acknowledged that he needs “a lot more training.”
“Really fun! The obvious conclusion is that I need a *lot* more training,” Musk said in response to a picture of himself with martial arts coach John Danaher and fighting specialist Lex Fridman.
The news that Twitter is threatening to sue Meta’s new app Threads broke earlier this month.
Meta launched the new word-based app and it garnered millions of users in its first weeks, thanks to the integration with Instagram making it super simple for their billions of users to sign up.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a letter from Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro, in which he detailed the company’s intention to sue.
It accuses Meta of hiring Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote.
“Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice.”
US copyright law does not protect ideas, but it does protect intellectual property, so for Twitter to be successful in court they would have to prove that, for example, programming code was taken.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said in a Threads post: “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”
Twitter has made eighty percent of its staff redundant since Musk’s takeover, laying off 7,500 employees since last October.
Elon Musk was replaced by Linda Yaccarino as CEO of Twitter last month, but he has responded to the news of threats of legal action via the site.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” he wrote, referring to a tweet citing the news.
The news comes after Twitter has seen an increasing amount of change, with Musk’s pay-for-verification scheme seeing legacy accounts lose their blue ticks and limits on the amount of tweets users can see each day being just some of the ways in which the app has transformed this year.
On the day of Threads’ launch, Meta CEO Zuckerberg returned to his Twitter account after eleven years to share a photo of the iconic Spider-Man meme of 2 figures pointing at each other.
He also responded to a question from MMA fighter Mike Davis, who asked if Threads could become larger than Twitter.
“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1bn+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will,” Zuckerberg wrote.
And now, it seems that Musk is working hard to keep up with Zuckerbergs plans, as he’s just announced a total rebranding of Twitter, sharing that the site will now be called ‘X.’
Around 1:45 pm, Musk tweeted, “X.com now points to https://twitter.com/,” which has received over 7 million views.
he later added: “Interim X logo goes live later today.”
Understandably, dozens of users were confused by the sudden announcement, with one writing: “I am not sure how it will be called now! Post? X-post? Xost?”
While another added: “Get on threads at this point.”
However, the comments didn’t stop Musk from sharing his idea, and in a follow up tweet, he wrote: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
He continued: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”
In the end, Musk pinned a shaky video of an X covering the bird logo to the top of his page.
Sawyer Merritt, co-founder of an apparel company came up with the idea, while physics engineer Alex Tourville created the graphic.
What do you make of the change?
