X (formerly Twitter)Copied

Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and had already renamed the company X Corp before the public rebrand in July 2023. His stated reason was an everything app, an idea he had attached to the letter X for years. The Twitter name and the bird, nicknamed Larry after basketball player Larry Bird, did not fit that plan, so both went in a matter of days.

The new logo is a white X on black in a double-struck, blackboard-bold style. The Guardian noted it derives from the Unicode mathematical double-struck capital X, and It's Nice That reported it was adapted from a design shared by Sawyer Merritt, originally made for a podcast called X Pod and credited to Alex Tourville. Musk called it interim, briefly swapped in a thicker version, then reverted.

Musk announced the change in a burst of posts, inviting users to suggest designs, and the X went live on 24 July 2023. Chief executive Linda Yaccarino framed X as an AI-powered marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities, as Reuters and NBC reported. Musk said the logo would be refined later. Business Insider catalogued a flood of memes and mockery, and nostalgia for the bird ran through the replies.

There was no agency and no conventional design process to credit, which was rather the point. Critics noticed. R/GA's Tom Morton told Reuters the change signalled that Twitter was Musk's personal property, and the Guardian raised the question of whether a Unicode character could be protected as a trademark at all.

The Verge traced the mark's origins and legal standing. Musk had asked followers for a logo that could go live worldwide the next day, and Sawyer Merritt offered an X he no longer needed. Its designer's explanations conflicted, and sleuths linked it both to a glyph in Monotype's Special Alphabets 4, which Monotype said was similar but not a match, and to Unicode's mathematical double-struck capital X, which anyone may use freely. A law professor told the outlet that a single letter could still be protected once people associated it with the service, but that in a field crowded with X marks, including ones held by Microsoft for Xbox and Meta, the same argument would make it hard to enforce against others.

As a mark, the X is not terrible: it is stark and legible at small sizes. As a rebrand, it threw away one of the most recognised symbols on the internet, and a verb, tweet, that the world already used, for a letter with no built-in meaning.