X Marks the Stop

The end of the line for the iconic blue bird

The rebrand of HBO to MAX is the worst rebrand in recent times. 

Elon Musk, sitting on the toilet, scrolling Twitter at 3 am: Hold my beer.

Honestly, I’m a little tired of writing about the bird app. Stop writing about it then! I hear you gasp. But every week, its overlord does something dumber than the week before, and the fallout is just too juicy not to comment on. 

Destroying 15 years of brand legacy in favor of a whimsical obsession with the letter X might just top the list. 

Twitter is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Its logo is on nearly every website, product packaging and business card you can imagine. Rival social platforms would kill to create some as unique and renowned as a "Tweet" or "Retweet," phrases that are baked into the social media fabric alongside the “like.” That kind of brand recognition is nearly impossible to replicate intentionally. Despite the platform struggling to grow its user base beyond the current ceiling and failing to make any decent monetary return for shareholders (well, until Musk came along, but the point stands), its brand legacy kept Twitter afloat, preserving its cultural relevance.  

And last night, Musk decided to throw all of that away. 

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“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”

The tweet popped up at 5 am. Here he goes again, many of us thought, trolling away like an immature child, desperate for some reaction. But quickly, it became apparent that this time he was serious. Without seemingly consulting anyone, he announced that Twitter would rebrand to X, with the domain x.com now pointing to Twitter.com. (I promise you, that is not a link to a porn site.) Then came a half-assed logo, seemingly plucked from nowhere — and not designed in-house — and with that, it was done. A few hours ago, the X appeared. 

The bird was dead. 

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Musk owns a SpaceX company, in which the X makes little sense and is there because he thinks it’s “cool.” And back in 2000, Elon Musk tried to rebrand PayPal as x.com before the board forced him out. He got his hands back on the domain in 2017 and has been waiting for an opportune moment to release it. 

And now it’s here. So what does the future of X hold? New CEO Linda Yaccarino tried her best to put the rash rebrand-without-reason into marketing speak. 

“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. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine. There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything.”

Yikes. That copy could have been ripped straight from the grifter’s playbook to crypto and NFTs. Big splashy words. Unlimited interactivity (if you sign up for Blue.) Global marketplace. Powered by AI. Transformation. It’s just buzzword after buzzword, assembled to say nothing coherent. 

Saying that app does everything really says it does nothing. No app does everything. No app can do everything. As Benedict Evans put it, “Claim you’re going to build an all-encompassing ecosystem that combines everything Apple, Meta & Google have failed to do in the last decade of trying. But, with AI! Have you heard of it?”

I feel so sorry for Yaccarino. She signed up to try and rebuild Twitter's legacy and restore advertisers’ faith, only to have the actual legacy and the very thing she is selling to advertisers - the Twitter brand - ripped out from under her. If it was an uphill battle to convince companies and brands to spend dollars on a Musk-owned Twitter, it’s now a mountain to climb. What are the chances of getting them back on board with a product that isn’t even Twitter anymore? It seems an impossible task. 

What comes next? 

If Musk was this happy to discard the brand, everything is on the table. We’ll quickly see “tweet” and “retweet” rebranded or perhaps ripped up entirely in favor of something new. We’ll likely see payments included, but for what reasons or purposes beyond paying to subscribe to someone remains to be seen. More video content seems inevitable, moving the platform away from its identity. But none of that speaks to the core experience of Twitter. None of that improves what most of us love about the site. It all does the opposite. But at this rate, it could be that Musk is just intent on destroying the platform just because and will use some legal loophole to claim it as a tax write-off. Who knows. His army of fans seems delighted by the move, but that’s to be expected now. Anyone who can think rationally and subjectively can see that destroying a brand that is so recognized, and that carries weight and social significance, is not a smart business decision. 

The bird is dead.

The bird app could be next.