The X-Phile: What does the Twitter transformation say about Elon Musk?
Where to even begin? Over the last week Elon Musk changed the name of his $44bn toy from Twitter to, simply, “X”.
In doing so he unleashed yet another torrent of confusion and indignation, something the eccentric billionaire must surely be somehow feeding upon, vampire-like, such is the frequency with which he invites it. But even in the grand scheme of Musk’s grand schemes this is a Big One. In a social media world where brand loyalty is everything, changing the name of a major social network is… bold. Stupid, even.
“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity,” announced new CEO Linda Yaccarino, “centred in audio, video, messaging, payments [and] banking.”
The move was so sudden that police were called to Twitter – sorry, X – headquarters when workmen set about removing the iconic bird sign; it turned out the “unauthorised” work hadn’t been cleared with the building management.
Eventually, though, the new X logo was triumphantly raised over the Market Street headquarters. Not just any X, either, but one that strobed painfully throughout the night, pulsing the letter into the sleepless eyes of everyone in the building opposite. A slew of complaints inevitably followed, which, combined with the fact building inspectors hadn’t signed off on the permit-less structure, meant the X was dismantled just three days after its erection. “I should just buy all the buildings around X Headquarters so we can put the sign back up,” joked a Musk parody account with almost 700,000 followers.
Nobody, though, could stop Musk from changing the logo on his own website. Overnight, just as it once inexplicably changed to the Dogecoin dog, the famous bird was banished into the ether. Musk even commandeered the handle @x from San Francisco-based photographer Gene X Hwang, who had registered it all the way back in 2007; Twitter reportedly offered him “some merch” in return. Hwang now tweets from the decidedly less cool handle @x12345678998765. “All’s well that ends well,” he tweeted from the new account, although I’m not sure that’s really true in this case.
Musk has history with the 24th letter of the alphabet, scrawling it over everything he owns like a teenage skater doodling the “Cool S” on his pencil case. Most obviously it’s in the name of his rocket company SpaceX but it was also the name of the online bank he founded in 1999 (X.com) and it’s woven into the naming conventions at Tesla, where cars were branded “S”, “3,” “X,” and “Y”, combining to spell “S3XY”.
And there is something cool about the letter X, used in maths (and 90s TV shows) to represent the unknown. There’s an elegance to its typographical simplicity: those bold, intersecting lines with their pleasing symmetry. It’s a shame everyone else already had the same thought. There’s a good chance you’re reading this article on an iPhone X, for instance, and there’s an outside chance you’re looking at it on an Xbox. And companies from Xerox to Exxon have been trading on X’s inherent cultural cache for decades.
Indeed the letter X is so prevalent in the tech world that Musk may face a legal battle to hang onto it: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta already owns a trademark for a white and blue X relating to the field of “social networking services”.
And then there is the… other problem. X has become synonymous with another major international industry: pornography. In his attempt to own one 26th of the alphabet, Musk is now facing off against some of the filthiest websites in the world, not least xvideos.com, the most popular smut peddler that’s ever existed, with 3.3bn monthly visitors (it’s the only porn channel to break the top 10 most visited websites, ahead of even PornHub). Shortly after the rebrand, Musk suspended the official @xvideos account, which would presumably conflict with his plans for videos on X.
What does all this mean for users? Probably not much in the short term. It’s just more proof that the company formerly known as Twitter has become the plaything of a mercurial billionaire, further removed than ever from the “global town square” once envisioned by Musk.
I’ll leave you with an elegy from celebrity chef Raymond Blanc: “I understand everything changes, but what a shame to lose this unique little tweeting bird which we all came to love. All this to be replaced by a huge, uninspiring X.”