Live: Twitter’s strange X rebrand explained and ChatGPT comes to Android

Our Fast Charge liveblog is your quick fix of all the latest tech news, with up-to-the-minute updates on all the latest stories.

Welcome to another strange day in the tech circus that is Twitter – or should we say, X, as the social media site will seemingly now be called, following a swift rebrand over the weekend.

Elon Musk started tweeting yesterday about Twitter’s sudden rebrand to X, which follows the business being renamed X Corp last year. A new logo was quickly crowd-sourced on Twitter – and it looks like the full rebrand is going ahead, despite it having the hallmarks of another kneejerk publicity stunt.

But why is this happening and what does it mean for Twitter? We’ll be exploring that below in our liveblog, so stay tuned for all of the latest updates. And if you don’t fancy jumping on the dizzying Twitter carousel, we’ll also be rounding up all of the latest news that broke over the weekend.

This includes the imminent launch of an official ChatGPT for Android this week – and in less good news, Spotify’s likely raising of individual Premium pricing in the US. But first, it’s time to unravel the demise of Twitter’s blue bird…

There’s only one place to start with today’s tech news – Twitter’s overnight rebranding to X. It started with yesterday’s Tweet above from Elon Musk, which kicked off a fast-paced makeover for the social media site that gave it a new logo.

Over the next few hours, Musk took part in a Twitter Spaces chat (where he stated that “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches”) and changed his Twitter profile to the new logo.

So what exactly is going on? As ever with Musk, there method to the apparent madness remains slightly unclear, but it’s likely to be related to Musk’s recent announcement of xAI and his desire to turn Twitter into an all-encompassing app in the guide of China’s WeChat. More on that shortly…

What exactly is the plan behind Twitter’s X rebrand? Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has tried to explain the vision (above), which sounds an awful lot like the app wants to become an all-encompassing answer to WeChat. 

Yaccarino states that messaging will just be another part of the new Twitter, sitting alongside “payments/banking” (interestingly, Musk’s original X.com merged with PayPal back in March 2000) to help create a “global marketplace”. Sounds like memes might become something of a Twitter sideline…  

The blue bird is gone!

Twitter isn’t messing around with this X rebranding. For us, the blue bird logo has now disappeared from the web version of the homepage – presumably, the same will happen soon to the mobile app.

This all follows the slightly sinister projection of the new X logo onto Twitter’s building last night, which looks more like a scene from a Batman movie than a rebrand of one of the world’s most-loved social networks. 

This all makes Twitter’s “what is happening?!” prompt seem all the more fitting today…

Why is Twitter turning into X?

Before we delve into the deeper reasons for Twitter’s rebrand, why X? After all, it’s a pretty neutral, some might say dull, replacement for the charming (and globally recognized) blue Twitter bird.

Well, Elon Musk has had something of an obsession with X. He started with X.com in 1999, which later became part of PayPal – then there’s SpaceX (the rockets and spacecraft company), the Tesla Model X and the recent launch of xAI (a new generative artificial intelligence venture).

So killing the Twitter logo with an X is very much on-brand for Musk’s companies, and sees it fit into his growing collection of tech brands. But it also likely marks the start of Twitter’s change from a messaging app into an ‘everything’ app that takes us full circle back to those early attempts to disrupt the traditional banking industry…