Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks throughout an occasion to launch the brand new Tesla Model X Crossover SUV on Sept. 2015 in Fremont, California. The billionaire has a long-time affinity for the letter “X.”

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks throughout an occasion to launch the brand new Tesla Model X Crossover SUV on Sept. 2015 in Fremont, California. The billionaire has a long-time affinity for the letter “X.”

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

More adjustments are coming to Elon Musk’s Twitter, because the billionaire proprietor of the location introduced plans to exchange the corporate’s iconic blue fowl emblem with the letter “X.”

An interim new emblem was anticipated to go stay someday on Sunday, Musk mentioned, as he introduced that the URL “X.com” would now mechanically redirect customers to Twitter.

Taken collectively, the 2 adjustments mark the most recent and arguably most dramatic adjustments for the social platform because the billionaire’s buy final 12 months. It might sign a brand new period for the platform — which Musk has lengthy envisioned as an excellent app that may provide a wide range of companies from on-line banking to video messaging.

“X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything,” Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote Sunday on Twitter.

Musk has hinted at altering Twitter’s identify to “X” since final 12 months when he was days away from formally proudly owning the corporate. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he said on Twitter.

Musk’s imaginative and prescient for an “everything app” has been in comparison with platforms like the ever-present WeChat app in China.

“He wants to create an app similar to how WeChat is used in China, where it’s part of the fabric of day-to-day life. You use it to communicate, to consume news, to buy things, to pay your rent, to book appointments with your doctor and even to pay fines,” Ashlee Vance, the creator of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, instructed NPR in a May interview.

Social media consultants are uncertain of Musk’s “everything app”

Twitter’s new emblem is slated to be sleeker and on par with the futuristic fashion of Elon Musk’s different enterprise ventures, Tesla and SpaceX. But social media knowledgeable Jennifer Grygiel is skeptical that Musk can create an modern Twitter because the re-branding suggests.

“I’m not sure he has enough trust from his user base to get people to actually exchange money or attach any type of financial institution to his app,” Grygiel, a professor on the University of Syracuse, instructed NPR.

Grygiel added that Musk harm Twitter’s integrity with choices like eradicating blue checks, firing hundreds of Twitter employees and reinstating problematic accounts.

Jeffrey Blevins, a journalism professor on the University of Cincinnati, agreed that Musk has dismayed a good portion of Twitter customers — a lot so {that a} rebranding cannot harm.

“I think this is a way, maybe, to try to save it essentially by destroying it and recreating it as something else,” he mentioned.

Musk actually likes the letter “X” however nobody actually is aware of why

For years, the billionaire has been recognized for having an affinity for the letter X — although he has shared little clarification as to why.

In considered one of his earliest ventures, Musk known as his on-line financial institution X.com. That identify was later dropped when the platform merged with a competitor to grow to be PayPal.

“Everyone tried to talk him out of naming the company that back then because of the sexual innuendos, but he really liked it and stuck with it,” mentioned Vance.

“X” is already the identify of Tesla’s third electrical automotive mannequin, which debuted in 2015. Musk’s spaceflight firm known as SpaceX. And in 2020, Musk and his then-partner, the Canadian musician Grimes, named their youngest son “X Æ A-12.”