The blue Twitter bird sign that once was once mounted on the exterior of the San Francisco headquarters of the social media company now known as X sold Thursday at auction for $34,325, failing to reach an estimated bidding price of $40,000.
Nicknamed “Larry,” after Boston Celtics star Larry Bird, the 560 lb. logo was one of two displayed on the building before the company rebranded. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a “special government employee” overseeing aggressive cuts to the federal government for President Donald Trump, bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X the following year complete with a new, worse logo.
The rebrand and new ownership has proven abysmal for the company’s worth. As of last December, the value of X had fallen 72% from what Musk paid for Twitter, according to a valuation from Fidelity, an investment services company. The lost brand equity that’s come from removing the blue bird logo and old name have also proven costly.
It’s AP style to refer to the social network on first reference as “X, formerly known as Twitter.” As “X” is both new and less distinctive than “Twitter,” readers may be less familiar with its new single-letter name. The same can be said of the old versus new logos. RR Auction, the auction house that sold the sign, likened the old Twitter logo to the logos of some of America’s most iconic brands.
“Although Twitter and its light blue bird have since retired, the symbol remains an icon of tech and social media history, an instantly recognizable emblem in the same league as Nike or Apple Computer,” the auction house says in its listing. It’s a symbol that represented the company “from 2012 to 2023, an 11-year span representing Twitter’s most popular and influential period.”
After buying the social network that would become X, Musk turned the app into a pro-Trump site that amplified his own posts, ended unpaid verification, and became a more accommodating platform for right-leaning news influencers and a less accommodating one for news sites. In a bit of mutual admiration this month, Trump has promoted Musk’s cars on the White House grounds while Musk’s political action committee has run more than $200 million in pro-Trump ads on X. X as it is now is associated with Musk, Trump, DOGE, and MAGA while Twitter is now nostalgia, associated with a previous era when it was publicly owned and public opinion of social media was more positive.
The giant sign that just sold is now a piece of history (not to mention one that the new owner is now responsible for paying shipping costs on, per its listing). But it’s also a reminder of a time before social networks felt as politicized and as heavily influenced by their partisan owners as they do today.
