Elon Musk says he's changing Twitter's name to "X.com" and dumping all of the bird stuff

Ever since Elon Musk’s disastrous time as the owner of Twitter began, users have been waiting for the inevitable day when something important permanently breaks and the whole website just dies. Sadly, it looks like we’re not going to get to see that happen, because Musk has apparently just decided to kill off Twitter himself, along with what is presumably some very valuable and well-established branding. According to Musk, via Variety, he will soon be changing the name of Twitter to “X,” making everything black instead of blue, and getting rid of all the bird stuff.

But why is he doing this? Well, it’s because Musk had an idea for a website two decades ago called X.com, and he hasn’t had a single new idea since. The old X.com was a bank, one that Musk was the CEO of for a short time, with his replacement—who will go unnamed—overseeing X.com’s transition into a far more successful company called PayPal. (With the popularity of PayPal making even more money wealthy than he already was.)

In 2017, Musk spent (probably) a ton of money to buy the X.com domain from PayPal because of its “great sentimental value,” and now he’s grafting that name onto Twitter so he can take credit for “making” X.com into something since he couldn’t do that before. And all it took was buying someone else’s website, destroying the stuff about it that worked or made sense, erasing all of its identifiable branding, and replacing it with a dumb letter.

And he’s going to think that’s cool and that it’s all part of his great plan, and a bunch of dummies are going to agree with him and insist that actually it makes perfect sense for a company to burn down its existing branding so it can all be replaced with a single letter (a letter that happens to already have a dedicated use in the world of technology, since it’s the thing you click or tap when you want to close or delete something, which is actually a perfect representation of Musk-era Twitter).

At this point, it’s unclear when this change will happen, or even if it will really happen, but The A.V. Club has reached out to Twitter for confirmation or any kind of comment. For now, let’s just keep calling it Twitter, because X.com is a stupid name (stupider even than Twitter!) and because we don’t feel like learning another new batch of dumb social media verbs.