SINGAPORE: Twitter is now simply X.
And tweets should be called “x’s” – at least according to Elon Musk on Monday (Jul 24) as he launched a rebranding of the social media platform.
“We must bid adieu to the bird,” Musk said, killing off one of technology’s most iconic logos.
The billionaire’s connection to the letter X goes back 24 years when he founded X.com, which later was renamed PayPal despite his objections.
His space exploration company is called SpaceX and the parent company of Twitter was changed to X earlier this year.
“It’s a completely irrational business and brand decision,” Allen Adamson, brand expert and co-founder of Metaforce said of the Twitter rebranding.
“But there was no good story left, I think, for Elon on Twitter. There was no good news. There was nothing about his Twitter acquisition that would make him look like a successful business person.”
Here are five other companies that rebranded with varying and sometimes controversial results.
META
Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta in October 2021.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the new name reflects the company’s work in building the metaverse.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” Zuckerberg said then.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp.
Around the time of the rebranding, Meta was dealing with the fallout from a Facebook whistleblower who leaked internal documents suggesting that the company chose profits over safety in managing societal harms.
According to American business magazine Fast Company, citing a poll, Meta experienced a significant drop in public trust following its announcement that it was changing its corporate name.
A separate survey by market research platform SightX found that 47 per cent of respondents believed that the rebranding to Meta was a poor idea.
For all the latest world News Click Here
