Why Did Elon Musk Change Twitter's Icon to the Doge Emoji? Details
Published April 4 2023, 11:52 a.m. ET
It’s been a trip since Elon Musk took over as Twitter’s CEO in October 2022. The controversial tech billionaire immediately began laying off employees left and right, ultimately leaving the world wondering if the platform’s demise was near.
An untraditional overseer to say the least, he even teased users when he posted a poll on his account, allowing users to "decide" if he should step down as the head of Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the majority of voters said he should and unsurprisingly, he didn’t.
Basically, anything can happen on Elon’s Twitter. And on April 3, he made a major change to the platform's logo. "Does anyone else see the #doge as the Twitter logo," tweeted one user.
You see, Elon swapped out the brand’s iconic blue bird symbol for a dog emoji. And not just any dog emoji, but the internet-famous doge emoji. What gives? We unpack his decision below.
Why does Twitter have a dog logo?
Twitter has a dog logo because Elon is an avid supporter of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which is symbolized by the doge emoji. Allegedly this idea was suggested to Elon by the Twitter account @WSBChairman in a previous conversation.
For context, doge is a meme that became popular around 2013, per Know Your Meme. The meme typically consists of a picture of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu dog, surrounded by multicolored broken English text in comics sans font. The text is believed to represent the dog's internal monologue.
How long will the doge logo be on Twitter?
It's unknown how long the doge emoji logo will live on Twitter. There is also some speculation that Elon's spontaneous logo change may be due to an impending lawsuit.
In June 2022, a Dogecoin investor sued Elon and his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, for $258 billion, per CNBC. They said that Elon and his companies had encouraged people to buy Dogecoin, which made its price go up substantially, and then let it crash.
The plaintiff claimed that Elon knew that Dogecoin wasn't worth anything, but he still talked about it to make money and have fun. On March 31, Elon asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit because he said it wasn't true.