25 Jul Brand X

With a net worth of $243 billion, Elon Musk can afford to do whatever he wants – including buying an entire social media platform and making it his own.  His approach to branding, however, may cost him dearly.

Twitter is a strong platform – becoming a hot bed of political news and commentary. It has more than 450 million monthly active users and has been around since 2006. That’s 17 years of “bird” brand equity. And Musk is letting it all fly out the window – the birds, the tweets, the Twitterverse –  to call it X.

Tweets will be “X’s”-  for now.

The logo will be an X.

I get that he’s enamored with the mark. He’s used it in many of the companies he’s founded –  SpaceX, xAI, X.com. But can you really own “X” – a vital letter of the alphabet not to mention the roman numeral for 10? Perhaps he should ask Taylor Swift who attempted to trademark the year “1989.”

Musk says he’s not only changing Twitter’s name, he’s changing its entire concept. He acquired Twitter through his X Corp “as an accellerant for X, the everything app.”  Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted (or X’d) that the new logo represents “the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities.”

X – an app that does EVERYTHING? Sounds pretty important. Maybe important enough to thoroughly think through BEFORE you even begin to rebrand? But I guess throwing ideas around on your social media platform – even asking for logo designs – is another way to go. I’d hate to work in his marketing department. Then again, maybe his X app will do his branding.

Twitter’s proposed new name and logo