Twitter users noticed Monday that the app’s iconic blue bird logo – which has long served as a home button at the top of users’ menus – had been swapped out for an image of the popular ‘doge’ meme featuring the face of a shiba inu.
The image also appears as a buffering icon when users open the site via desktop.
The cheeky dog is perhaps most well-known for serving as the face of Dogecoin, the meme coin that billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk famously endorsed and helped catapult into success in the spring of 2021 – that is, until its historic crash in 2022, when the value of the currency tanked approximately 75%.
The change to Twitter’s logo comes just three days after Musk petitioned a US federal court to drop a $258bn racketeering lawsuit levied against him by Dogecoin investors. Plaintiffs allege that the controversial Twitter and Tesla exec was essentially operating a pyramid scheme in support of the cryptocurrency. They say that Musk purposefully drove up the price of the token more than 36,000% over the course of two years – only to let it plummet, which resulted in billions of dollars in losses.
Filed in June of last year, the lawsuit asserts that “Musk used his pedestal as World’s Richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme for profit, exposure and amusement.”
