every tag on this post says hannibal and they’re correct

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

• Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
• The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
• The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
• The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
• Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
• The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
• Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
• He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

• Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
• Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
• The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
• The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
• The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
• TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
• This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
• This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
• X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
• Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
• The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
• One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
• Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

When Statler and Waldorf go after you for your life choices, you seriously need to sit down and have a rethink.

man what tha hell am I going to do with a BACHELORS IN PSYCHOLOGY

These Jezebel commenters are right and they should say it

I know you mean the Magazine, but it’s funnier to imagine you calling these two commenters Whores.

Not "It's a product of it's time" as a way to excuse its problematic undertones but rather "it's a product of it's time" to say to say that the issues it tackles were relevant then and its stances that now seem milquetoast were radical then, and that heavy handed, cheesy driving home of those viewpoints was sometimes necessary, and our acceptance and normalization of those viewpoints is in large part because of media like it normalizing those viewpoints and imagery, and watching it in the modern day turns into a loving study of history of the masses and public opinion

Yes this is about the original star trek

i think its funny how facial scars are seen as like a major character plot point where they reveal that someone tried to kill their dad or something when i know a ton of ppl (including myself) who have facial scars bc they rlly arent uncommon and all of them are like. from tripping and falling as a toddler

i could use this post as an oppritunity to talk about how scarring is a natural and human thing and everyone has scars, and larger scars as well as facial ones and burn scars should’nt only exist in media as a storytelling device but im also gonna just say that your oc is still hot as hell if he has a massive slash going through his eye i just think it would be funnier if he got it from falling down the stairs and then picking the scab too many times

Aside from the everything else about it, changing twitter’s name to X is just so … short sightedly juvenile?

Like, it’s got the energy of a nine year old calling their superhero villain X-Corp “cause it sounds cool.”

Because X as a letter is cool, it’s unique and rarely used in English because it has a very narrow purpose and sound that doesn’t get used often in everyday speech. It catches the ear … but that’s kind of all it does.

“Twitter” works as a company name, because it rolls off the tongue and, as a bonus, works etymologically. To “twit” or “be a twit” is to be silly, foolish, meaningless — the original purpose of twitter before it became one of the most essential and transformative social media platforms in terms of spreading news quickly and concisely in times of chaos and disaster (and I’m also not about to pretend that twitter has not, on the whole, remained silly, foolish, and meaningless). To “tweet” makes sense to the English brain wonderfully. It expresses exactly what it means. There is no doubt in my mind that it’s name and the way it could be adapted so easily into the language played markably into the platform’s remarkable success.

And how does “X” work in that context? How does “X” work, linguistically? Short answer, it doesn’t. It literally can’t, because of how X is used in the language. We literally use that letter to mark nothing, negative, a blank or rejected space. It represents void. And the way we say it and use it reflects that.

To say you “x’d” something means you ruled it out. You rejected it. Unmade it. It’s quite literally the opposite of creation and creativity. Of generation. On a platform that relies on creativity and constantly generating content.

Every roll out has emphasised how Elon insists on continuing to limit the use of the site, Twitter Blue, maximum posts sighted, I just saw he’s limiting the amount of times you can DM someone.

It’s become an anti-social site, being killed slowly from the inside like a mindless and completely ignorant rot.

i cannot emphasize enough how much elon musk is very much not killing twitter on purpose. he is not that smart. you are giving him too much credit. he makes cars that melt. a few weeks ago a billionaire imploded several other billionaires and himself in the ocean because of this same brand of born-rich brainworms. destroying a social media site because of a petty, long held grudge over his paypal co-founders not letting him rename that to "X" is not a stretch.