Turns out Elon Musk isn’t as creative at coming up with company names as we previously thought, as his obsession with the letter X is getting him into some legal trouble. A Florida ad agency for law firms is suing the billionaire’s company over trademark infringement.
Reuters reports that the agency, X Social Media LLC, filed the lawsuit in Florida federal court, arguing that Musk rebranding Twitter to X was grounds for customer confusion. The agency argues that it has consistently used the federally registered trademark X SOCIALMEDIA since 2016, which has led consumers to associate the agency with social media. The lawsuit claims that the ad agency has also invested upwards of $US400 million and alleges that X Corp violated Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices.
“As ‘X’ is a social media platform, consumers naturally conflate ‘X SocialMedia’ as an X Corp.’s social media platform,” the lawsuit argues. “X Social Media has already suffered loss in revenue that correlates with X Corp.’s rebrand and use of the mark ‘X.’ It is highly probable this reverse confusion will continue to X Social Media’s financial detriment and to the detriment of the consumers who use and benefit from its services.”
There are apparently 900 U.S. trademark registrations on “X” in a wide variety of different industries. Microsoft, for example, has a trademark on X for its Xbox video game console and related platforms, and has owned that trademark since 2003. Twitter/X competitor Meta also has a trademark on X for a software and social media logo. While X Social Media LLC has just filed its lawsuit against X Corp for infringement, this legal limbo could serve as an example for other companies holding similar trademarks to follow.
Elon Musk officially took over Twitter last October, and this past April, court filings revealed that Musk was transitioning the company name from Twitter Inc. to X Corp. The platform itself eventually became known as X after the URL twitter.com began redirecting to x.com this past summer. Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted some word salad to the platform following the rebrand, claiming that “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity” and will be “powered by AI.” Yaccarino, however, has also been forced to clean up the mess left behind by Musk’s bid to create a website for everything, with the CEO calling the rebrand a “liberation from Twitter.”