The brief and blinding life of Elon Musk’s X sign
When Elon Musk changed the name of the social media platform Twitter to X on Sunday, July 23, the rebrand’s rollout was rocky. Early the next morning, the new X logo was projected onto the side of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, but the old name and bird logo were still to be found on various arms of the platform for days to follow.
One change that couldn’t be made digitally was the removal of the Twitter sign from the exterior of the company’s offices. The day after Musk’s name change announcement, workers sidled a cherry picker boom lift onto the sidewalk and began dismantling the letters. The police arrived soon after, halting the work for its apparent lack of a permit or even rudimentary safety measures for pedestrians walking below. For a moment, all that remained of the company’s sign were the last two letters of its former name: “er.”
But that wasn’t the end of the Twitter-to-X-rebrand signage fiasco. Here’s what happened next:
Friday, July 28
A new sign begins rising on the roof of the company’s building. Steel support columns shaped like a football goal post are put in place near the edge of a rooftop garden, and workers are soon seen using ladders and lifts to put into place a vaguely familiar X logo stretching about 30 feet into the sky.
One image shows six workers hoisting a diagonal stroke of an X symbol onto a simple steel frame. Piles of black sandbags appear to be counter-weighing the sign, causing at least one safety-minded observer to consider the seismic risks such a structure could pose.
An official complaint was filed with the city, citing a “structure on roof without permit.” This spurred a building inspector from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection to visit the site. The inspector’s report notes that the company declined to allow access to the roof to see the sign, saying it was “a temporary lighted sign for an event.” (Charmingly, the report refers to the company as “Tweeter.”)
By nightfall, the sign was complete and its lights turned on, flashing and strobing like the inside of a nightclub. Neighbors and passersby were not pleased.
Here’s another angle I forgot I had that shows the X strobing.
Also, my apartment building needs a bath. pic.twitter.com/t66erPuDlL
— Christopher J. Beale (@realchrisjbeale) July 29, 2023
Saturday, July 29
The city’s building inspector made a second attempt to get onto the roof of the building. “[U]pon arrival access was denied again by tenant,” the report notes. For lacking a permit and violating city code, the project was issued a Notice of Violation.
Sunday, July 30
In total, the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection received 24 complaints about the light and structure in a little over 48 hours. Like the sign dismantling that started less than a week earlier, this new sign was erected without any official permit. “A permit is required to install, replace, reconstruct, expand, intensify, or relocate any sign unless it is specifically exempted from the regulations,” according to the city’s planning department.
Monday, July 31
A city building inspector made a third attempt to visit the rooftop of the building, and the company again denied access. At the same time, observers outside the building watched as workers began removing parts of the sign. “[B]y the time I left the entire structure had been removed,” the inspector wrote in the report. “I explained to Building management that a building permit was still required to remove the structure.”
By 2p.m., images on the X platform showed the X sign completely removed.
That the company acquiesced and removed the sign is probably an indication that it knew the whole thing was illegal from the start. (Musk-owned companies have exhibited a pattern of skirting rules and norms, from an internal team at Tesla focused specifically on suppressing complaints about unrealistic battery range estimates to the environmental hazards created by exploded SpaceX rockets in Texas.) The brief and bright life of the rooftop X sign was likely intended to be just a flash in the pan, eliciting the right balance of outrage and media coverage to put the struggling company back into the minds of users and advertisers.
The sign saga, though, is not likely to be completely over. Inevitably, a new sign will be erected on the building as Musk tries to turn X from a well-used social media platform into an “everything app.” But if Musk wants X to stick, he’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: with a permit.
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