Like a poisonous moth emerging from its hard cocoon, the social network formerly known as Twitter has completely metamorphosed into x.com.
Several elements of Twitter had already adopted the rebranding and the company has been wearing x.com links from early April. But now the domain has completely changed, marking the end of a tumultuous transition period and erasing the last vestiges of the bird application.
“We inform you that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same,” reads a message at the bottom of the X home and login pages.
The change has been a long time coming. Musk announced on Twitter switched to X last July. But the billionaire has harbored a dream for decades of creating an “everything app” by that name, and Twitter is his vehicle.
“The Twitter name made sense when you only had 140-character messages that came and went, like birds tweeting, but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video,” Musk said. wrote in the newly named X last summer. “In the coming months, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to manage your entire financial world. The name Twitter makes no sense in that context, so we must say goodbye to the bird.”
In fact, Twitter under Musk has added video and voice calling to its list of features. He has also reframed conspiracy theorists as Alex Jonesfostered a welcoming environment for spam porn accounts, turned verification into a disaster, introduced a monetization system that encourages rampant proliferation compromise agriculturedestroyed their trust and security team, allowed an increase in hate speech on the platform, designated NPR as “US state-affiliated media.” deleted news headlines completely and then reintroduced them in a strange place, took down a bunch of fun bots and third-party apps by introducing tremendously expensive API changes while giving blue check verification to a friend generated by AI, turned to videopresented an AI model that help you commit crimes and supervised a decline in usage of more than 20 percent in the U.S., according to app analytics firm SensorTower.
The “whole financial world” part is still a work in progress.
A sentimentalist may lament the death of Twitter, which despite all its flaws always had the ability to delight and surprise. But he remembers that this transformation was inevitable. Musk first owned X.com in 1999, when he co-founded an online bank by that name; It would eventually merge with a competitor and become PayPal. He bought X.com from PayPal in 2017, tweeting that it had “great sentimental value.” And he has seen Twitter as a vehicle to create X on Earth since before the acquisition was completed, according to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.
“In the days leading up to his acquisition of Twitter in late October 2022, Musk’s mood fluctuated wildly,” Isaacson wrote in Elon Musk. “He said he would make it the combination financial platform and social network that he had envisioned 24 years earlier for X.com, and added that he planned to rebrand it with that name, which he loved.”
To put it even better, Musk’s tweet today The announcement that “all major systems are now on X.com” included the logo of the company he founded 25 years ago.
While X may never become the full app of Musk’s dreams, it is undeniably and indelibly somewhere different from the one he bought into. Which in some ways makes this final transition even more palatable. Whatever Elon Musk’s platform is, it’s certainly not Twitter. Call it whatever you want.