Elon Musk has explained his decision to strip Twitter of its famous blue-bird logo as a move to remake the business into a broad platform for communications and financial transactions, a target he’s described as the everything app.

“This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing,” Musk said about the apparently spontaneous move over the weekend to crowdsource a logo from fans and adopt it as Twitter’s new insignia. “The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting.”

The billionaire owner’s envisioned X app — which will connect Twitter’s underlying infrastructure with x.com, a web address that now functions as a routing service to Twitter — is one that layers communication, multimedia and “the ability to conduct your entire financial world”.

In messages posted in support of Musk’s overhaul, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said X would include fintech features like payments and banking. A recent arrival at the company, Yaccarino has the task of restoring trust with advertisers and users alike following a series of abrupt and seemingly arbitrary changes executed by Musk.

Twitter’s advertising revenue has fallen in half, Musk recently tweeted, and bigger rival Meta Platforms this month rolled out a direct competitor with its Threads app. The move to rebrand Twitter into X has brought attention back to the social platform, though that’s unlikely to offset the potential billions of dollars in lost brand value, according to media experts and analysts.

Musk has talked about modelling X on WeChat, the Tencent Holdings super-app used by the majority of Chinese for everything from payments to messaging, along with online financial services such as consumer loans. It’s unclear what the billionaire intends for X specifically. — (c) 2023 Bloomberg LP