According to engadget, X, the social media platform owned by xAI, has updated its terms of service as of January 16, 2025, to explicitly forbid anyone from using the “X name or Twitter name” or related trademarks without express consent. This move is a direct response to a startup called Operation Bluebird, co-founded by former Twitter general counsel Stephen Coates, which filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel X’s control over the Twitter and Tweet trademarks. Operation Bluebird argues that X has “eradicated” and abandoned the storied brand, and it plans to use the trademarks for its own new social media platform located at twitter.new, which has already convinced over 145,200 people to claim handles. The company’s counterpetition, detailed in legal documents like this one, insists the trademarks remain its “exclusive property,” despite Elon Musk’s own July 2022 post where he said, “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
Brand Abandonment Blues
Here’s the thing: Operation Bluebird has a pretty solid legal argument on the surface. Musk was incredibly public about killing the Twitter brand. He tweeted it, then he did it—replacing the bird with an X everywhere. In trademark law, if you stop using a mark with no intent to resume, you can be deemed to have abandoned it. That’s the core of the startup‘s petition. But X has one giant, blinking neon counter-argument: twitter.com. The fact that the iconic domain still redirects to X.com is a huge piece of evidence that they haven’t fully severed the connection. It’s a lingering thread to the past, and now they’re pulling on it hard in their legal defense.
Why Bother Now?
So why is X suddenly amending its terms of service to mention a brand it supposedly ditched? Fear. Pure and simple. 145,000+ sign-ups for a potential competitor using the old, beloved name is nothing to sneeze at. It shows there’s still massive residual goodwill and recognition for “Twitter.” Musk might have thought the X rebrand was a visionary leap, but to much of the world, it’s still “Twitter.” This legal scramble proves that inside X, they know the Twitter name still holds immense residual value—value they might need to leverage if the X experiment continues to falter. They’re trying to have it both ways: publicly champion a “everything app” future while legally clinging to the social media past that actually defines them.
A Ghost of Platforms Past
This whole saga is a bizarre case study in brand management. You can’t just loudly declare a globally iconic brand dead and then get mad when someone else wants to bury it properly—or resurrect it. Operation Bluebird, led by an insider who knows the company’s legal playbook, is essentially calling Musk’s bluff. And look, even if X wins this legal fight and keeps the trademarks locked in a vault, what have they really won? They’ve spent billions to buy a platform, then worked tirelessly to dismantle the very brand equity that made it valuable. Now they’re spending more time and money in court to protect assets they publicly trashed. It’s a deeply weird, costly circle. The real question is: does any of this actually make the platform better for users? Probably not. It’s just another distracting sideshow.
