There is a love story that connects Elon Musk to the letter X.

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Elon Musk has always been fond of the letter X, using it in most of his businesses. Now, in an attempt to turn his $44 billion acquisition into something truly his own, the famous Twitter logo, the blue bird, is being killed off in favor of the letter X.

Critics see Musk’s vision for X as something akin to WeChat in China, a massive app that people can use for entertainment, shopping, and online services, as well as for posting updates and messaging friends.

The announcement of the logo change came after months of erratic behavior from the world’s richest person, leading some users to boycott the app and advertisers to move away from it, leaving Twitter in a financially unstable position and increasingly vulnerable to competition.

Mike Proulx, an analyst at Forrester, says that killing off a famous online brand is “extremely risky” at a time when competing apps like the new Instagram Thread and smaller startups like Bluesky are attracting users.

Proulx added to the US network “CNN” that Musk “single-handedly killed the famous brand in our cultural dictionary for 15 years.”

Observers say that the logo change is not entirely surprising, as Musk has already transformed the name of the company Twitter into X Corp, to become a subsidiary of X Holding Corp, as revealed in a lawsuit in April.

Musk said in October last year, before buying Twitter, that he saw the $44 billion deal as an “acceleration to create X, the everything app.”

The letter X prominently appears in the name of Musk’s space rocket company, SpaceX. X.com was Musk’s payments company name over two decades ago, which eventually became PayPal through its merger with the competitor at that time.

Name changes have become somewhat common among major web companies, with Facebook becoming Meta in late 2021, and Google adopting the name Alpha. However, these parent companies retained their original brand for their core services.

Linda Yakarino, whom Musk appointed as CEO in May, said in an email to employees on Monday that the company “will continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in voice, video, messaging, payments, and banking services, creating a global market for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

Proulx says that Musk’s desire to turn X into a super app requires “time, money, and people,” which “Twitter no longer has.” Earlier this month, Musk admitted that Twitter had suffered a 50% drop in advertising revenue.

Some advertisers have become concerned about promoting their products on Twitter because of reports of rising hate speech, racist and offensive comments on the platform, as documented by many civil rights groups and researchers.

Musk attempted to compensate for some of the decline in advertising by offering a premium subscription service for $8 per month, which the company will need tens of millions of subscribers to make up for losses.

Meanwhile, Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg said in a statement sent via email that the name change represents “a sad day for many Twitter users and advertisers” and “a clear signal that the Twitter known for the past 17 years has disappeared and will not return.”

Enberg wrote: “Renaming Twitter is a reminder that Musk, not Thread or any other app, was and likely still is the killer of Twitter.”