SAN FRANCISCO: Since Elon Musk reluctantly bought Twitter nine months ago, having been threatened with a lawsuit when he tried to back out of his unsolicited offer to buy the company, the platform has lost an estimated $20 billion in value with advertisers leaving en masse and the brand’s image being devalued with every post its CEO makes.

Soon after acquiring Twitter last year, he fired about 5,500 employees and is currently being sued for violating a federal law regulating employee severance plans. His new vision is to pay his remaining staff to create a platform akin to China’s WeChat, where users can go for entertainment, buying goods and services and interacting with friends.

The new “X” logo is meant to visually integrate the platform with Musk’s other ventures like SpaceX and X.com, which was bought through a merger twenty years ago to become Paypal. In a tweet from July 23, he tweeted, “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” Within two days, the iconic blue bird had been replaced by a lifeless white “X” on a black background, signifying the shift.

While rebranding has been known to pay off in the past, success stories are generally accompanied by an improvement in the product’s function or quality. Changing “X” into a super-platform will require time, people and money-assets which the company appears to be lacking at the moment. Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg posted, “Twitter’s rebrand is a reminder that Elon Musk, not Threads or any other app, is and has always been the most likely ‘Twitter killer,’” she wrote.