Twitter’s rebranding as X may invite more significant and longer legal battles, as many other companies have trademarked the alphabet for their businesses.
Though not as direct ones, Meta and Microsoft have variants of X trademarked that may trigger lawsuits if X (formerly Twitter) decide to overlap. The company is already dealing with many cases from its creditors, current and former employees.
Twitter’s Problems of Rebranding
Twitter 2.0 is all over the news. Ever since Elon Musk took over his favourite social media platform, problems have been pouring in various kinds. Some include loss lawsuits from former and current employees, default debt payments and loss of ad revenue.
Amidst this, Elon Musk proceeded to rebrand Twitter’s name and logo to X – which has the potential to bring a lot of problems to Twitter now. Firstly, the new brand cuts all the goodwill that Twitter and its bird logo catered to all these years, potentially valued at billions of dollars.
Further, changing all the internal records to X branding would create confusion and possibly a cybersecurity threat to the users. Having a single word in critical communications and notice could be easily manipulated.
The Twitter rebrand to "X" is the trademark story of the year.
A few reasons why:
1⃣ The Twitter trademark is known (and protected) around the world.
To cast aside an asset this valuable in favor of a new trademark is unprecedented in history.
2⃣ It takes years of effort to… pic.twitter.com/RZdSeukRXL
— Josh Gerben (@JoshGerben) July 25, 2023
And majorly the word X is trademarked by several other companies worldwide for various purposes. Meta, for example, has this word trademarked for future businesses, while Microsoft had it for the gaming segment; hence we see Xbox.
Thus, a 100% probability that Twitter/X will be sued by both opportunistic and legitimate plaintiffs sometime later, and the company will have to shell out tens of millions of dollars (if not in hundreds) for the legal fees and settlement costs. And these issues will be overly complicated in the other parts of the world where Twitter is already operating.
Despite all such potential issues, Elon Musk continued to rebrand Twitter. It even stripped the iconic Twitter bird logo from the company’s San Francisco headquarters and placed an “X” atop twitter.com.
