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 a.m. ET last night, he began tweeting — and did so for hours — about Twitter’s rebranding to X, the one-letter name he’s used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with a a tweet saying “soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the twitter brand and gradually to all birds” followed by second tweet adding that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Then, over the next few hours, Musk signaled the change between other posts and responses, tweeting things like “Deus X”, or answering of other users talking about it. At one point he joined a Twitter Spaces session called “Nobody Speaks Until We Call Elon Musk” and sat in silence for nearly an hour before turning on the sound and confirming that he would be changing the Twitter logo tomorrow, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo out of the blowtorch building.”
Musk also reportedly sent an email last night to Twitter employees telling them the company would become X and that this was the last time he would send an email 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 because the Twitter business had already been renamed X corp.
The letter “X” is on almost everything Musk has touched in the past two-plus decades. X.com was the original name of Paypal; it’s in the name of his company SpaceX; it’s in the name of the Tesla SUV; and he said he wants to make Twitter “X, the app for everything.” Now he’s finally doing something with the X.com domain he bought back from Paypal in 2017.
Finally, rebranding the site will be the clearest declaration yet that this is no longer the same social network it was before Musk bought it last year. But that’s far from the only change in Musk’s Twitter era.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment. An automated response read: “We’ll get back to you shortly.”
Update July 23, 2023, 3:31 PM ET: It added that Musk sent an email to Twitter employees overnight to inform them of the change. He also added that X.com now redirects to Twitter.com.