Linda Yaccarino last week announced she is stepping down as the CEO of Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, two years after joining the firm. Yaccarino was hired by Musk to run X in 2023, after the billionaire took over the platform, then known as Twitter, in a $44 billion deal in 2022. Amidst Linda's resignation, here's looking why Twitter was rebranded as X.
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Twitter is now called X. Tesla CEO Elon Musk drove this change after acquiring the company in 2022. But why was Twitter rebranded as X? Know everything there is.
A stylized new 'X' took the place of Twitter's traditional blue bird logo in 2022. Websites, applications and even the company's headquarters dropped the name Twitter.
Musk has much bigger plans for X than just using it for microblogging. The rebranding of Twitter to X reflects his aim to transform the social network into a comprehensive 'everything app'.
Musk hopes to make X a multipurpose app like WeChat in China which offers everything one needs to do with an app, from social networking, banking, shopping, etc.
According to Musk, "Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.”
"Twitter's name made sense when it was just 140-character, messages going back and forth - like birds tweeting - but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video," in the words of Musk.
"We will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world," according to Musk.
7. Musk has had a longstanding fixation with the letter X. He founded a financial start-up called X.com. His space-exploration venture is SpaceX, his artificial-intelligence app is xAI and the Model X is one of electric car company Tesla's earliest models.
X is different from Twitter in that it is much more than a social media networking platform. X has been designed as a super app for messaging, banking and much more.
Although the name has been changed but all the existing followers, posts and interactions have transitioned to X. This means that social accounts on the social network remain the same.
In X, 'tweet' has been replaced with 'post' and 'retweet' with 'repost'.
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