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Trademark experts predict ‘100 percent chance’ Elon Musk will be sued over Twitter rebrand

July 26, 2023 | | Print Article

Trademark experts predict companies will line up to sue Twitter mogul Elon Musk over switching to his new X branding for the social media platform.

Musk has a thing for the letter X. His son is named X and, of course, there is SpaceX, xAI, and X Corp. He envisions using the branding for a universe of apps, products, and services since X is symbolic of the unknown in science.

However, his dream which has been decades in the making may run afoul of trademark law, according to Reuters. It’s doubtful that will give Musk any pause. His determination is legendary. Even so, the so-called experts assert that he is coming up against “nearly 900” companies that are using some version of “X” as their brand.

Twitter has officially merged with X Corp. and no longer exists as an entity. The social media platform laid the iconic bluebird to rest on Monday and has morphed into X despite everyone proclaiming that the sky is falling… again.

“There’s a 100 percent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” trademark attorney Josh Gerben ominously told Reuters in an interview.

Among those 900 companies are Microsoft, the maker of the Xbox, and Musk’s nemesis, Meta, which registered a federal trademark in 2019 for “a blue-and-white letter ‘X’ for fields including software and social media.”

Meta also faced trademark challenges from Metacapital, which is an investment firm, and MetaX, a virtual reality company.

It should be noted that if anyone has the resources to fight for a brand, it’s Elon Musk and if Mark Zuckerberg comes after him, he would probably relish it.

Reuters trotted out a second trademark attorney, Douglas Masters, who stated, “Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as ‘X,’ Twitter’s protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo. The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow.”

And right on cue, other media outlets predicted more doom and gloom for Twitter and Musk. So far, they have been amazingly wrong.

The Wall Street Journal noted, “Swapping the blue bird logo for the letter X has confused users, upset some former employees and opened the door to lawsuits. Ditching the site’s nomenclature threatens years of brand equity. And some say the new logo is more akin to a pornography site than a social-media platform.”

Nice of the media outlet to connect a visionary product such as X with pornography.

“Lawyers say it could be a challenge for Musk to change the meaning of a letter in the public consciousness, particularly one that has risqué associations. The term X-rated is commonly understood as a reference to adult content. Numerous pornography websites contain the letter X in their names and logos,” the Wall Street Journal continued.

After that smear, they dug up disgruntled employees reminiscent of when Musk originally cleaned house at Twitter.

“Sara Beykpour, who worked at Twitter for 12 years, posted on Twitter a photo of her LinkedIn profile with the X logo, saying, ‘do not want. @LinkedIn help plz,'” the media outlet noted.

Nic McConnell, who worked as an account manager at Twitter from 2018 to 2020, also asked LinkedIn for assistance on Monday after the X showed up on his profile.

“I don’t want to be associated with Elon Musk in any capacity and I sure as hell never worked for whatever X is,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Then they turned to their own trademark attorney experts to hammer the X brand.

“Twitter cannot just block off the rest of the world from using that letter for anything else,” Emily Poler, a trademark litigator who runs the law firm Poler Legal LLC in New York, told the Wall Street Journal.

Despite the hand-wringing, pulling of hair, rending of clothes, and gnashing of teeth, there’s a “100 percent chance” that Musk has considered patent challenges to the brand and he has the best attorneys in the world on board to tackle them.

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