In a silly and probably misguided marketing stunt, online classifieds site Ditchit just "ditched" one of the 500-pound Twitter bird signs that used to adorn the erstwhile Twitter Building in San Francisco by way of explosives.

There are several odd things about this fiery marketing stunt by Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp competitor Ditchit that clearly cost a tidy sum. First off, it seems that the company purchased the big blue-and-white bird logo at auction from Musk's renamed company that everyone still calls Twitter for $34,000 because they just wanted a bit of tech nostalgia — this was the second of two large bird signs that was auctioned off back in March, the one that hung over the Jessie Street entrance.

As Ditchit's PR guy James Deluca tells Endgadget, "Everyone in the office is a tech enthusiast, and we thought it would be cool to own a piece of history."

The company paid to transport the 12-foot sign to its Orange County headquarters, and then, Deluca says, a plan "emerged organically" to blow the thing up and film it as a marketing ploy. The convoluted messaging here is "Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X to support free expression. We're doing the same for local marketplaces."

I mean, they got Endgadget and now SFist to write about it, so that may help with brand awareness, but it's not like blowing up this bird is going to remind anyone to go sell their old vacuum cleaner on Ditchit.

Also, these guys seem like committed Elon stans, so maybe this was something they partly did to please him or get him to tweet about it. They also drove it out to the Nevada desert with a caravan of four Ditchit-branded Cybertrucks, as you can see in the video below. So, yeah, barf.

They are now auctioning off the pieces of the blown-up bird to the highest bidder, with the auction ending on July 17. Is someone seriously going to pay a significant amount of money to purchase the exploded bits of this sign? I guess nothing surprises me anymore.

Previously: The Old Twitter Building Bird Logo Sign Is Up for Auction, But You Have to Pay for the Shipping