Elon Musk has un­veiled a new black and white “X” lo­go to re­place Twit­ter’s fa­mous blue bird as he fol­lows through with a ma­jor re­brand­ing of the so­cial me­dia plat­form he bought for $44 bil­lion last year.

Musk re­placed his own Twit­ter icon with a white X on a black back­ground and post­ed a pic­ture on Mon­day of the de­sign pro­ject­ed on Twit­ter’s San Fran­cis­co head­quar­ters.

The X start­ed ap­pear­ing on the top of the desk­top ver­sion of Twit­ter on Mon­day, but the bird was still dom­i­nant across the phone app.

Clone or com­peti­tor? Users and lawyers com­pare Twit­ter and Threads

Musk had asked fans for lo­go ideas and chose one, which he de­scribed as min­i­mal­ist Art De­co, say­ing it “cer­tain­ly will be re­fined.”

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twit­ter brand and, grad­u­al­ly, all the birds,” Musk tweet­ed Sun­day.

The X.com web do­main now redi­rects users to Twit­ter.com, Musk said.

In re­sponse to ques­tions about what tweets would be called when the re­brand­ing is done, Musk said they would be called Xs.

Musk, CEO of Tes­la, has long been fas­ci­nat­ed with the let­ter. The bil­lion­aire is al­so CEO of rock­et com­pa­ny Space Ex­plo­ration Tech­nolo­gies Corp., com­mon­ly known as SpaceX. And in 1999, he found­ed a start­up called X.com, an on­line fi­nan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny now known as Pay­Pal,

He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose ac­tu­al name is a col­lec­tion of let­ters and sym­bols, “X.”

Musk’s Twit­ter pur­chase and re­brand­ing are part of his strat­e­gy to cre­ate what he’s dubbed an “ every­thing app ” sim­i­lar to Chi­na’s WeChat, which com­bines video chats, mes­sag­ing, stream­ing and pay­ments.

Lin­da Yac­cari­no, the long­time NBC Uni­ver­sal ex­ec­u­tive Musk tapped to be Twit­ter CEO in May, post­ed the new lo­go and weighed in on the change, writ­ing on Twit­ter that X would be “the fu­ture state of un­lim­it­ed in­ter­ac­tiv­i­ty — cen­tered in au­dio, video, mes­sag­ing, pay­ments/bank­ing — cre­at­ing a glob­al mar­ket­place for ideas, goods, ser­vices, and op­por­tu­ni­ties.”

Here’s the lat­est for Mon­day, Ju­ly 24th: Ne­tanyahu re­leased from hos­pi­tal ahead of con­tro­ver­sial vote; Russ­ian at­tack on Ode­sa, Ukraine; Mas­sive flood­ing in east­ern Cana­da; Deck col­lapse in Mon­tana.

Ex­perts, how­ev­er, pre­dict­ed the new name will con­fuse much of Twit­ter’s au­di­ence, which has al­ready been sour­ing on the so­cial me­dia plat­form fol­low­ing a raft of Musk’s oth­er changes. The site al­so faces new com­pe­ti­tion from Threads, the new app by Face­book and In­sta­gram par­ent Meta that di­rect­ly tar­gets Twit­ter users.

LON­DON (AP)