The rebranding of the Twitter social media company after it was acquired by Elon Musk in 2023. Replacing the iconic bird logo with an "X," twitter.com became x.com (see
X/Twitter). The X software is expected to add financial services, combining social media and payments processing like China's leading "everything app" (see
WeChat).
Several X Names
Musk is obviously very fond of the letter X. In 1999, X.com was the name of the online bank he founded with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne and Ed Ho. A year later, x.com merged with Confinity Inc. and eventually became PayPal. SpaceX is the name of Musk's very successful rocket ship company, and Musk even named his daughter X (see
X AE A-12). Also spearheaded by Musk, xAI was formed in 2023 to "understand the universe" according to the company's website. See
XAI,
SpaceX and
PayPal.
Does a Retweet Become a Re-X?
Rebranding is often done without regard to how the new name will be used over time. After 17 years of Twitter terminology, will "tweets" and "retweets" really go away? "Post" and "repost" are their official replacements, but there are many other Twitter terms (see
Twitterese). See
naming fiascos.