text: Following Twitter's change in ownership, Musk began referring to the platform as "X/Twitter" and "X (Twitter)", and renamed several features to remove references to bird-oriented terminology, including Birdwatch to Community Notes and Quote Tweets to Quotes. On July 23, 2023, Musk confirmed the rebrand, which started when the X.com domain (formerly associated with PayPal) began redirecting to Twitter; the logo was changed from the bird to the X the next day, and the platform's official main and associated accounts also began using the letter X within their handles. The @x handle was originally owned by photographer Gene X Hwang, who registered it in 2007. Hwang had expressed willingness to sell the handle, but received an email on July 25, 2023, stating that the company was taking it. He was offered some X merchandise and a meeting with the company's leaders, but no financial benefits. The Android app's name and icon were changed to X on Google Play by July 27; the same change went live on the App Store on July 31 after Apple granted an exception to its minimum character length of 2. Around that time, some more elements of the Twitter branding were removed from the web version, including tweets being renamed to "posts".
  The rebrand was described as unusual, given that Twitter's brand was already strong internationally, with words like "tweet" having entered common language. The rebranding has been criticized on the basis that the trademarkability of the name and logo is weak: there are almost 900 companies in the U.S. that own an X trademark, including an existing social media-related logo owned by Meta Platforms. The X logo uses a blackboard bold X, a character that has appeared in mathematical textbooks since the 1970s and that is included in Unicode as .