THE “BIRD IS freed,” crowed Elon Musk on October 28, 2022. The purchase had finally gone through. Musk was now the lord and master of Twitter—a platform that he described as the world’s “de facto public town square.” The irony of the online crucible for the free, democratic exchange of ideas being held entirely in private hands seemed to be lost on the billionaire. Domesticated birds do not fare well in the (capitalist) wild. The bird died a “slow and tedious death” at Musk’s hands. The platform’s new overlord began to break things big and small, not least the site’s cultural norms. By July 2023, the bird was put out of its misery once and for all. Musk rebranded Twitter to “X,” and the platform’s iconic avian hallmarks were summarily binned.

Killing Larry came at a steep cost. Experts estimate that the platform’s X-ification “wiped out anywhere between $4 billion and $20 billion in value.” Twitter had achieved the “Holy Grail for brands”: its nomenclature had become part of the “cultural lexicon.” The word “tweet” had penetrated the public vernacular, used even by people who had never logged onto the platform itself. “It’s not just Twitter in a name,” as Mike Proulx points out, “It’s Twitter as a verb.” Musk did not care. From thence forth, he decreed that a “tweet” should be known as “[a]n X.” Shockingly, this did not catch on, with Musk’s preferred term being ditched for the generic “post.” The loss of Larry, Twitter’s beloved blue-bird logo, hit particularly hard.