To the power X

What will tweets be called once the bird goes? Musk says it will all be Xs.

Spare a thought for all the students currently dealing with algebra. Does anyone of them care what X is? As a popular meme goes, it is not about Y or Z, but always about X - the first child of algebra. However, leave aside the hapless students wrestling with X for a moment and deliberate on the eXistential purpose of X, currently in the news.

On July 24, Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, also changed the logo of Twitter, the 17-year-old social media platform, from the popular blue bird to X. Within days (July 28), he'd put a giant X sign on the Twitter building in San Francisco - triggering an investigation by the city.

Musk had hinted about the rebranding through his tweets over the weekend and when the bird was brought down from the Twitter headquarter building in San Francisco, X appeared its place and on the desktop site as well. The @Twitter handle, as we write, is still the bird which, we now know, will stop tweeting. What will the tweets be called once the bird goes? Musk says it will all be Xs. Too excessive or too mysterious? We wonder.

Musk’s love for X is legendary. One of his children is named X Æ A-12. From X.com, his first online bank that merged with another startup and eventually became PayPal, his spacecraft brand Space X, to his AI company X.AI; Musk has ensured that all have the X factor.

K.V. Sridhar, Global Creative Officer of Nihilent Ltd, aka Pops in the advertising circles, is bemused by X. Not the letter but the rebranding. “Companies don’t own brands, people do,” he says. “Tweaking a popular brand with a change in colour and so on is fine, but this will not go down well. The platform became popular because of the little tweets one could put up. Everybody likes to converse and gossip, which is why Meta’s Threads took off with 100 million subscribers within a week. The blue bird denoted all the conversations.”

That aside, how about the letter X? Draw X on a plain piece of paper and ask people what they think of it, Sridhar suggests. It will be read as NO, he answers. “X is a cross in a semiotic way,” he says. “It needs context. By itself, X is negative. X-rated, XXX, and so on. The branding for Yes Bank was successful because of positive connotations – ‘yes’ to loans…”

Brand expert Harish Bijoor says X as a brand is bad, good and ugly.  “Here’s what I feel,” he lists out.

The bad: X is a canceller. In addition, X is meant to be meaningless. Something that cannot be described. To that extent, it adds the stigma of the indescribable in brand terms. X is meant to be evil. Different. And when read as the opposite of a tick mark, even the twitter verification mark is one, it reads bad.

The ugly: X is the Devil. One X is just that, it is dark. It is devious. If the tick mark is a plus, the X mark is a minus. Two of them mean double the indescribable negative. Three of them, triple X, is linked with pornography. And four of them represent the world’s favourite four-letter word!

The good: The X factor can be a positive. It is the magic ingredient that can get a brand going - the secret sauce. To that extent, it is all about the chemistry that is important within a brand and what it offers consumers. And every Tom, Dick and ‘Harish’ brand doesn't have it!

That said, Sridhar views the letter X as a “beautiful” letter. Symmetrical and sexy. Just two lines with immense possibilities. He says it is a typographer’s delight. “If you ask me why X, I can only answer by saying, because it has no Z,” he laughs at the joke. What’s more, you can turn it around and it becomes a plus!

Can Musk turn around Twitter with X? “It is death (for the company) by postmortem,” he declares. The re-branding is a forced push of X down the bird’s throat, Bijoor says. “The bird has been sacrificed at the altar for X.” And no one, not even the students solving algebraic equations, can know the power or value of X.