regardless of Elon Musk’s intentions to rename the bird app to a dull, bland, easily copied “X” billionaire tech mogul there may be some roadblocks on foot on its way since every company under the sun has already called dibs on it paper. There are hundreds of companies with an “X” trademark, and many may be tempted to sue for infringement.
said patent attorney Josh Gerben Reuters he counted close to 900 US trademark registrations in “X” in a wide range of industries. Just within the realm of technology, Microsoft has a trademark on “X” because of its Xbox system brand. The company has owned that trademark since 2003, just a year after it released the first Xbox console. Meta also owns a trademark on an “X” logo for software and social media. That company also now has its own own lameness AND more and more lifeless Twitter Contender: Topics.
Twitter did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment (which is probably better than sending us a poop emoji). The rebranding debacle has caused quite a few headaches for the site that is still called Twitter. As the company was removing the logo from its San Francisco headquarters on Monday, local said the reporters that the crane and crew were blocking traffic causing several confusion about self-driving cars. Police forced crews to move on, and currently all that remains of the old signage is a big, bold “er” along with the old blue bird logo.
It hasn’t fared well in terms of brand awareness either. like time reported, brand agencies were perplexed as to why any company would abandon such buzzwords as “Twitter,” “tweet” or “retweet” in exchange for this whole “X” message. According to that report, analysts claimed that Twitter’s brand could be worth several billion dollars, and the site’s owner may be throwing it all away. And this for a company that Musk himself is said to be worth half the $44 billion he originally paid for it.
A cursory search of the US Patent and Trademark Office database reveals that several of these logo patents were filed last week, just days before Musk began mentioning his intention to rebrand Twitter. Some trademark logos are as simple as a large “X” in a square box. Others from firms such as Brand X Co. include a more stylized X that can be compared to Musk’s current logo choice. This despite the fact that the design has a great similarity to Brand monotype font AND Unicode character (U+1D54F).
Companies may be incentivized to sue if they can claim brand confusion. According to Gerben, X Corp—the company that now owns Twitter—has filed for a trademark on the Twitter name itself. If Musk finds the potential the court process is getting very hot, he has a chance to go back.
But that’s unlikely to happen given Musk’s connection to the letter. Author Walter Isaacson said Axios that Musk had was planning for the X renaming tall before finally agreeing to buy the platform. His goal, according to the biographer, is to create a “financial platform that helps anyone profit from content creation.” This will also include allowing journalists to create stores on the platform for people to support Patreon-style. So far, the few people who have taken Musk up on this idea have been people like Former Fox pundit Tucker Carlson dirty AND increasingly right-wing spokesman Matt Taibbi.
Musk has publicly said he wants to get rid of “all the birds.” He loves the brand “X” so much that he is naming the company’s conference rooms with the letter. New York Times reported that he renamed himself in the conference rooms to “eXposure,” “eXult,” and “s3Xy,” because the billionaire has apparently never left the early 2000s when leetspeak was still a thing.
