A closer look
Biz Stone and the other Twitter founders originally purchased the famous blue bird logo from the stock photo website iStockphoto for an incredibly modest sum of fifteen dollars. The artist who designed the original clip art, Simon Oxley, barely made any money from the transaction and was actually legally prohibited by the platform from using his own design once it became a global corporate trademark. For over a decade, that little blue bird served as the universal symbol for toxic political discourse, celebrity meltdowns, and people getting violently angry about opinions they actively chose to seek out. Of course, all of that brand recognition was eventually thrown directly into the garbage when an eccentric billionaire bought the platform and rebranded it to a single, menacing letter of the alphabet that looks like an energy drink logo
