A year ago, Elon Musk initiated a rebranding of the social media platform Twitter. Initially, he altered Twitter’s name and logo to X. As of now, the social network has officially transitioned from its previous address of twitter.com to a new URL: x.com. Musk verified this change on his page on X.
Though Twitter was renamed to X in July 2023, the site’s address remained unchanged, and the x.com domain redirected users to twitter.com. As it stands, visitors to twitter.com are redirected to the homepage of x.com with a welcoming message:
“Welcome to x.com! Our URL has changed, but your privacy settings and data protection remain the same”.
Other services linked to Twitter have also been rebranded. Tweetdeck is now referred to as XPro, while Twitter Blue has taken on the new name, X Premium.
Musk carries a long history with the x.com domain. Back in 1999, under this name, Musk pioneered his second business venture (after selling his first business, Zip2, to Compaq). Barely a year later, X.com merged with Cofinity, which managed a money-transfer service named PayPal. Musk served as the CEO of the consolidated organization for a few months but resigned due to disagreements with fellow executives. Although the unified business initially adopted the name X.com, it was rebranded to PayPal in 2001 after evaluating customer feedback. In 2002, eBay Inc. acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, bringing Musk a personal gain of $165 million. Musk repurchased the x.com domain in 2017 at a rumored cost of $5 million.
Even before acquiring Twitter, Musk expressed his intention to transform the social platform into an “application that has everything”.
This post was last modified on 05/18/2024