Elon Musk faces trademark battle over X rebrand

Elon Musk might have been hoping that people would have accepted Twitter's new name by now. However, the most controversial rebrand of the year continues to be a headache for the company's CEO.

It turns out that there's a surprising number of businesses called X out there. And there's even a company called X Social Media that's not happy about Twitter's new name (see our pick of the best social media platforms for artists if you're looking for alternatives).

X Social Media says it sent a cease and desist letter to Musk's X in August. X refused to desist and so the company, which helps clients with advertising on Facebook and Instagram, is taking things further. 

In a complaint to the US Patent and Trademark Office, it says it has been using its branding “exclusively and continuously” since 2018 and that the Twitter rebrand has caused it “serious irreparable harm” and a loss of revenue, not least as a result of falling down in Google search results.

Visually, the two X brands don't look much alike. Musk's crowdsourced X logo features a generic unicode character that would be hard to trademark. X Social Media’s logo shows a stick man holding up the scales of justice. I'm not quite what that has do with social media, but the company apparently began life focusing on mass torts. 

However, X Social Media's representatives, the law firm of trademark attorney Josh Gerben, stresses that it is registered in the same business segment as the other X (the Twitter one) in the “social media, business data, promotion and advertising, business consulting, market research services and advertising services” categories. Most amusingly, the news comes just weeks after an amateur football team accused another Musk's Space X of stealing its logo design.