Twitter Is Dead As Elon Musk Completes Transition To X.com

Slightly less than a year ago, Elon Musk renamed Twitter to "X," but the changeover was only officially completed today. Since his takeover of the social media platform, Musk has been determined to assert his own way of doing things over the website, and the name change was symbolic of that. Paying for Twitter was out, subscribing to X was in. However, the domain name of the website remained Twitter, something its denizens — especially those opposed to Elon Musk's increasingly reactionary public persona — delighted in pointing out.

Today, the often mercurial billionaire announced via a post on X, "All core systems are now on X.com." In other words, typing "twitter.com" into a browser will now redirect to the single letter domain. Since the change, many users have reported that X.com is now working as intended, but a rash of issues have plagued the site, with a surge of outages for various users tracked by Downdetector. Migrating a website of X's scale to a new domain is a technically complex process full of potential failure points, so users experiencing issues should wait a few days as X's remaining staff sort out any remaining issues.

Twitter's rebranding as X is the result of Elon Musk's long-running obsession with the letter. In addition to naming one of Tesla's cars the Model X, he has talked about making a website called "X.com" since the early days of his entrepreneurial endeavors. However, his original attempt at making X.com was one of Elon Musk's biggest tech failures that no one talks about. 

After founding the company X.com in 1999, Musk partnered with PayPal owner Peter Thiel, folding PayPal under the X.com name. But Musk was reportedly the only one who liked the name "X," and after he was forced out of the company following a vote of no confidence from the board, Thiel renamed the company PayPal. 25 years later, Musk has finally achieved his goal of owning a product called "X," and all it took was giving up "Twitter," one of the most recognizable names in tech and social media. 

In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be renamed to X, and he installed a gigantic neon "X" sign on the roof of the company's headquarters. It was removed shortly thereafter, as a complaint was filed by an inspector, according to SFGate. 10 months later, the actual systems that power the platform formerly known as Twitter are finally hosted on X.com, completing one billionaire's lifelong dream.