Elon Musk Apparently Didn’t Bother To Make Basic Preparations Ahead Of His Chaotic, Comical Rebranding Of Twitter As ‘X’ Despite His Decades-Long Obsession With The Letter

The seemingly sudden decision by Elon Musk to rebrand Twitter as X continues to look more and more like a seat-of-the-pants operation with little to no planning. Amongst the numerous jokes roasting Musk for the abrupt product change, reporters begin digging into the details of the “X” rebrand. To the surprise of no one, there was a whole lot of diligence left on the table.

Despite Musk having a decades-long obsession with the name X, to the point that it led to his ouster at PayPal, it appears that nobody at Twitter thought to check if anyone had already registered the X trademark. Turns out, Musk’s rival Mark Zuckerberg is already sitting on the name along with 900 other copyright registrations (including Microsoft). Whoops.

Via Reuters:

X is so widely used and cited in trademarks that it is a candidate for legal challenges – and the company formerly known as Twitter could face its own issues defending its X brand in the future.

“There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.

News that Musk never checked the trademark claims to X arrived on the heels of reports that he attempted to remove the Twitter logo from the company headquarters in San Francisco, but was stopped by the police because of a permit issue. In short, the first 24 hours of X were a typical Musk mess, and once again, he got ruthlessly roasted on his own platform.

You can see some of the reactions below:

https://twitter.com/CoreyDeshon/status/1683696141899288577

And congrats to whoever’s squatting on X.com. They might be about to get paid.

(Via Reuters)