Why Meta May Stop Elon's Twitter Rebrand

Twitter is in the middle of an identity makeover. Elon Musk, who spent $44 billion to buy the social media platform, has renamed the company "X" after its parent X Corp. The X logo is already live on the Twitter home page in the form of a black badge and even on third-party platforms like LinkedIn. But as the company is busy scrubbing the legacy Twitter insignia from its headquarters, it might run into a trademark battle with none other than Meta — a company that itself faced trademark-related legal action after its own major rebrand.

Although the design illustrations don't look identical, both Meta's and X's brand identity representation is derived from the same letter. Meta filed its trademark back in 2017, way before Musk decided to drop $44 billion to purchase Twitter with the ultimate goal of turning it into an everything app called X. 

So far, neither party has announced any intentions to meet in court over the "X" trademark. However, the two companies don't have any fondness for each other, especially at this moment, as they are now direct competitors thanks to Threads — in fact, their respective founders recently expressed intentions to duke it out in a cage fight, so that tussle is brewing, too.

According to a trademark filing submitted before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Meta's "X" design is a stylized derivative that consists of two arrows — one in blue and the other in white — facing each other to create the letter X. Twitter's version is a pair of parallel lines diagonally crossing a single line to create the "X" silhouette. It's difficult to confuse the two, as even the background colors are dissimilar.

But it's the type of services that the logo is intended to cover that could open the floodgates to a legal battle. Meta's patent filing notes that the logo could be used for services like "game content, digital media, images, music, audio, video, movies and animations." While that may sound like an overarching coverage for a lot of products, it's the subsequent sections that could become the point of contention. 

Meta declares that "X" could also be used for "online social networking services; online social networking services, namely, facilitating social introductions or interactions among individuals; social networking services" — or, in simple terms, your typical social media platform, like X, Threads, Instagram, and TikTok. Moreover, the trademark's status is listed as "Active," which means Meta can deploy it for its own products whenever it desires. Meta, however, doesn't hold the rights to the letter X in and of itself.

But that's not where the "X" logo similarities end. Unicode, an internationally accepted encoding system that assigns a unique number to each character, also has an essentially identical "X" in its database with the codename U+1D54F. Unicode describes it as a "Mathematical Double-Struck Capital" that is based on the letter X. Moreover, many noted that Musk's new Twitter branding is also similar to the "X" in the Monotype foundry as part of its Special Alphabets 4 font library, though Monotype's Creative Director Phil Garnham clarified later on that it's not the same, according to The Financial Times.

When Insider reached out to Twitter ("X"), the company reportedly replied with an automated message stating that its communications department would issue a statement soon. It should be noted, however, that Musk dissolved Twitter's communications department soon after acquiring the company, and every press request following that has received a poop emoji in response. In light of that, it's not clear whether X will make good on its promise and issue an actual statement about the matter. Neither Meta nor Microsoft has commented on the matter at the time of writing.

Microsoft, just like Meta, filed a trademark representing the letter "X" more than two decades ago in 2000. This one could be problematic for X. Talking to The Messenger, trademark lawyer Linda Joy Kattwinkel indicated that X Corp would need to make the argument that its own services (offered under the X brand) are sufficiently different from those offered by Microsoft. While Musk may not face any trademark heat from the folks over at Monotype, it's Meta and Microsoft that could ultimately prove problematic for the billionaire.

In the notoriously fickle world of trademarks and brand identity, logo and name similarities quickly snowball into court drama if they are used for promoting products in the same domain. For example, Starbucks famously went after brands like British Columbia's HaidaBucks and a coffee shop in Oregon called "Sambucks" over the use of "buck." Meta's Facebook also went to war with an online community for teachers called Teachbook in 2009 over the use of "book" in the name.

https://t.co/bOUOek5Cvy now points to https://t.co/AYBszklpkE.

Interim X logo goes live later today.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023

Musk said on the platform formerly known as Twitter that the current Unicode-like "X" is merely an interim logo, indicating that its design will be updated at some point in the future — likely in a direction dissimilar from existing designs. That would only address half of the problem, however, as the company would still be operating under the X brand, and only time will tell whether Meta — or any other company — decides it's unhappy about that.