Twitter sign: what happened at San Francisco headquarters, why were police called - Elon Musk X rebrand

Workers taking down the Twitter sign at its headquarters were forced to stop what they were doing after police arrived on the scene.

Twitter owner Elon Musk rebranded his social media company to "X" earlier this week, prompting the sign change.

Police said that the social networking company failed to inform security and the owner of the building about its plans to take down the sign at the firm's Market Street offices in San Francisco.

News website Insider reported it was told by police that officers at the headquarters were responding to "a possible unpermitted street closure."

According to local media, the building's owners were allegedly not informed of the sign's removal. Police ultimately concluded that no crime had been committed.

Workers were able to remove most of the lettering via cherrypicker before their work was paused, but for a moment, only the letters 'e' and 'r' remained, humorously spelling out the word "er". Perhaps a visual metaphor for Musk's often confusing management of the platform...

Twitter's former blue logo - known as ‘Larry the Bird’ - has been the platform's symbol since its launch 17 years ago in 2006. The latest design of Larry had been in use for over a decade, first going live in 2012.

Musk briefly replaced the logo for a short period of time in April with the ‘doge meme’ dog, an apparent nod to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

"Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted on Sunday (23 July). He had asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying that it “certainly will be refined”.

He replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture of the design projected on Twitter’s headquarters. The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com.

The change to X is the most recent and maybe the most divisive modification Musk has made to the website since purchasing it for $44 billion last year.

Pictures obtained by the New York Times show that Musk has already changed the names of meeting rooms at the corporate headquarters to include the letter, including one room that is reportedly now known as "S3xy".

Musk has long been fascinated with the letter X and had already renamed Twitter’s corporate name to X Corp after he bought it in October. The billionaire is also chief executive of rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, commonly known as SpaceX.

He also started an artificial intelligence company this month called xAI to compete with ChatGPT. In 1999, he founded a start-up called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal. Additionally, he calls one of his sons, whose mother is singer Grimes, X.

“I can’t say I’m surprised [by the change], but I think it’s a very selfish decision,” said Hannah Thoreson, of Baltimore, Maryland, who has used Twitter since 2009 for work and personal posts.

“There are so many small businesses and so many non-profits and so many government agencies and things like that all around the world that have relied on Twitter for many years to push their message and reach people,” she said.

“And they all have the Twitter icon on everything from their website to their business cards.” Changing all this costs time and money, she added, not to mention the confusion that comes with a previously unknown brand name.