‘Blaze Your Glory!’: Twitter Has a Bizarre New Slogan After ‘X’ Rebrand

“X”, the product formerly known as “Twitter,” has a new tagline in Apple’s App Store: “Blaze your glory!” The tagline now shows up when an iOS user tries to download the social media app, which was purchased by increasingly unhinged reactionary billionaire Elon Musk last year.

Users noticed the update on the App Store on Monday morning, the latest rebrand of the popular microblogging site, which changed its name from Twitter to X last week. Musk rolled the company up into parent company X Corp in April. Also on Monday morning, Musk tweeted, “Blaze Your Glory!!”

While deciphering the motivation of X’s CEO is likely a fool’s errand, the tagline reads either like a desperate admission or an embarrassing troll. It references a colloquialism—“going out in a blaze of glory”—that valorizes a spectacular but premature death. While the phrase was used as early as the 16th Century, most people may know it from Jon Bon Jovi’s song of the same name, from the soundtrack to the 1990 Western Young Guns II. Downloading X in this context is analogous to joining its owner on a doomed mission in which a once-celebrated app becomes increasingly unprofitable and unusable, infested with spam, hate speech, paywalls, and presumably self-immolates. 

Considering Musk owns another company that shoots rockets into outer space which have people in them, and another company with cars that occasionally burst into flames while people are inside them, it remains to be seen if the phrase will be used across brands.

Elon Musk bought Twitter last year for $44 billion, with a deal that was finalized in October 2022 after months of legal wrangling in which he tried to escape it. Musk framed his takeover as a win for free speech, but third-party data suggests that  the company’s rate of compliance with government takedown requests rose to 80 percent, up from 50 percent in pre-Musk days. The company hasn’t published a transparency report since the takeover. He launched an $8 a month service called Twitter Blue which drastically underperformed even as advertising revenue cratered. And he launched a revenue-sharing program with many of the initial payments going to far-right conservatives.

After changing the company’s name to X, Musk replaced the iconic blue bird logo on the company’s San Francisco office space, after which the Department of Buildings received a complaint about the unsafe removal. Twitter is now estimated to be worth between $15-20 billion, an incredible loss of value in a short amount of time from the $44 billion it went for last year.

When reached for comment, Twitter sent Motherboard an auto-reply saying “We’ll get back to you soon,” a change from the poo emoji that journalists have been automatically receiving from Twitter since Musk took over. We will update this story if Twitter does get back to us soon.