Twitter has launched its new logo, replacing the blue bird with a white X on a black background as the Elon Musk-owned company moves toward rebranding as X.

The social media network's website showed the company's new logo, but its URL was still showing as twitter.com and the blue "Tweet" button was visible, suggesting the rebrand was not yet finalized.

Musk and the company's new chief executive Linda Yaccarino announced the rebranding Sunday, saying the company would be renamed X and move later into payments, banking, and commerce.

Founded in 2006, Twitter takes its name from the sound of birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.

Musk changed his profile picture late Sunday to the company's new logo, which he described as "minimalist art deco," and updated his Twitter bio to "X.com," which now redirects to twitter.com.

He also tweeted that under the site's new identity, a post would be called "an X."

Musk had already named Twitter's parent company the X Corporation and has said his takeover of the social media giant was "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app" -- a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become online payments giant PayPal.

Since he bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform's advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on Musk's management style and mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation.

In response, the billionaire SpaceX boss has moved toward introducing payments and commerce through the platform in a search for new revenue.

Twitter is thought to have around 200 million daily active users, but it has suffered repeated technical failures since Musk sacked much of its staff.

Many users and advertisers alike have responded adversely to the social media site's new charges for previously free services, its changes to content moderation, and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts.

Musk said this month that Twitter had lost roughly half of its advertising revenue since he took control.