Elon undoubtedly has folders full of cool images he's saved, so while he was still focused on the "X" idea, he rummaged around and found that one and thought, "Yeah! This is gonna be sick dude!"
Thus are decisions made by the world's richest teenage edgelord.
2nd Update: Musk hired a company to remove the Twitter sign from the building in SF but neglected to get a permit. The cops shut the work down.
Space Karen's destroyed the internationally recognized Twitter brand, reduced the value of his $44 billion purchase by at least half, chased advertisers and users away, seriously diminished the value of Telsa and tarnished his own reputation enough that it may never recover. He is now going to either have to back-pedal or be embroiled in years of litigation. Good thing the "genius" doesn't pay his lawyers.
To be fair, that design is a pretty basic one. Like extremely basic. Sure it's cleaned up and modernized but trying to say it was stolen is a reach. Elon does still have the Midas Touch where everything turns to gold, in which he subsequently murders everything he touches and makes even gold worthless.
As a graphic designer, I knew at a glance that nobody was paid to make that stupid "x".
If a client as big as Twitter asked me for an X logo I'd be so fucking depressed. It would be such a pain to make a proper logo like that without looking exactly like a dozen other ones, because it's hack and has been done to death.
The X everything app is literally some high school composition notebook doodle shit Elon has been clinging to for over 20 years. He's like the dad from the movie Holes that thinks he's a great inventor, but just keeps catching the house on fire and stinking up the place.
I was just thinking about all the websites that have the Facebook logo, the Instagram logo, and the Twitter logo on their pages. That's just supposed to be an X now?
Not that I want to defend Elon or anything... But it's an X. The second most simple character in the alphabet. What are you expecting from an X? How much should one pay for one X?