Elon Musk's X completes rebranding, shifts Twitter url to X.com

Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October 2022.

Elon Musk-owned X, the social network previously known as Twitter, on May 17 changed its website URL from Twitter.com to X.com, redirecting users to the new website.

This shift signals that the rebranding of the social network, started nearly 10 months ago, is now complete. In July 2023, Musk had renamed the social media platform as X, a letter closely associated with the tech billionaire since 1999. Musk acquired Twitter in a $44-billion deal in October 2022.

"We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same. For more details, see our Privacy Policy: https://x.com/en/privacy," the company said in a popup notice on its website.

In a post on X, Musk said that all "core systems are now on X.com", while sharing a picture of the old X.com logo from 1999.

Elon Musk's post on X that indicates the Twitter URL's transition to X.com

Musk had earlier co-founded X.com as one of world's first online banks, which later merged with rival Confinity and the combined entity rebranded itself as the online payments company PayPal in 2001. Musk bought back the X.com domain name from PayPal in 2017.

X rebranding exercise

While renaming Twitter as X in July, Musk replaced the company's iconic blue bird logo, called Larry Bird, with a fan-made logo, a stylised version of the alphabet X.

In a post on X, he said at the time that the platform would add "comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world" in the coming months. "The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird." he said.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino also said in a post on X that they aim to create a "global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities, that will be centred in audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking" and will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI)

In October 2022, Musk said that buying Twitter was an "accelerant to creating X, the everything app," akin to so-called super-apps such as China's WeChat that combine several internet services within a single app.

The rebranding was also an indicator of how different the social media platform has become from the time of its purchase, due to the various product and policy changes Musk has introduced in the past year or so.

The changes include introducing paid verification, prohibiting third-party apps and introducing new API tiers for developers, paywalling many features that were previously available to consumers for free and shutting several others.

AI experiences, payments

In January, X announced plans on using AI to improve the user and advertising experience on the platform. AI will power various experiences on the platform including improving the search feature and advertisements to "fuel a new level of customer understanding" among others, it said.

The social media platform had also stated its intentions to launch peer-to-peer payments that will "offer new opportunities" for commerce on the platform.

In recent months, X has also rolled out Grok, a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot from Musk's AI startup xAI, to all the subscribers of its Premium and Premium+ tiers across over 50 countries including India. It was made available in Europe on May 16.

Last month, X announced plans to soon launch a dedicated television app as part of the company's deeper push into video content and take on rivals such as Google's YouTube. The app is expected to be available to most smart TVs.

That said, the chaos caused by the various product and policy changes under Musk's ownership has led to many firms, including Meta's Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky, to look to attract users who are seeking to move to alternative platforms.

In particular, Threads has witnessed significant growth in the past year. In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads has more than 150 million monthly active users, up from over 130 million in February and about 100 million users in October.

Earlier today, Threads also started testing a new interface on the web that resembles TweetDeck, a social media dashboard that Musk rebranded as X Pro last year and brought it under a paywall.