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Live: Twitter's strange X rebrand explained and ChatGPT comes to Android

Our Fast Charge liveblog is your quick fix of all the latest tech news, with up-to-the-minute updates on all the latest stories.


Welcome to another strange day in the tech circus that is Twitter – or should we say, X, as the social media site will seemingly now be called, following a swift rebrand over the weekend.

Elon Musk started tweeting yesterday about Twitter's sudden rebrand to X, which follows the business being renamed X Corp last year. A new logo was quickly crowd-sourced on Twitter – and it looks like the full rebrand is going ahead, despite it having the hallmarks of another kneejerk publicity stunt.

But why is this happening and what does it mean for Twitter? We'll be exploring that below in our liveblog, so stay tuned for all of the latest updates. And if you don't fancy jumping on the dizzying Twitter carousel, we'll also be rounding up all of the latest news that broke over the weekend.

This includes the imminent launch of an official ChatGPT for Android this week – and in less good news, Spotify's likely raising of individual Premium pricing in the US. But first, it's time to unravel the demise of Twitter's blue bird...

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There's only one place to start with today's tech news – Twitter's overnight rebranding to X. It started with yesterday's Tweet above from Elon Musk, which kicked off a fast-paced makeover for the social media site that gave it a new logo.

Over the next few hours, Musk took part in a Twitter Spaces chat (where he stated that “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches") and changed his Twitter profile to the new logo.

So what exactly is going on? As ever with Musk, there method to the apparent madness remains slightly unclear, but it's likely to be related to Musk's recent announcement of xAI and his desire to turn Twitter into an all-encompassing app in the guide of China's WeChat. More on that shortly...

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What exactly is the plan behind Twitter's X rebrand? Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has tried to explain the vision (above), which sounds an awful lot like the app wants to become an all-encompassing answer to WeChat. 

Yaccarino states that messaging will just be another part of the new Twitter, sitting alongside "payments/banking" (interestingly, Musk's original X.com merged with PayPal back in March 2000) to help create a "global marketplace". Sounds like memes might become something of a Twitter sideline...  



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