Elon Musk began his long-promised rebrand of Twitter as “��” this week, kicking off the platform’s transformation from a “global public square” into the “global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities” that CEO Linda Yaccarino promised earlier this week. Zooming out to look at the big picture — how this rebrand is happening, why, and what it means personally to Elon, a notoriously hands-on tech mogul — can tell us a lot about the future he has in store for us, and how it might come to fruition. First of all, this has been a long time coming. If you’ve been on Twit — er, sorry, �� — the past couple of days, you’ve likely seen reporters like Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin pointing out that Musk has been attempting to build some version of a company called “X” since 1999. Contemporaneous CNN footage shows Musk hawking “X.com,” his online banking company that would eventually merge with PayPal and kickstart the fortune that’s allowed him to make his megafortune and wider mark on the world. As Chafkin recounts in his book “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power,” Musk unsuccessfully tried to convince his compatriots post-merger to drop PayPal and adopt the “X” brand. He never lost that ardor, apparently, with biographer Walter Isaacson telling Axios this morning that Musk’s desire to rebrand Twitter dates back to before he even signed the paperwork for the purchase. It’s not like he hasn’t been able to stamp the rest of his legacy, quite literally, with his preferred branding: there’s SpaceX, the Tesla Model X, and even his son with pop musician Grimes who bears the legal name X Æ A-Xii. (Read Grimes’ somewhat belabored explanation here.) Why does this brand mean so much to Musk, and what exactly does it mean? There’s an edgy, sci-fi aesthetic quality to the letter that stems from its association with the X-Men; the 1950s-era obsession with “X-ray” technology; and Gilded Age astronomer Percival Lowell’s theoretical (and now disproven) “Planet X” beyond Pluto. But the font itself that Musk chose for its X branding, along with some of the recent statements he’s made about his preferred branding for Twitter, hint at a more coherent and politically significant philosophy. As we noted in yesterday’s DFD, the new logo that’s replaced the little blue bird is simply a Unicode character of the letter “X” that has a stylish, Art Deco flair to its typography. Dating back to 2021, Musk has professed on Twitter (and then X) his love for the French art movement that married European elegance to the bold, futurist aesthetic that dominated the era of America’s great skyscrapers. It’s pretty easy to understand why an aesthetic that combines an admiration for the upper class with the glory of human progress would appeal to Musk. And he’s not alone in that, as a desire to return to Art Deco-style aesthetics has become something of a default preference on the right — an executive order issued in the waning days of the Trump administration even listed Art Deco as one of the only acceptable styles for constructing new federal buildings. In short, Musk’s rebrand of Twitter isn’t just the culmination of a lifelong obsession, but part of an overall retrofuturist shift on the right that longs to break through what they see as technological and political stagnation through good old fashioned capitalist dynamism. Only… surprise, surprise, there might be a few logistical roadblocks standing in Musk’s way. One, as law professor and blogger Andres Guadamuz Tweeted (X-ed?) yesterday, trademark experts are highly skeptical Musk can trademark a Unicode character. Second, it appears that hundreds of companies have trademarks on some permutation of the character “X,” with one lawyer telling Reuters "There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody.” To which Musk would presumably say, go ahead, make my day. The rebrand saga, legal dilemma and all, is almost perfectly reflective of Musk’s philosophy and tastes: A titan of industry takes over a company by sheer financial force, and then remakes it in his own highly personalized tastes and image while betting that his own fortune and momentum will allow him to steamroll any legal obstacles. To quote Musk himself: “Whatever sins this platform may have, being boring is not one of them.”
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