Elon Musk’s X may have dropped the Twitter name, but it doesn’t want anyone else to use it.
The social media company, formerly known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Delaware against a startup called Operation Bluebird, accusing it of trademark infringement over plans to revive the Twitter brand.
Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. About a year later, the company rebranded as X. Now, however, X is arguing in court that “the Twitter brand is alive and well, owned by X Corp., and is not ripe for the picking.”
The lawsuit comes after Operation Bluebird announced last week that, following “12 months of quiet work,” it had filed an application to claim the Twitter trademark. The startup also submitted a petition to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seeking to cancel X’s trademarks for “Twitter” and “Tweet,” arguing that Musk’s rebrand amounted to an effective abandonment of the “storied brand” with no intent to resume its use.
That petition repeatedly cites a July 23, 2023 post from Musk, published just before the rebrand.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote at the time.
Operation Bluebird now says it plans to launch a new social media platform at Twitter.new. Its website already allows users to reserve handles, and the company claims nearly 150,000 people have signed up.
X, however, is trying to block what it calls an attempt to steal and co-opt the reputation and goodwill associated with the Twitter brand, which X says it paid billions of dollars to acquire. In making that argument, the company also acknowledges that large parts of the internet still think of the platform as Twitter.
“Each day, more than four million users access the X platform through the TWITTER.com domain; users around the world continue to refer to the platform as TWITTER and posts as TWEETS; consumer- and client-facing webpages continue to use each of the TWITTER Marks; third-party licensees continue to display the TWITTER logo,” the company wrote in its complaint.
Operation Bluebird, for its part, says it’s confident it will win this 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 emailed statement. “Our cancellation petition is based on well-established trademark law and we believe we will be successful.”
X did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
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