elon musk twitter and x illustrations

‘X’ A dumb Name Or Masterclass Twitter Re-brand?

June 5, 2024Companies & Brands Article

Is Elon Musk the world’s stupidest billionaire? There is certainly an argument to make on that front, with the Tesla owner having taken over one of the most recognisable brands in the world only to remove from it the things that made it so recognisable.

What he chose to do to Twitter is akin to if you bought Coca-Cola and changed its name to ‘Fizz Pop’, refusing to acknowledge anyone who called it by its original name. To most, the decision of Musk to re-brand Twitter to ‘X’ is about as idiotic as you can get, but is that entirely fair? What might have been the thinking behind the decision to change the title of such a recognisable brand?

Why Elon Musk Bought Twitter in the First Place

phone with twitter on elon musk and a load of cash

Before we get into the nitty gritty around whether or not re-branded Twitter to X, it is worth taking a look at why it was that Elon Musk decided to buy the social media platform in the first place. Before Musk took over Twitter it was losing money at a rate of knots. Despite being one of the world’s best-known and most-used social media sites, it was incredibly difficult to monetise it.

As a result, the previous owners of Twitter couldn’t believe their luck when Musk decided that he wanted to buy the company, ostensible because he felt that it wasn’t living up to its potential of being a platform ‘for freedom of speech’.

This feeling came to the fore when Twitter banned Donald Trump from the social network in the wake of the January insurrection in the United States of America, which many believed that Trump initiated. In the January of 2022, Musk became the largest individual shareholder of Twitter with 9.2% of shares, then a few months later he made an unsolicited offer to buy the company.

This resulted in them putting a ‘poison pill’ strategy in place to resist a hostile takeover, then later unanimously accepted his buyout offer of $44 billion. When he tried to back out a few months later, he was taken to court and effectively forced to buy it.

Re-branding Twitter to X

old twitter name and logo

In the July of 2023, Elon Musk confirmed that he was re-branding Twitter. In spite of the fact that he had bought one of the best-known social media platforms in the world, with everyone from celebrities to politicians and even the Pope using it, he felt that he needed a fresh start.

It wasn’t just that he chose to change the name, he also got rid of the white bird on the blue background that was one of the most famous pieces of branding on the planet in favour of a white X on a black background. Speaking about his decision to engage in the re-brand, Musk said that the previous name did ‘not make sense’.

Perhaps more important was the fact that X Corp was the name of a company owned by Musk that he wanted to use to launch ‘the everything app’. He took to Twitter, as it was at the time, in order quote tweet the fact that many other companies also changed their names, such as Cadabra becoming Amazon, BackRub turning into Google and Blue Ribbon Sports changing to Nike.

Facebook was also on the list, claiming that it changed to Meta, but that wasn’t exactly true. The parent company of Facebook did indeed before Meta, but Facebook the social media site has remained Facebook because it is so recognisable to so many people.

In his quote tweet, Musk said that the name Twitter made sense when tweets were limited to 140 characters each, ‘messages going back forth’ ‘like birds tweeting’, but that since the character limit was extended the name no longer made sense.

We must, he said, ‘bit adieu to the bird’. With SpaceX featuring the letter as well as one of his children, an artificial intelligence firm that he launchers and an online bank that he co-founded and that later became PayPal, some believe that Musk made the change in order to tie the social media platform into his own personal brand, for better or for worse.

Was it a Good Decision?

The choice to turn Twitter into X seemed to be somewhat idiotic at the time, but by the middle of 2024 it seemed even more so. Very few people other than Musk acolytes ever referred to the platform as X, with news reports writing about the platform referred to it as ‘X, formerly Twitter’.

Even when it was being spoken about, journalists and commentators still felt the need to include its former name so that people knew what they were talking about. Pages sprang up on Reddit entitled things like ‘X re-brand is stupid and Elon is incompetent’, whilst websites referred to it as an example of a bad re-brand compared to good ones.

The entire point of a re-brand is that it encourages people to refer to the new name and forget about the old one. For Musk, the problem is that X is so forgettable as a title and Twitter was so ubiquitous that few people were ever going to make the jump in the way that Musk had hoped.

Not only was the name of Twitter recognisable but also the ephemera around it. If you told someone that you’d read a ‘Tweet’ they knew exactly what you meant. If you ‘quote-Tweeted’ someone it was clear what you’d engage in. Musk threw all of that away in favour of referring to it as ‘posting’, which has nothing unique about it at all.

The problem with Twitter was never its name or other aspects of its branding. In fact, there is an argument that they were the best part of a company that had many other issues. In mathematics, X is a variable that has no meaning until you define it.

Musk’s decision to take Twitter and turn it from a definitive into a variable was, in many ways, indicative of someone who simply lacks the imagination to make decisions that will interest all but the most intensely loyal to him. Sadly for Musk, that does not describe the majority of the population and definitely isn’t true for most of the people who loved Twitter just the way it was.

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