Twitter’s blue bird becomes extinct as Elon Musk continues to transform the platform

X marked the spot of no return for Twitter’s famous blue bird this week as Elon Musk revealed a new logo for the social media platform he bought for £38bn last October. The billionaire and his company’s chief executive Linda Yaccarino on Monday both tweeted a large X beamed onto the side of its headquarters in San Francisco.

“Lights. Camera. X!” a tweet from Yaccarino read before the blue bird was replaced by an X on the Twitter website. The move follows the renaming of Twitter Inc to X Corp back in April. According to Musk, “tweets” will also be replaced and posts will now be called “x’s”.

For those who have followed Musk’s plans for Twitter the transformation will come as no surprise. Even before buying Twitter, Sky News reported that the entrepreneur saw the purchase of the platform as an “accelerant to creating X, the everything app”.

Musk has previous compared his new ‘super app’ – which combines messaging, social media and payments (and has a lack of reliance on ad revenue) – to China’s WeChat, which already has more than one billion users, but has no equivalent in the West.

Seemingly doubling down on this strategy, Yaccarino tweeted:  “X is the future of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

Drew Benvie, social media commentator and founder of digital agency, Battenhall told the BBC: “Musk is going full throttle for the everything app space, leaving old Twitter in his wake, and eyeing the successes of Asia’s trailblazers like WeChat and Moj.

“Succeeding in just a couple of additional services, such as shopping or payments, could be all that’s needed to make X better than Twitter was. But there are already so many alternatives, so Musk and co are playing an enormous game of catch-up.”

The loss of Twitter’s blue bird has been mourned by many, including Martin Grasser who designed it in 2012. “Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird,” he tweeted.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been controversial from the start. After months of to-and-fro legal rows, Musk finally took control of the platform in October last year. A mass exodus of staff followed, with the billionaire telling the BBC in April that 6,000 people at Twitter had been laid off since taking over the company.

Musk said his actions were necessary because the company was facing “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation.”