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    Twitter bids adieu to Bluebird as Elon Musk rebrands platform to X

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    Popular social media platform Twitter has officially rebranded to X after months of teasing by CEO Elon Musk. The rebranding saw the popular social media app ditch its iconic bird logo after two decades and replace it with an “X” after two decades. The rebranding also saw the social media app change its color from blue to black.

    As part of the rebranding, Twitter’s URL was also changed to “x.com.” a domain name linked to Musk’s 1999-founded financial services startup sold to PayPal now redirects to Twitter.

    X.com was an early online bank and the company was initially funded by Elon Musk and Greg Kouri, who went on to fund Musk’s later ventures: Tesla and SpaceX.

    Musk’s association with the brand name ‘X’ dates back to 1999 when he first founded the company. However, it never became a stand-alone company and later became part of Paypal. Musk uses the letter X for his space firm, SpaceX, as well as appearing as part of several Tesla car model names. Twitter’s rebranding means the character will finally be transformed into a stand-alone brand after three decades.

    Musk founded X Corp in March earlier this year as Twitter’s parent company, paving the way for Twitter’s transformation. The rebranding comes as part of Musk’s vision to create a “super app” with more functionality including financial services within the social media platform. In April, Twitter introduced a new feature that allows app users to access the crypto market and other financial market services from within the app.

    Musk’s tenure as head of Twitter has been controversial from the start. However, his plans to transform Twitter into a financial platform began before the takeover.

    In a recent interview, Musk reiterated that the main motive behind the X rebranding was to create an “everything app,” a concept popular in China. Chinese social media applications such as WeChat, are not only used for text and video calls, but also have provisions to pay bills, book cabs, book restaurants and other financial activities without leaving the app.

    Musk said that if done right X will be a popular platform for finance: banking, payments, and data, and over time it has the potential to become “half of the global financial system.”

    The rebranding of Twitter, however, did not get much support from many users of the application who believe that removing two decades of heritage for a new concept is not a good idea.