X.com evokes porn site “Twitter”

Rebranding the more than ten-year-old “Twitter” to the ethereal letter “X” has been a difficult process for Elon Musk. At the company’s San Francisco headquarters, workmen mounted a crane and started to take down the enormous letters “Twitter” on Monday. The issue was that the required authorizations, such as blocking a busy street, had not been obtained. the half-torn sineage with the letters “er” was left behind after the police department swooped in and stopped the work!

There was additional unrest in Indonesia, halfway around the world. The site was ordered to be shut by the Islamic nation because it might be mistaken for a porn website. Indonesia has tight regulations against gambling and obscenity, so it was not pleased with the images that the rebranded X.com conjures up.

For some time, Elon Musk and his group have been considering rebranding Twitter. According to them, the goal is to make Twitter into a super app for highly connected individuals that can do “everything” from accessing podcasts to shopping and viewing movies. This would be similar to China’s WeChat.

“The name Twitter made sense when there were only back-and-forth 140 character messages – like birds tweeting – but now you can upload nearly anything, even hours of video… and control over your entire financial life,” reads a post by Elon Musk. We must say goodbye to the bird, Musk said, adding that the Twitter moniker “does not make sense in that context.”

Musk’s fixation

The capital letter ‘X’ has long been a source of passion for billionaire Musk. But it might very well be the downfall of the $44 billion asset he bought last year. In 1999, Elon Musk co-founded the online bank ‘X.com,’ which he later combined with a competing company, Confinity, to rename as PayPal. Musk made an attempt to persuade the business to rebrand PayPal as “X-PayPal.” The concept was market-tested but was abandoned because clients thought it sounded pornographic.

Even after, Musk didn’t give up on “X” and continued to use it extensively for a number of products, such as Tesla’s “Model X” and his space company “Space X.”Is there a good reason for ‘Twitter’ to be rebranded, except the owner’s obsession with the letter ‘X’? Every month, Twitter records 450 million users. Up to 52% of its customers are Gen Z, or 25 years of age or younger.

It has a great brand penetration, and despite not being as popular as Meta or Google, it has very wealthy and communicative followers. Since 2006, the brand has effectively evolved over 17 years, but with many setbacks. It serves as the celebrity’s chic hangout spot. What then is wrong with Twitter’s brand?

There doesn’t seem to be a rational solution. Why rename something that is already successful? Brands develop a multifaceted value over many years. According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk might lose anywhere between $4 and $20 billion in brand value as a result of switching from the blue-bird emblem to a black ‘X’.