SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter on Monday began to shed its name and logo – both online and in the real world – but not before city police questioned whether crews were cleared to dismantle the iconic signage that has long graced its headquarters in San Francisco.
The signage removal work was paused while San Francisco police checked to see if a permit was in place to close the street. Unlike the signature blue bird, everything was on the up and up, and no tickets or citations were issued, police said in an email to the Bay Area News Group.
Elon Musk is replacing the Twitter name and logo with a stylized X as he seeks to turn the 17-year-old service into an app that does everything, Bloomberg reported. According to the news agency, Musk on Saturday invited his followers to suggest an X logo, then chose one of the designs and made it the company’s new brand identity Sunday.
About 24 hours later early Monday, the logo was projected onto the company’s headquarters on Market Street.
The sudden change comes as the firm faces a sharp drop in advertising dollars. Brands have fled the site as Musk’s less-restrictive content policies have led to what critics say — and the company denies — is increased hate speech, and Musk himself continues to use the platform to spread and boost inflammatory right-wing statements and conspiracy theories. The website now emblazoned with the X logo also confronts a new rival in Threads, a service similar to Twitter from Menlo Park-based Meta Platforms Inc. that attracted 100 million users within just five days of launching earlier this month, Bloomberg reported. Also on Monday, social media giant TikTok added a new format for text-based posts, potentially putting itself in competition with Musk’s X.
Musk’s rebranding effort could also face legal hurdles. Meta, Microsoft and hundreds of others own a trademark to X, according to media reports.
As of Monday afternoon, only the “er” and the blue bird remained on the vertical sign at its headquarters. The removal work will presumably resume at some later point.
Staff writers Rick Hurd and Ethan Baron contributed to this report.
