On Sunday the 23rd of June Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, officially confirmed the death of one of the world’s most recognisable brands. The app however, remains. But with a new name and logo – X. Here is everything you need to know about the Twitter rebrand.
Twitter and the Twitter rebrand
Twitter was founded in 2006 as a product of parent company Odeo. Jack Dorsey was made CEO and held the position until 2008 and then was later reinstated, with his last spell of CEO ending in 2021. Twitter has grown into one of the lead social media platforms with around 450 million users, making it the 14th most popular in the world.
Fast forward to 2022 and Twitter is now being taken over by Elon, being bought for $44b. Since the takeover, Twitter had lost half of its ad revenue after Musk set a target of being cashflow positive by June 2023. Many advertisers left the platform after the Musk takeover after fearing damage to their brands, with concerns that more hate speech is allowed under Musk’s ownership.
The rebrand was temporarily put to a halt when police stopped the removal of the Twitter sign at the San Francisco headquarters, calling it unauthorised work, before saying no crime was committed.
Why do a Twitter Rebrand?
The announcement of the rebrand surprised many but Musk has a long history with the letter “X”. Musk’s obsession with the letter X goes as far as naming his child with singer Grimes– X AE A-XII Musk. But what is the meaning of “X” and why has he decided to strip Twitter of its iconic branding?
X.com was an early venture from Musk, bought in 1999 for $1.5m, with advisors expressing concern over X as a brand. Musk called X.com the “coolest URL on the internet” as “X marks the spot for treasure” and began turning X into an online banking company. In 2000, X merged with competitor Confintity Inc and renames to PayPal and in 2002 was acquired by eBay for $1.5b. Musk had been adamant throughout the two years as PayPal that the better branding was X, despite concern from advisers and bad reception from consumers.
With the history of X.com it seems Elon is trying to revive his oldest business idea. Musk has expressed his interest in making X an “everything app” that specialises in social media and payments, similar to what X intended to be back in 2002. “This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing” said Musk in a tweet, putting a clear emphasis on X becoming more than a social media app.
This also aligns Twitter with other Musk-run companies such as SpaceX, xAI and X Corp.
Can X become trademarked?
Although a letter can be trademarked, the sheer number of companies that involve the letter X may make it difficult for Musk to trademark a single letter.
Speaking to Reuters, trademark attorney Josh Gerben said there is a 100% chance of twitter being sued by somebody as there are nearly 900 companies with filed trademark registrations involving the letter X in the US alone. Some of these companies include rival Meta and Microsoft. The simplicity of the new logo, a plain white X on a black background, could prove difficult to trademark as there are little to none outstanding qualities. One notable similarity is the Xbox logo, also a white X with a black background.
Even if the trademark is successful, it may be difficult to have full control over the letter X with it being such a common letter to use in branding. “The less detail, the fewer artistic elements going on, the harder it will be to distinguish.” says trademark attorney Jonathan Menkes.
Conclusion – Twitter Rebrand
Musk has a clear desire to turn Twitter into X to make his first dream of a company a reality but it could prove to be a difficult trademarking issue. Given Musk’s recent history of reversing decisions on Twitter, there is no guarantee this will be a permanent decision and we will have to wait over the next few weeks to see how this unfold.
By Jim Mann, a student at the Open University
References for the Twitter Rebrand
Here are the references we used for this article about the Twitter Rebrand.
Twitter (Wikipedia.org)
Elon Musk (Wikipedia.org)
Jack Dorsey (Wikipedia.org)
X.com (Wikipedia.org)
Confinity (Wikipedia.org)
Paypal (WIkipedia.org)
eBay takeover (Computerworld.com)
Grimes (Wikipedia.org)
Reuters Josh Gerban article (Reuters.com)
Bloomberg article on X’s trademark (Bloomberglaw.com)
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