Rebranding Twitter as X is never going to catch on, despite Elon Musk’s recent and half-hearted efforts.
Elon Musk has some kind of obsession with the letter X. He owns SpaceX, and there’s a Tesla Model X. He even named his son X Æ A-12 (pronounced either Ecks-aye-eye or Ecks-Ash, depending which parent you ask) and usually calls him just X. Now he wants people to stop calling Twitter Twitter, and begin calling it X. He even bought X.com, though it currently only redirects straight to twitter.com.
But like many of Musk’s abrupt decisions regarding Twitter, he either hasn’t done his research, or hasn’t listened to people who have. His main opponent Meta already owns a trademark on X as related to social networking services and app development, while Microsoft owns the trademark on the letter concerning gaming services.
Musk wants to make “X” an all-in-one platform, for social media, banking, gaming, videos, messaging, and more. But he laid no groundwork before making his abrupt rebranding changes, and from the looks of things, didn’t alert his staff either. While there are X’s scattered around here and there, the site is still twitter.com, the login page welcomes you to twitter, tweets and retweets have not been renamed. And no one is ever going to call it X. He’s also opened himself up to major trademark infringement lawsuits from Meta, Microsoft, and other major companies. Lawsuits he will likely lose, forcing the rebranding to be reversed.
On top of that, the long-held association between ‘X’ and unmentionable things has already gotten Twitter blocked entirely in conservative countries like Indonesia, where ‘negative content’ like porn and gambling are restrictively banned. The blocking was remedied in short order, but will be a problem faced over and over by “X.com.”
To add insult to insult, Twitter employees removing the Twitter logo and bird from the company’s headquarters on Monday were stopped by police because they didn’t have any permits and hadn’t taken the time to do the job safely.
