There Is a ‘100 Percent Chance’ Twitter Will Be Sued Over New X Branding, According to Trademark Expert

(Sipa via AP Images)

Elon Musk is getting the X branding he’s wanted for decades, but there might be a catch: trademark law.

Musk debuted X Corp, which is still tentatively being called Twitter, on Monday, vowing to do away with anything using the bird logo (whose name is Larry — RIP, Larry) and removing the Twitter sign from the company’s headquarters or at least trying. But these outward changes are just the beginning of the turbulence Musk will face since, according to trademark experts, “nearly 900” companies are using some version of “X” as their brand.

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

Two of those almost 900 companies are Microsoft, the maker of the Xbox, and Musk’s direct competitor, Meta, which registered a federal trademark in 2019 for “a blue-and-white letter ‘X’ for fields including software and social media.” For its part, Meta also faced trademark challenges from Metacapital, an investment firm, and MetaX, a virtual reality company and maybe even a challenger to Musk. (Maybe Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and MetaX founder Justin Bolognino can all duke it out in the cage, and maybe they can call it the X Cage!)

But those companies aside, it was always going to be tricky to try and trademark a single letter of the alphabet. Douglas Masters, another trademark attorney, told Reuters:

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.

The letter X was expected to comment on this brouhaha but has not issued an official statement.

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