Musk hints Twitter's bird branding could be replaced

SAN FRANCISCO, US - Twitter owner Elon Musk hinted late Saturday night that he may ditch the social media network's blue cartoon bird branding -- and soon -- for an edgier logo based on an "everything app" he has long alluded to called only X.

"Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," he tweeted around midnight, implying an end to the imagery from where the very word "tweet" stems.

"Like this but X," the billionaire SpaceX boss said, above a picture of the Twitter bird over a black and white marbled background.

"To embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique," he replied to the post.

Twitter, founded in 2006 and whose name is a play on the sound of birds chattering, has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.

The 52-year-old Tesla founder has previously said that his rocky takeover of Twitter last year 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 PayPal.

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

Musk has already named Twitter's parent company the X Corporation.

"If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow," he said.

Musk went on to make several other X-related comments, saying a new emblem should be "of course, Art Deco" style and that under the site's new identity a post would be called "an X."

Twitter is thought to have around 200 million daily active users but it has suffered repeated technical failures since the tycoon bought the so-called bird app for $44 billion in 2022 and sacked much of its staff.

Since then, many users and advertisers alike have soured on the social media site thanks to charges introduced for previously free services, changes to content moderation and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts.

Musk said earlier this month that Twitter has lost roughly half of its advertising revenue since he took control in October.

Facebook parent Meta earlier this month launched its own 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, however, according to data from market analysis firm Sensor Tower. - AFP