Twitter became X, and the verb went out with the bird

Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, for about 44 billion dollars. Nine months later, in the last week of July 2023, the company changed its name to X. The blue bird disappeared from the website on July 24 and from the mobile app icon a few days after. Workers began taking the sign off the San Francisco headquarters, were stopped halfway through, and for a while the building read “er”. Inside the product, tweets became posts and retweets became reposts. The x.com address took over gradually, and the move of the domain was completed in May 2024.

The stated reason was ambition. Musk had talked for years about an “everything app” that would combine messaging, payments and media, and he presented X as the name of that future, with Twitter as one stage on the way. The platform kept its users, its features and its owner’s controversies, which we leave aside here. Our interest is narrower: what the company chose to give up, and whether the new name had anything to carry yet.

The rarest asset a brand can own

Most companies spend decades trying to get their name into ordinary speech. Twitter got there in a few years. “Tweet” became a verb people used without thinking about the company, and dictionaries recorded it. News anchors read tweets on air, and politicians and footballers tweeted their announcements. In our vocabulary that is an asset from the narrative and reputational families, the kind that is cultivated slowly and cannot be bought: the brand had become the name of the behaviour.

An asset of this sort works like a category name. Whoever owns the word for the action owns the default in the customer’s head, and competitors have to describe themselves in relation to it (“like Twitter, but for…”). Retiring the verb handed that position back to the language. People kept saying “tweet” anyway, so the asset survived, detached from the company that had paid to build it.

The name test, run on both names

The books describe a simple check for a category name, the name test: ask what a competitor could claim tomorrow for free, and what they could only claim after rebuilding the asset underneath. Applied to “Twitter”, the result was unusual. Nobody else could use the bird, the word or the verb without borrowing Twitter’s own history. Applied to “X”, the result points the other way. A single letter is available to anyone, already used by many companies, and hard to protect or to search for. The new name has to earn its distinctiveness from nothing.

A name also carries a promise in compressed form. “Twitter” promised short, fast, public conversation, and the bird made that promise friendly. “X” pointed at the everything app, a product that did not yet exist in most markets. When a name announces a promise with no proof behind it, the customer is asked to believe first and receive later, which is a loan against trust the brand will have to repay with features.

What a rebrand should keep

A rebrand moves values, and there is a safer way to do it: keep a base, change one element at a time, and let the familiar parts carry customers through the change. X replaced everything within days. The name, the mark, the colour, the vocabulary and the address all changed together, which left the product as the only continuity. The product held most of its users, a sign of how strong the network was. It also means the brand contributed little to the move.

A useful exercise before any change of this size is to price each asset as if you had to buy it. What would a new entrant pay to have its name used as a verb by hundreds of millions of people? If the honest answer is more than any advertising budget could reach, the asset deserves a place in the new identity, as a feature name, a product line or a heritage mark, even if the company name above it changes.

A story still in motion

The plan behind the rename keeps changing. In March 2025 Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, had acquired X, and the everything app remains a work in progress at the time of writing. Whether the letter eventually acquires a meaning of its own depends on the proofs the company builds under it. Meanwhile, much of the value of the old brand lives on in everyday speech, owned by nobody.

Before your company changes its name, take an inventory of what the old one does without your help; that inventory is one of the first steps in what we do.