No, ‘The Simpsons’ Didn’t Predict Twitter’s New ‘X’ Logo

In this episode of “Matt Groening is a time traveler,” the Simpsons creator goes back to the creation of the written word and invents the letter “X.”

The phrase “Simpsons already did it” is one of the most enduring utterances of the internet, with usage stretching back to 2002 when a South Park episode of the same name satirized Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s own struggle to come up with plots that hadn’t already been explored by their cartoon contemporaries. Then, when an eerily prescient joke about Donald Trump becoming president from a Season 11 episode went viral in 2016, the Simpsons’ supposedly soothsaying storylines started to become front page news each time events in real world mirrored those in Springfield.

As Elon Musk inexplicably rebrands Twitter under the simple moniker “X,” a viral Tweet (or Xeet, as we’re apparently supposed to call it) claimed that, once again, The Simpsons did it first. They’re going to lose their minds when they see what Microsoft calls their game box.

As the context box under this post reveals, the screenshot in question is, in fact, Photoshopped – the actual frame from the Season 23 Simpsons episode “Ned 'n' Edna's Blend Agenda” shows a phone with an x-shaped icon that more closely resembles the iPhones traditional Safari app button. However, the truth has never once stopped Twitter from losing their minds over something insignificant, and the many Simpsons conspiracy theorists of X are currently reposting the doctored image ad nauseam.

While an impressive number of Simpsons bits have legitimately spilled over into real life over the years, it’s important to remember that, with 750 episodes over 34 years and a notably high joke-per-minute (JPM) rate, there are simply so many Simpsons gags that it’s almost a statistical certainty that, every now and then, our increasingly absurd world will copy Matt Groening’s homework.

In this case, however, Musk did not steal his new logo from Homer’s phone – he stole it from Tic-tac-toe.