The massive neon sign had drawn complaints from neighbors and city officials
The controversial neon “X” sign has been removed from the roof of the former Twitter headquarters, multiple eyewitnesses confirmed on Monday on CEO Elon Musk’s newly-rechristened platform.
Photos of construction workers dismantling the sign were posted to the platform formerly known as Twitter, though the company has yet to issue a public statement and Musk’s own account still showed the sign beaming from the building’s roof as both his pinned tweet and his profile background as of Monday evening.
The city of San Francisco filed a complaint and launched an investigation after the sign was installed on Friday, explaining that erecting signs on top of buildings requires a permit. Neighbors subsequently complained as the sign flickered and beamed its bright light into the residential building across the street, illuminating the area “like it was daylight” according to one angry tenant.
🚨#BREAKING: The large 𝕏 sign from X headquarters has been removed.
— SIR MAEJOR – AMERICA FIRST 🇺🇸 (@REALSIRMAEJOR) July 31, 2023
Police had previously attempted to intervene as workers removed the Twitter logo and blue bird from the outside of the building last Monday, again claiming they lacked permits to close the street, but authorities later acknowledged no crime had been committed and the sign’s removal was “not a police matter.”
While police were protecting the Twitter sign, crime in San Francisco has become something of a punch line – a CNN reporter sent to document the phenomenon in March had the window of her rental car smashed, her bags and passport stolen while she was interviewing the newly-elected supervisor of the city’s Sunset District. Several major retail chains have left the city, including Whole Foods, Nordstrom and Saks off Fifth, many explicitly citing the unsafe conditions.
Musk, however, has pledged to keep X Corp’s headquarters in San Francisco despite the “doom spiral” the city has entered, revealing on Saturday that “many have offered rich incentives for X (fka Twitter) to move its HQ” elsewhere.
While Twitter officially became X Corp on paper in April, the company only adopted the X logo last week after Musk held an informal competition among his followers to design it, promising that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds” in a tweet last Sunday.
The decision has further divided opinions over the future of the platform he purchased for $44 billion last year, with some believing that discarding what was once referred to on its website as “our most recognizable asset” has doomed X Corp to irrelevance. Musk, eager to revamp the social network into an “everything app” along the lines of China’s WeChat, has said the logo change “should have been done a long time ago.”
