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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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".
Readit News
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixer_(service)
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.
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I see lawsuits ahead.
Apple owns X with OS X and the iPhone X.
Microsoft own Xbox's logo, with the console, store, game pass
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.
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.
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.
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I find it difficult to believe both SpaceX and Tesla was 100% pure luck and chance. Not even the devil is that lucky.
It's rather political, and debated within the clearance community. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
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.
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.
It's hard to say how many duds he had in the aughts, since they're probably well-buried at this point.
It just looks like an error or failure and completely out of place with the rest of the site.
Or maybe he's finally stretched himself too thin, isn't getting enough sleep, etc.
"the howard hughes effect"
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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.
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.
Luck (in a random chance context rather than a supernatural context) is real.
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
WeChat is what it is in China because it replicates (in a sense) how things are in Chinese society.
Also, X is fucking stupid.
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.
Tim Apples even saw this coming and had an emoji in place, Man Crossed Arms.
Or maybe he just doesn't care when people tell him "no".
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.
Musk can't trademark the letter X and he can't trademark an existing font letter.
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.
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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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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).
Which also happens to already be a porn site…
Quite. It's pretty big corp 101 to sort this shit out as a rebrand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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
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
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I would have also waited to roll out the name until I actually had something to show for it. But what do I know.