Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

https://themessenger.com/tech/twitters-rebrand-to-x-could-be-a-trademark-nightmare-thanks-to-microsoft

by sundaeofshock • 3 years ago

293 460 3 years ago

themessenger.com

abhinavk• 3 years ago

Meta also owns the trademark in the context of social networks.

andrewmunsell• 3 years ago

Meta's trademark registration: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...

justinclift• 3 years ago

Wow. That probably only looks like an X if you're drunk and viewing from a distance.

squarefoot• 3 years ago

I rather see a pair of angle brackets there.

The new Twitter logo immediately brought to mind the X-Window system one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

dcmatt• 3 years ago

But theirs is a design mark, just the design is trademarked, not the letter "X" itself. Important distinction

midoridensha• 3 years ago

Maybe, but I'm hoping Meta and Twitter will somehow get into a long, and very, very expensive courtroom battle over this.

chrisco2552• 3 years ago

Probably the only thing that's actually trademarkable if your brand is a single letter.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

It trademarked a very different 'X' logo, but they'll file suit anyway as a matter of form.

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

They literally have to, or they may lose the trademark.

gruez• 3 years ago

mywittyname• 3 years ago

It's kind of dumb that someone could trademark a letter.

WalterBright2• 3 years ago

Zilog attempted to trademark Z. They failed.

code_duck4• 3 years ago

What about Nissan Z? Surely it was never open season for other automakers to name a model that, right?

t0bia_s3• 3 years ago

I'm sure that Russian troops don't care about trademarks.

arcticbull• 3 years ago

You can only trademark the use of that letter in a specific context - you can't blanket stop people from using an 'X' or even calling themselves 'X' - so long as there's no brand confusion. As mentioned in a different post there's Delta Airlines, Delta Faucets, Delta Fans and Delta Power Supplies. The Microsoft/Meta trademark happens to be literally the use of 'X' as a brand in the social network domain, lol.

Between that and the requirement that they be defended, honestly, I think trademarks are one of the forms of IP that I like the most.

chrisco2552• 3 years ago

Even in that context there's limited enforcement available for something so generic.

michaelt• 3 years ago

You might very well think that, but I've read articles saying [1] that Apple has engaged in legal battles with Fruit Union Suisse and a cycle path. It has even set its sights on logos that involve other fruits, like oranges and pears [2].

While you and I might think it's obviously legal to start Apple Airlines or Apple Faucets or Apple Fans, apparently this is not obvious to Apple's trademark lawyers.

I'm not sure intellectual property law operates according to any rational rules that can be understood by us mere mortals.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-vs-apples-trademark-ba... [2] https://archive.is/MKQpW

notatoad• 3 years ago

this is just how trademark works, and it's mostly okay. it also sounds dumb that park tool can trademark the color blue, or kubota can trademark the color orange.

but park tool's trademark is only in the context of bicycle repair tools, and kubota's is only for tractors. the law just isn't that dumb, it's interpreted by courts and real people, who are capable of saying "no, that's dumb" if something is dumb. kubota can keep their trademark, and everybody else can keep making orange things as long as those things aren't tractors or tractor-like things that are going to get confused with kubota products.

similarly, any somewhat reasonable person will be able to see that twitter's rebrand to "X" isn't really going to confuse anybody into thinking they're using a microsoft product, so depite it being a very bad name it's probably not actually going to run afoul of anybody's trademarks.

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

any somewhat reasonable person will be able to see that twitter's rebrand to "X" isn't really going to confuse anybody

I feel that reasonable people and the people who suffer from Musk Derangement Syndrome (seemingly a lot of the people here...) are two very different groups.

t0bia_s3• 3 years ago

What about colours? Could I trademark #906090?

mkl• 3 years ago

For a particular purpose or category, yes. E.g. https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/9-brands-trademarked-color

supriyo-biswas• 3 years ago

https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/trademarked-colors/

dmix2• 3 years ago

If it is just a trademark issue and not logo design, could Twitter just make it x.com? Elon made x.com in 1999. He could pitch it as a revival rather than simple X the company.

zadler• 3 years ago

X.com seems a better brand than X anyway…

nullindividual• 3 years ago

Not to be confused with XCOM.

code_duck4• 3 years ago

If he had the trademark then, he wouldn't have it 20 years later without having used and defended it in the intervening time.

dmix2• 3 years ago

I don't know how that works though. What if it just dies on the grapevine and no one uses it for 2 decades? AFAIK It got merged into Paypal then was mostly just killed off as a functional trademark

minighost• 3 years ago

No one even mentions Google X which rebranded to just X years ago. Clearly it’s been effective that no one even points this out. Yet another winning project.

3cats-in-a-coat5• 3 years ago

It's full of X brands. "Thanks to Microsoft" is kinda arbitrary of the article.

I mean "Twitter Videos" are now "X Videos". "The Twitter Files", this series of "investigative" threads... are now "The X Files" (lol).

"Direct Messages" will now be referred to as DirectX I guess, or I don't know.

X is a letter.

It's Roman number ten.

It's in millions of brands around the world.

It also stands for "X Rated", as in containing excessive violence and nudity. It stands for pornography in some context.

It's unsearchable, and barely speakable, as in it's unclear already when you say "X" if you mean Twitter or Elon's son or whatever.

What is he doing? We can ask but I doubt he knows himself.

sco1• 3 years ago

I mean "Twitter Videos" are now "X Videos"

Which also happens to already be a porn site…

simonklitj3• 3 years ago

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that he is tanking Twitter to then get a payout from the Saudis.

rodgerd• 3 years ago

It's full of X brands. "Thanks to Microsoft" is kinda arbitrary of the article.

Quite. It's pretty big corp 101 to sort this shit out as a rebrand.

threeseed3• 3 years ago

X also means ecstasy making the phrase "I am on X" problematic.

Euphorbium• 3 years ago

He is implementing security through obscurity.

s3p• 3 years ago

DirectX. That gave me a laugh. I realized their branding was poor but didn't think about all the practical implications.

mypastself• 3 years ago

There’s also “Brand X”, which is always worse than whatever is being advertised.

eastbound• 3 years ago

X also stands for ex-, as in, something which belongs to the past.

prawn3• 3 years ago

As for what he's doing, I think it's pretty transparent. He thinks Xs are really, really cool. And perhaps that bird-themes aren't very cool. He loves the idea of an everything app 'like they have in Asia'. And he's addicted to Twitter enough that he got stuck buying it.

So now we have this insane situation where he's going to throw away a strong brand that has an outsized influence in global media by converting it to become the do-everything app, and rename it to his favourite, cool letter. I don't think there's a secret plan beyond that.

I have no idea why he didn't just buy Twitter, keep it strong, and then leverage it to push a do-everything app (that could be called X for all anyone cares).

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

What is he doing? We can ask but I doubt he knows himself.

Muxk likex X and xe doexn't gixe a fux.

But seriously, Musk likes X. When you have the kind of Fuck You Money(tm) that he does, you don't need a reason to like something or use something you like.

loopdoend• 3 years ago

Musk has been obsessed with this domain he owns for decades now. PayPal started as x.com, he's reliving his glory days.

nextlevelwizard2• 3 years ago

I head they named entire operating system after the letter X

a_nop• 3 years ago

Getting press and attention, as seen here, for better or worse.

falcolas• 3 years ago

The owners of “X” box? Who woulda thunk it.

Now then, of course Musk can challenge it, and given his domain ownership, possibly successfully even.

But given the scads of lawyers who Musk owes money to, yet is not paying, who will take the fight on?

edgyquant3• 3 years ago

Really have no idea what you’re referring to with the legal bill things. Other than the company that represented the Twitter deal, which is in the middle of a lawsuit over their charging practices. Seems like you’re mixing up trumps legal history with Musk.

DropInIn• 3 years ago

Owning a domain doesn't preclude others having ip priority.

It's about 'Extant Use', not existence.

jrd259• 3 years ago

X window system?

dboreham• 3 years ago

afaik that's why the domain x.com was registered in the first place (by Marcel and Jeff). x.org was used for X11 purposes and x.com was registered to prevent someone squatting on it.

AraceliHarker• 3 years ago

The "X" trademark owned by Meta belongs to Mixer, a game streaming site formerly run by Microsoft, which was shut down in 2017, but its operations were taken over by Facebook Gaming. The "X" trademark of Mixer was also given to Meta at that time.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixer_(service)

stingraycharles2• 3 years ago

Isn’t it only the logo that’s trademarked, rather than the name “X”? I am not an expert on trademarks by all means, how likely is it that Meta would actually have a case here?

turtledragonfly4• 3 years ago

This is correct. I'm not a trademark lawyer, though I have filed some.

There are two main types: a "standard character mark" (which is text) and the rest, which are visual logo designs.

This one is the latter. That is, they're not trademarking the text "X", just that particular visual representation — the colors involved, etc.

You can tell in the TEAS system by looking in the "Mark Information" section, and the "Standard Character Claim: No" line.

255• 3 years ago

Had a small existential crisis reading this - Mixer was birthed (rebranded) in 2017 and closed down in 2020.

tim3333• 3 years ago

Apparently several hundred trademarks reference 'X'.

I see lawsuits ahead.

kvetching3• 3 years ago

Why would he care about that?

smileysteve• 3 years ago

I would also think

Apple owns X with OS X and the iPhone X.

Microsoft own Xbox's logo, with the console, store, game pass

dgellow2• 3 years ago

Mixer has been shut down in 2020.

threeseed3• 3 years ago

Everyone seems to be missing the interesting part here.

It's that Twitter is using a generic Monotype font letter for their brand.

Which would mean that their brand will not be able to be trademarked and thus anyone could use it to associate their dodgy product with the main site. So I wouldn't worry about Meta, Microsoft etc but about the insane number of X ripoffs we are going to see in the future e.g. X crypto coin, X bots.

NoZebra120vClip2• 3 years ago

You've confused copyright with trademark here.

fomine3• 3 years ago

A logo is a trademark

threeseed3• 3 years ago

Trademarks can be word mark or a design mark.

Musk can't trademark the letter X and he can't trademark an existing font letter.

tzm• 3 years ago

Did you mean Dogey product?

xwdv• 3 years ago

X WDV

zgluck• 3 years ago

Monotype Executive Creative Director Phil Garnham Executive told The Messenger in a statement that the company “can confirm that whilst it is similar, this is not the capital X glyph from Monotype’s “Special Alphabets 4.”

speedgoose• 3 years ago

Aren’t all those "Company Name" in Helvetica trademarks?

dehrmann3• 3 years ago

I loved how American Airlines and Apparel both used Helvetica.

These days, the one I find shocking is Monday.com and Slack. Both have names in lowercase black Circular, their logos use pill-shaped elements in similar shades of primary colors, and they're both in the business productivity space. The branding is so close you'd swear they're sibling products like IntelliJ and CLion.

srik• 3 years ago

Redrawing a font design outline from scratch is fair game (fortunately or unfortunaly depending on who you are).

tim3333• 3 years ago

xHamster and many similar are already out there. Famously referenced in the How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus vid.

trollied• 3 years ago

𝕏 - it's just Unicode

kvetching3• 3 years ago

Gotta give it to Elon for going into uncharted territory once again.

blobbers• 3 years ago

This has to be the most moronic part of Elon's plan.

Firing everyone to improve operating margins, I understand that.

Iterating on features rapidly, even if they're not quite ready for prime time? That makes a lot of sense if you're trying to beat out the competition.

Rebranding your website and conference rooms? This sounds like a stupid waste of time and effort. If you wanted to create X the next twitter, just do a start up. Everyone would have signed up just because Elon Musk was using it. You didn't need to buy twitter for that.

Just stupid.

echelon• 3 years ago

You didn't need to buy twitter for that.

You do need to buy Twitter to avoid running afoul of the SEC.

You do need to buy (something) to dump lots of Tesla stock without cratering it.

kadoban3• 3 years ago

You do need to buy Twitter to avoid running afoul of the SEC.

Huh?

partiallypro• 3 years ago

He could have easily created a second app and done exactly what Meta did with Threads and had instant signups with a Twitter account, connecting the two. His plan is comically awful. Unfortunately, I loved Twitter, and felt it was the most valuable social network in terms of instant content, but it is now being ruined.

yodsanklai• 3 years ago

but it is now being ruined.

I'm not a Twitter user, how has the user experience changed since Elon's taking over?

omoikane• 3 years ago

If a complete rebranding to X actually happens, I wonder if someone else is allowed to take over the Twitter brand.

But I suspect what will happen is people will continue to call it Twitter and the X name will not stick.

romanovcode2• 3 years ago

But I suspect what will happen is people will continue to call it Twitter and the X name will not stick.

Me too, the problem is that you cannot convert X to a verb. "They x'ed this and that" sounds much dumber than "They tweeted this and that".

hef198984• 3 years ago

After "Let that sink in", we have "I X'ed Twitter".

sam_bristow• 3 years ago

"The company formerly know as Twitter".

majewsky2• 3 years ago

How about "the app formerly known as Twitter", to make the acronym read nicely? I think I'm indeed going to start calling it TAFKAT. :)

rchaud• 3 years ago

I think you're right, HN and news websites are the only places that Facebook is referenced as "Meta", and that's been the name for a couple of years now.

oneeyedpigeon8• 3 years ago

You mean "Facebook" as a company name, presumably? Isn't the social network still called "Facebook"?

HWR_147• 3 years ago

Elon must have been aware that a single letter can cause a trademark issue. After all, Tesla has models S, 3, X, Y because Ford ready had an "E"

croisillon2• 3 years ago

and (most importantly i think) a T!

HWR_147• 3 years ago

Most important Ford model, sure. But not relevant to what he's trying to spell out.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

I always thought the Tesla naming scheme was inspired by Model T

oneeyedpigeon8• 3 years ago

To explain most of Elon Musk's decisions, you have to start by thinking what a teenage boy would do.

HWR_147• 3 years ago

The Model T was a S3XY car in its day.

nashashmi3• 3 years ago

The subliminal message nearly escaped me.

romanovcode2• 3 years ago

It's not "X", it's "𝕏" (U+1D54F)

Maybe he should trademark this unicode character instead of letter "X".

villgax• 3 years ago

Absolutely love the soon to be unfolded shitshow

dehrmann3• 3 years ago

At this point, it's more of a shitsaga.

kens• 3 years ago

It's interesting to examine this website with the thousands of trademarks for "X". Some are extremely stylized while others are just the letter X. Some are specific to particular colors. Some cover very narrow areas. Microsoft has a lot of trademarks here, but Apple shows up too.

https://trademarks.justia.com/search?q=X

World177• 3 years ago

Elon Musk also did own x.com in the 1990s. [1] It was sold, but he repurchased it several years ago and left the page to resolve to a simple "x" index. [2] This usage was before Microsoft's 2003 registration.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991114130555/http://x.com/mana...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230401142845/http://x.com/

Closi2• 3 years ago

They made the change but https://x.com still leads to a GoDaddy parking page for me…

esskay• 3 years ago

No it doesn't, it's been redirecting to twitter.com for a couple of days now. If you're seeing a GoDaddy page then theres some incredibly slow dns caching in your setup.

thenickdude• 3 years ago

Your browser can also be caching the HTTP redirect itself, especially if they messed up on setting cache lifetimes on it.

jillesvangurp2• 3 years ago

Trademark law is fairly complicated . One of the aspects that is often overlooked is that you actually have to enforce your trademark rights in order to keep your trademark. Failure to do that, weakens your grip on it.

In the case of this particular trademark claim, it's likely to be fairly weak for MS. There are countless legitimate uses of the letter X. They've not been going after a lot of companies over this. And there's also the notion that MS launched the x-box after the x.com domain was registered by Elon Musk. So, any dispute over this could end up being quite hairy for MS. I doubt MS lawyers are going to even bother with a cease and desist letter.

Not a laywer of course; this is just my understanding of trademark law. It gets even more complicated when you consider that laws vary internationally.

therouwboat• 3 years ago

Isn't it even weaker for elon, since he lost the domain around same time that xbox was introduced and only got it back 2017 and even then he said that he had no plans for it.

jillesvangurp2• 3 years ago

Doesn't matter if no-one else has a credible, enforcable claim.

sparrowInHand• 3 years ago

There is a german saying: "Satz mit X, war wohl nix." that comes to mind. Anti-Search Engine Optimisation. The world has really passed google by, if this is a valid option.

thih9• 3 years ago

"Satz mit X, war wohl nix."

Google translate: “Sentence with X was probably nothing.“

majewsky2• 3 years ago

I'm German. Here's a better translation: "A sentence with X: That evidently didn't work." The "sentence with X" part hinges on the alternative spelling of "nichts" (nothing) as "nix".

solarkraft• 3 years ago

Idiomatic translation: Well, that was a failure.

svag• 3 years ago

There is also this site, https://x.company, which is a division of Google / Alphabet... It will be very confusing...

ibrarmalik• 3 years ago

Also https://x.org

shri_krishna• 3 years ago

If you ever want to understand what living in a tech bubble is like, reading the comments here should be sufficient. People feeding off each others conspiracies and hate for Musk. Hilarious to watch

camgunz• 3 years ago

It's also pretty close to the logo for x.org.

alfiedotwtf• 3 years ago

Off-topic I know, but does anyone know the reasoning behind Elon taking $44B and running Twitter into the ground?

jrockway• 3 years ago

Probably just human nature, right? The normal person version of this is getting excited about a Raspberry Pi, buying one, failing to do your project on the first try, and then shoving the thing into a drawer you never open. If you're the richest person in the world, you have the unique ability to tack on 9 zeroes for your "it could be good" speculative projects.

reneberlin2• 3 years ago

All the actions combined come down to a fictional handbook written by Musk:

"How to destroy a international brand and company properly and fast"

I can't believe it was intentional, but i can't imagine any reasons for this, i could only add my speculation.

z7• 3 years ago

Musk's explanation:

"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.

The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.

In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1683656350046232578

FrustratedMonky• 3 years ago

Who cares if 'Twitter' doesn't make sense for things over 140 char.

They didn't re-brand 'Coke' when they took out the 'Cocaine'.

It takes a lot of effort to have a global brand. They already have it in 'Twitter'. X is not unique enough to ever stand out.

This is such a bad decision, it is just frosting for all the people sitting back eating popcorn watching this dumpster fire.

mikrotikker2• 3 years ago

You want an SEO position at X Corp?

yreg2• 3 years ago

By the way Coca-Cola still uses coca leafs in the production, although perhaps it's so dilluted there are no traces left in the final product.

There is a single company that is authorized to import coca leafs to US. They create a cocaine free extract which they sell to Coca-Cola as an ingredient for their syrup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company#Coca_extraction

mbreese• 3 years ago

Just to be that guy… Coca-cola didn’t get its name from cocaine, but the coca leaves from which cocaine is extracted. Coca-cola still contains some amount of “decocainized” coca leaves. And the continued presence in the syrup formula is likely due to the name/brand.

From: https://www.eater.com/23620802/cocaine-in-coca-cola-coke-rec...

it’s more likely that it “continues to be used merely to enable the Company to retain the word ‘Coca’ in the name

What does this have to do with the made up name of a short message of 140 characters? Nothing. It’s not like sending a video or 141 character messages are auto associated with the term “X”.

But in the Coca-Cola case, the words in the brand do have meaning.

salamwaddah• 3 years ago

Coke had Cocaine?

phpisthebest8• 3 years ago

Clearly you do not remember "New Coke" where they did in fact attempt to rebrand from Coca-Cola the actual brand to "Coke" in addition to the formula change.

The brand kinda succeeded, as everyone calls is Coke, even though ti is actually Coca-Cola Classic and Coke is dead because the Coke formula was terrible tasting

oneeyedpigeon8• 3 years ago

Tbf, although I pretty much disagree with everything about Musk's approach to life, I kinda buy this. However, I think that should go hand-in-hand with the twitter trademark being released and usable by a service that approximates the original. Maybe Jack Dorsey would snap it up and save us from the appallingly bad name that is "Bluesky".

snowwrestler5• 3 years ago

Yeah, we understand the new thing he wants to build. We just think it was stupid to start by spending $44 billion on a globally recognized product, IP, and customer base and then throwing them all in the toilet.

thaufeki• 3 years ago

Not really, if you want your new platform to instantly become one of the most used websites in the world. Why should he care about twitter's brand name?

jacobsenscott• 3 years ago

Twitter is already as irrelevant as MySpace or usenet to anyone under 30. It is a dead brand walking. Renaming makes total sense.

brookst3• 3 years ago

He didn’t spend $44B on a globally recognized product, IP, and customer base. He spent $44B on his ego.

bonoboTP2• 3 years ago

He paid for the users and their network effect.

LargeTomato• 3 years ago

How can he build an everything app when he fired a good portion of the engineering team? He will need to hire more people which seems antithetical to his original plan. An everything app will cost a lot of money which is going to put Twitter in an even bigger hole.

jklinger410• 3 years ago

I would've simply rolled Twitter up into the larger X app. Tweeting being the method of communication for the X ecosystem.

I would have also waited to roll out the name until I actually had something to show for it. But what do I know.

nextlevelwizard2• 3 years ago

Oh, is this why I haven't been able to look at twitter links (without an account)?

philip1209• 3 years ago

Wasn’t x.ai some kind of meeting scheduling startup about ten years ago?

rexreed• 3 years ago

Yes. But then folks realized that the supposed-AI tool actually used people pretending to be bots: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificia...

X.ai was subsequently acquired in 2021 by Bizzabo: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/06/03/224127...

Bizzabo then shut down the X.ai tool: https://www.bizzabo.com/blog/xai-sunset

And then they sold the X.ai domain to you know who: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/14/23684005/elon-musk-new-ai...

dools• 3 years ago

Twitter's rebrand to X could also be a nightmare because it's fucking dumb.

Sosh101• 3 years ago

The letter X, brought to you today by Mr X (Elon Musk).

phpisthebest8• 3 years ago

This could have been soo much better.

Personally if he wanted to make an "everything app" I would have gone with making X an "exclusive" edition of twitter, i.e replacing twitter blue.

Twitter is a free app for the unwashed masses and X is the Exclusive App.... if you login to twitter with a X login you get the rebrand

Then add new features to X

NickC253• 3 years ago

Except he can't make an "everything app" because we're not in China. People don't want the "convenience" of being able to do everything in the same app because they rightfully fear monopolies and over-consolidation of major corporations, and they doubly fear the government and corporations creating a way-too-convenient method of collecting every detail, large and small, about one's life in a single app.

WeChat is what it is in China because it replicates (in a sense) how things are in Chinese society.

Also, X is fucking stupid.

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

Or he could have just renamed the company to "X" and left the current Twitter product as "Twitter." All his hypothetical fancy new stuff could get its own branding (or not) but he still gets the X. The "Twitter" branding could be subservient to the company branding.

Like Alphabet, or Meta, or Microsoft, or countless others...

It really seems he just wants to start fresh and kill the Twitter brand immediately regardless of the short term cost. It's a strange play indeed, and it's hard to guess why he wants to disassociate with the brand so strongly.

tenpies2• 3 years ago

It has provided me endless entertainment in meat space because I cross my arms to form an "X" every time I talk about X.

Tim Apples even saw this coming and had an emoji in place, Man Crossed Arms.

brigandish• 3 years ago

You're joking but still… that emoji is from Japan, where people use this sign to mean "not allowed" (だめ).

kvetching3• 3 years ago

This will not age well.

brookst3• 3 years ago

Yeah. I give it 12 months at most before Twitter goes back to being Twitter and X becomes some kind of guiding vision blah blah blah.

biftek• 3 years ago

Throwing away a brand almost everyone has heard of and verbs that have become common in spoken language because you own x.com is just incredibly stupid stuff. The guy is surrounded by yes men.

wtetzner2• 3 years ago

The guy is surrounded by yes men.

Or maybe he just doesn't care when people tell him "no".

ithkuil• 3 years ago

I think that "Y" would have much better name.

Alice: it's called Y

Bob: But why?

Alice: Yeah, Y

Bob: no, I mean, why?

Alice: Yeah, you heard right, Y.

...

snowwrestler5• 3 years ago

One interesting aspect is that trademarks have to be in use in order to be defended.

If Musk’s X moves away from the name “Twitter” and the bird logo as completely as they seem likely to, those will become essentially undefended trademarks that someone else could start using.

Want to found Twitter all over again?

There are ways (legal tricks) to rebrand while defending the old brand. But these require detailed legal advice, disciplined ops, and a will to do so. I’d say that it looks like Musk is lacking all three of those at X right now.

marvinblum• 3 years ago

This reminds me of Twix, which every few years or so brings out a "special" Raiders edition to defend the old brand.

Perhaps Musk will do something similar. He's definitely not going to give up Twitter, and even if he does, he'll keep the domain.

tenpies2• 3 years ago

And it's not just a trademark matter. I haven't looked in detail at how the Twitter acquisition was structured, but somewhere there's a spreadsheet with the words "goodwill" and next to those words there's a huge number reflecting what Musk overpaid for Twitter.

To simply stop using the Twitter brand, logo, and verb-ology would be a huge slap to that number, not that it really means anything financially.

See: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill.asp

rurp3• 3 years ago

he'll keep the domain

Unless the company forgets to renew the domain because everyone who would be responsible for that has quite or been fired. Not that I think this is at all likely, but God would it be hilarious.

eitally• 3 years ago

It would be hilarious, if 100% unlikely, if jack@ reclaimed the Twitter brand and renamed Bluesky into Twitter.

tsol• 3 years ago

Doesn't Musk like to say the funniest outcome is the most likely? People were happy on twitter when Jack ran it, he might as well take the reins back

max51• 3 years ago

it's really not as hard as you think it is. Companies are not limited to owning just one product with one branding. If removing a product from the shelves was all it took for others to be allowed to immediately steal all the branding you had on it, the tech world would be a lot more chaotic.

If not using it is a big deal (it's not, but let's assume it is), it doesn't require "detailed legal advice, disciplined ops" to put add logo on a webpage.

snowwrestler5• 3 years ago

it doesn't require "detailed legal advice, disciplined ops" to put add logo on a webpage.

It actually does, because the use has to satisfy the specific terms of the trademark, which might not be accomplished by just a logo on a random web page. And it has to stay there even in the face of internal pressure to “turn the page” on the old brand, or the general drift of focus/priorities over time.

This is one those things that is simple in concept, but can be deeply complicated by internal factors. I’ve got years of experience doing this.

Trademarks are like a ratchet; if you let them slip too far, it can be extremely difficult to turn them back. And things tend to slip if left unattended.

Edit to add: note that I also said “a will to do so.” It’s not even clear whether Musk will want to defend the Twitter trademark. Certainly doesn’t look like it so far.

noarchy2• 3 years ago

So is this how Elon Musk performs when there is no board of directors or shareholders to rein him in? Because this entire rebranding effort looks like something he woke up and declared on a whim. Zero coordination or planning.

xutopia• 3 years ago

It doesn't matter if it's a trademark nightmare... it's a branding nightmare.

Musk is showing the world that he got lucky with his previous ventures. His management of Twitter has been a display of poor management at every level.

If you were less than a year into your position as CEO of a company with revenue divided by half, ex-employees suing you, banned journalists from your platform in the middle of some half-thought-out free speech debate... would you not be fired?

Everything about this makes me think he's just too rich to be fired... anyone else would have been. He just owns too much to not be given any more chances.

PM_me_your_math3• 3 years ago

Luck is a term used by incompetent people to explain things that they don't understand.

beeftime9• 3 years ago

correct, the term he should have used is "con man"

xlix• 3 years ago

What term do competent people use to explain things they don't understand?

jmull• 3 years ago

Doesn't it seem obviously wrong to suggest that things beyond an individual's control cannot have a significant impact on them?

rsynnott• 3 years ago

From a financial point of view, the most consequential thing ever to happen to me was joining the right company at the right time. More or less total chance. Lots of people could say the same. (Though, some will give themselves an inappropriate amount of credit for it after the fact)

Luck (in a random chance context rather than a supernatural context) is real.

hn_throwaway_993• 3 years ago

Everything about this makes me think he's just too rich to be fired... anyone else would have been.

Don't really like this framing of the problem - he owns a majority of voting shares, and he paid (or, rather, overpaid) mightily for that right. You can't really be "fired" from being an owner, and I'll note Musk is no longer CEO (and, sure, you can argue the new CEO was hired to be the fall girl/glass cliff example, but that was still her eyes-wide-open choice).

People wrung their hands about Zuckerberg as well (he also has a majority of voting shares of Facebook), but in retrospect that hand-wringing looked premature, at least from a shareholder perspective - Meta is nearly back at its peak and has tripled its stock price from late 2022.

shuckles6• 3 years ago

I wonder if the lenders can push him out if/when Twitter stops making debt payments.

Dudelander3• 3 years ago

Don't really like this framing of the problem - he owns a majority of voting shares, and he paid (or, rather, overpaid) mightily for that right. You can't really be "fired" from being an owner.

This is basically what people mean by "too rich to fire". I don't think anyone is suggesting that if he wasn't a stakeholder, he'd keep his job solely because he had a lot of money. I think it fair to say that, if Twitter was a publicly traded company with a board of directors, Elon likely would have been fired by now. Or, at the very least, significantly reigned in.

amarant• 3 years ago

Is it possible he did a good job with his successful ventures, and a bad job with the unsuccessful ones?

I find it difficult to believe both SpaceX and Tesla was 100% pure luck and chance. Not even the devil is that lucky.

georgeg23• 3 years ago

SpaceX (at least) was a government venture, funded by DARPA and the CIA to enable a program that isn't too hard to figure out when you look at the people involved.

It's rather political, and debated within the clearance community. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

raphaelj2• 3 years ago

Musk took over Tesla a few months after the Model S got announced. By that time, one could expect that most of the development teams and roadmaps were well in place.

adventured2• 3 years ago

Every single thread where he's the topic, without exception, focuses at least in part on attempting to strip Musk of any accomplishment. He is allowed to have accomplished absolutely nothing. There must be zero redeeming value to his existence.

The extreme nature of the focused attacks on him today are fascinating to watch in terms of how angry, irrational mobs form on targets and attack until there's nothing left (and then they keep attacking, because some people are late to the party).

They attack his parenting.

They attack his business successes.

They attack his mental capabilities and rationality.

They attack his character.

They attack his family and background.

They lie about all of the above to whatever extent is necessary.

This goes on here, on Reddit, Twitter, wherever a discussion about Musk arises. The only difference between HN and Reddit on this topic is that HN is slightly more highbrow, although the same general attacks get repeated here as they do on Reddit.

Someone on Reddit yesterday was proclaiming that he "attached" himself to the SpaceX success and deserved zero credit for it. That rather nicely encompasses what's going on.

It's one of the biggest shit shows in the history of the Internet. It's embarrassing - as a human - to watch so many people desperately rolling around in the muck to participate.

JuanPosadas4• 3 years ago

Except paypal, most of his "successful ventures" are just buying established companies and branding himself all over them.

ActionHank• 3 years ago

My first thought when I saw it prior to hearing about the change was that the icon failed to load for some reason.

It just looks like an error or failure and completely out of place with the rest of the site.

mettamage• 3 years ago

Musk is showing the world that he got lucky with his previous ventures.

1 dud

A few successes

It's really hard to tell to what extent it's luck versus skill. It'd be much easier to tell if we'd live for 10K years and he'd have started like 50 companies. If even 10 of those would've become wildly successful, whereas the mean baseline of other people who started 50 companies would be maybe 1 or 2 companies, then I'd argue that he didn't only get lucky. I'd argue there's also a skill component to it.

shuckles6• 3 years ago

SolarCity, Hyperloop, and Boring Company are obvious duds as well.

It's hard to say how many duds he had in the aughts, since they're probably well-buried at this point.

Dudelander3• 3 years ago

I think you just have to look at the individual decisions he's made. For me, I keep going back to the time he made the Twitter employees literally print out their source code. (Not send a link to github repo, he made them physically print them out.) That is not something a competent leader would have asked for.

adastra22• 3 years ago

Who would fire him? He owns Twitter.

renewiltord2• 3 years ago

That's the thing with luck. It helps you when you succeed but it's your fault when you fail. Only the perfect are not lucky.

Patton? Luck merchant (Task Force Baum)

Eisenhower? Luck buffoon (kesserine pass)

Einstein? All luck (Cosmological constant, black holes perhaps)

With moronic clowns such as these it is truly a wonder that the Allies got anywhere.

Also, I think we should make it so if you own a company and it stops making money, it should be taken away from you.

digging4• 3 years ago

This is a weird comment.

Musk is showing himself to be, well, kind of stupid. We've seen him make moves that are obviously bad and didn't pay off. If you look a little bit deeper, you can see that he has a pattern of making bad decisions. He may also make some good ones, but isn't it more likely that "his" other companies (which he did not create) are succeeding despite him, not because of him? After all, many other smart and ambitious people work with him.

wtetzner2• 3 years ago

Musk is showing the world that he got lucky with his previous ventures.

Or maybe he's finally stretched himself too thin, isn't getting enough sleep, etc.

red-iron-pine2• 3 years ago

too many mountains of cocaine, not enough bi-polar medication, et al

"the howard hughes effect"

cameldrv• 3 years ago

SpaceX and Tesla certainly involve luck, but it's way more than that. A huge element of the success of both companies is Elon managing to hire extremely bright and extremely hard working people for both companies. A huge element of that was the extremely ambitious and cool nature of what they're working on.

Terretta• 3 years ago

You don't believe in the 𝕏 utopia?

ojosilva• 3 years ago

Quick recap of a rebranding mess:

- X axes a renowned, recognizable tech brand

- X was done hastily, without proper planning

- X won't be a dictionary word, hardly a verb, not anything cultural

- X means nothing really, like a branding "*", the algebra/programming x, even more generic than "meta" or "alphabet"

- X is another gazillion brands, logos and trademarks

- X is impossible to search

- X is so X-Rated

- X certifies that Elon is nuts and has no idea what to do with this acquisition

- Users are vowing to resist, refraining from using X whenever possible

But it DOES make sense in Elon's World:

- Twitter as we know it is gone anyway, so we might as well call it... X

- X is his SpaceX thing, his pre-PayPal made-me-rich thing, his fetish letter, his Rosebud

- X is like sex, like Tesla models S,3,X,Y - a cool "bro" brand, fits Elon Musk maturity level very well because sex sells (at least for cars and rockets it does)

- No need to search for X. Search is dead. X is the new search, especially once it becomes a (sentient?) AI [1] https://x.ai

- X creates user resistance, friction and backlash, which means it's polarizing and Elon only thrives in polarized ecosystems

- Polarization arouses the media so much it will have free press for a while

- It sounds like something out of a Marvel movie. Like a villain's world-threatening crime syndicate.

- "It's just X, just fucking X, it's really badass dude"

My take on this:

- Twitter had to rebrand anyway if it were to evolve into a disrupting Musk company - it made no sense to just be the old, stagnated Twitter minus headcount, moderation and ad revenue. Another logo or word by itself would not cut it or be up to the task. It had to be something in-your-face like... X.

- X stock will probably soar when it hits Wall Street (again). The marketing actually feels solid or at least more in line with his other companies, and definitely stronger than Alphabet and Meta's wishy-washy rebranding. Now X Corp needs to deliver new moneys, beyond the dwindling ad revenue to prove itself as a Google and Meta's worse nightmare.

helmsb• 3 years ago

Seems like the only people making money in this whole thing is the company hired to change the sign every other week when Musk decides to make a joke or do a sudden rebrand.

unlikelymordant• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, even the sign company is having troubles: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23140317/twitter-sign-sf-...

adamsmith1432• 3 years ago

What?? You mean Elon made another colossal mistake, bbbut hes such a business genius...

PM_me_your_math3• 3 years ago

I enjoy reading the expert opinions of all the main characters who don't even have a basis point, let alone a fraction, of the man's net worth.

adamsmith1432• 3 years ago

Yeah so hard to make money during the Dotcom boom with all your dad's apartheid emerald mine money.

How does his boot taste?

dorkwood• 3 years ago

I do think it's important to look at a person's past accomplishments when deciding whether to listen to them or not. I'd even say it's the most important thing. But is there a line where a person's present actions start to outweigh their past successes?

beeftime9• 3 years ago

famously, no one with a lot of money has ever made a bad business decision

beeftime9• 3 years ago

blowing up one of the single most recognizable brands in the entire world so you can indulge your puerile obsession you have with the letter "x" and drive the 44bn albatross you were forced to buy because of your inability to watch your mouth even deeper into unprofitability is world-historic business genius mindset. you guys wouldn't understand.

azraeldv• 3 years ago

what if every alphabet is within their trademark jurisdiction, then our capitalism is basically doomed.

mwidell• 3 years ago

Most people would probably agree that Musk made some very bad and rookie-looking decisions since acquiring Twitter. Also he has said a lot of very controversial things in the last 1-2 years.

Before that he arguably was a lot more well respected as an entrepreneur - keeping a lower profile and building a couple of extremely successful businesses in parallel.

My big question that I’m still searching for an answer to: Did he drastically change as a person in the last couple of years? Or was he just “lucky” to build SpaceX and Tesla into tremendous successes? Or is he still a genius and all of us simply can’t see how he’s making Twitter into the next big success in his CV?

If he did change as a person - why? What happened? Bad breakup? Drug abuse? Depression? Too much self confidence? Too much stress for too long? Something else?

imoverclocked• 3 years ago

I think he’s upset that he was forced to buy the company and is actively running it into the ground.

heywhatupboys• 3 years ago

blatantly wrong

the_optimist4• 3 years ago

I will argue with your statement that “he was respected as an entrepreneur.” It is arguable, and this weasel word forms the basis for your subsequent argument. It’s wrong. The question is “respected by whom.” I do not believe that anyone who respected him for entrepreneurship beforehand now disrespects him as an entrepreneur.

I do believe that people who marginally understood his work but have vested interests in the existing structure, including “news” orgs, reporters, political hacks, and direct competitors, have tried to create controversy and confusion around Musk.

Of course this would be expected to happen, and those gossipers and murmurers who can be influential will be among the uninformed.

phillipcarter• 3 years ago

I do not believe that anyone who respected him for entrepreneurship beforehand now disrespects him as an entrepreneur.

You can count me in that bucket. I didn't like some of what I heard from Tesla, mostly about the working hours. But I genuinely believe he was driven by a desire to do Hard Stuff that traditional organizations refused to do, and inspired a lot of smart people to come along and try to make stuff happen.

Now I'm convinced he's just a drug addict, or the drugs have done enough damage to his brain over time that it's noticeable now.

raphaelj2• 3 years ago

I fail to understand how these could have been the results of vested interests from existing structures, and not Musk's questionable behavior:

- insulting a kid saving cave-diver a pedo;

- getting into a buying agreement with Twitter's shareholders, as a "joke";

- repeatedly asserting that FSD is a solved problem, and will be production ready in 6 months, for 6 years;

- repeatedly claiming to be free speech, but continuously enforcing politically backed censorship over Twitter;

- refusing to pay Twitter' suppliers.

digging4• 3 years ago

There is no change you should be looking for. This is who he is, and it doesn't take a lot of digging to see it. You, like most of us, just weren't looking closely at what he was doing before the last couple years.

jcranmer• 3 years ago

It's been clear for a while that Musk has had these sorts of issues. There's the infamous pedo guy incident stemming from Musk's unwanted attempts to help in the Thai cave rescue. Before then, there were quite a few reports during the early ramp up for Tesla Model 3 about several of Musk's bad ideas re car production. There were also several reports that SpaceX was only as successful as it was because it had a COO who could insulate the company from Musk's antics.

So it's been clear for at least a half dozen years or so that a successful Musk company needs a team to manage Musk and keep him from unnecessary interference in the company, but it may have required paying more attention to what he did. What changed when he bought Twitter is that he is now articulating a vision that is far less comfortable for many people ("stop banning fascists" is rather less inspiring than "I want to live on Mars"), and also, many of the failures of his micromanagement are far more visible to the general public on a large social media platform than a low-volume rocket or (at the time) auto manufacturer.

agentgumshoe• 3 years ago

As Rain Falls said in RDR2: "People don't change, they just become more of who they really are."

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Go read about the first X.com/PayPal debacle.

This is not the first time he's done this... stuck his fingers in, shouted at people, pushed his weight around, and Dunning-Kruger'd something to the point of failure. In that case, the board turfed him, and Peter Thiel fixed the problem.

He's grinding on an old (20+ years) obsession, down to the name of the 'product'.

As I said about this yesterday, Musk's success was a product of the economic situation from 2008->2022, when interest rates were insanely low, QE/stimulus was going crazy, Silicon Valley profits sky high and endlessly growing, and investors were willing to throw money at stuff like this.

With rates higher, investors will have other places to put their money, debt is more expensive, and people like Musk will find themselves standing naked on the beach as the tide goes out.

lesuorac3• 3 years ago

It's akin to Rudy Giuliani [1]. Musk was always this way but it wasn't the fore-front when everybody was enthusiastic about electric cars.

It's similar to the quote "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=mXQuto1fMp4

xeromal• 3 years ago

Word on the street is that Grimes got him into some serious drugs that has amplified his behavior.

ergonaught• 3 years ago

Bizarre that Zuck and Musk and I suppose "Goog" can have these spasms of inability to understand branding. Bezos needs a fit of it so we can rename Amazon to, uh, Fwoop. Why not.

honeybadger1• 3 years ago

He's done just fine considering all of the fud pieces spread by mainstream outlets and hacker news comments that are mostly lies and only part of the available information about him and his companies.

The salt amongst engineers / developers that are not working for his companies should be a thing of study, methinks it's mostly driven by jealousy.

Looking forward to what comes from all this 𝕏 stuff.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

I'm looking forward to the martial arts combat between Musk and Nadella now.

politelemon• 3 years ago

Poorly titled and I'm surprised nobody is calling it out. The body of the article shows that there is an entire minefield of trademark issues with several companies and entities to navigate, but the blame is being placed solely on MS' feet as though they should have known, 20 years ago, what Twitter would be doing today. A better one might be Twitter’s Rebrand Is A Field Of Nightmares.

Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft

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