Elon Musk’s ex may have removed the Twitter name, but he doesn’t want anyone else to use it.
The social media company, formerly known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware on Tuesday against a startup called Operation Bluebird, accusing it of trademark infringement over a plan to revive the Twitter brand.
Musk buys Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. About a year later, the company was rebranded as X. Now, however,
The lawsuit follows Operation Bluebird’s announcement last week that, after “12 months of quiet work”, it had filed an application to claim the Twitter trademarks. The startup also submitted a petition to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seeking to cancel
That petition repeatedly cites Musk’s post of July 23, 2023, published just before the rebrand.
“And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand, and gradually to all the birds,” Musk wrote at the time.
Operation Bluebird now says it plans to launch a new social media platform on Twitter.new. Its website already allows users to reserve handles, and the company claims about 150,000 people have signed up.
However, In making this argument, the company also acknowledges that large parts of the Internet still think of the platform as Twitter.
The company wrote in its complaint, “Each day, more than four million users access the
For its part, Operation Bluebird says it is confident of winning the case against X.
“X legally abandoned the Twitter mark, publicly declared the Twitter brand ‘dead’ and spent substantial resources establishing a new brand identity,” the company told Gizmodo in an email statement. “Our cancellation petition is based on well-established trademark law and we are confident that we will be successful.”
Ax did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
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