X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a Tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and a “temporary X logo” will replace Twitter’s bird logo later today. Leading up to the change, Musk spent a lot of time tweeting about it.
Around 12:00 ET last night, he started tweeting — and did so for hours — about rebranding Twitter to X, the one-letter moniker he’s used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with one I tweet saying “soon we’ll be praising the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” followed by a the second tweet adding that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk then, over the next several hours, gestured between the posts and other responses, tweeting things like “Mr. X”, OR answering about other users talking about it. At one point, he joined one Twitter Spaces Session yelled “No one to speak until we call Elon Musk” and sat in silence for nearly an hour before dropping his voice and confirming that he would be changing Twitter’s logo tomorrow, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo off the building with the lightsaber.”
Musk also reportedly sent an email last night to Twitter employees telling them the company would become X and that it was the last time he would send emails from a Twitter address, according to a Threads post by Platformer managing editor Zoe Schiffer. She added that she assumed he was talking about the logo, since the Twitter business had already been renamed X Corp.
The letter “X” has been in almost everything Musk has touched over the past two decades. X.com was the original name for Paypal; it is in the name of his company SpaceX; is on behalf of the Tesla SUV; and he has said he wants to turn Twitter into “X, the everything app.” Now he’s finally doing something with the X.com domain he bought from Paypal in 2017.
Finally, renaming the site will be the clearest statement that this is no longer the same social network it was before Musk bought it last year. But it’s far from the only change in the Musk era of Twitter.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment. An automated response said, “We’ll get back to you shortly.”
Update July 23, 2023, 3:31 PM ET: It added that Musk reportedly emailed Twitter employees overnight to inform them of the change. He also added that X.com now redirects to Twitter.com.
