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Musk and the company's new chief executive Linda Yaccarino announced the rebranding Sunday, scrapping one of technology's most iconic logos in the latest shock move since the tycoon took over Twitter nine months ago.

Musk's connection to the letter X goes back 24 years when he founded X.com, which later was renamed PayPal despite his objections. His space company is called SpaceX and the parent company of Twitter was changed to X earlier this year.

He described the logo as "minimalist art deco", and updated his Twitter bio to "X.com", which now redirects to twitter.com.

The Tesla CEO also tweeted that under the site's new identity, a post would be called "an X", challenging the public to stop referring to "tweeting" or "tweet".

Since the takeover, Musk has said his acquisition was an accelerant to creating an "everything app" inspired by China's WeChat, which would function as a social media platform and also offer messaging and payments.

The new logo was projected onto the facade of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters on Sunday night.

"Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we're just beginning to imagine," Yaccarino tweeted.

Yaccarino, a former advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk hired last month to be Twitter's CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.

"X is the future state of unlimited interactivity... creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities."

The logo change was greeted with criticism as well as nostalgia for what had become a symbol for the social media age.

Martin Grasser, one of the original designers of the blue bird logo, wrote that it was intended to be "simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes".

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who signed off on the design in 2012, replied to Grasser with an emoji of a goat, meaning "greatest of all time".

According to BBC, the new white X on a black background has replaced the blue bird on the desktop version of the social network, although is yet to appear on the mobile app.

"Tweets" will also be replaced, according to Twitter’s owner Elon Musk, and posts will be called "x's".

Source: AFP, BBC