Twitter is on its way to becoming the “X” altogether. The name and iconic bird logo have been removed from the company’s San Francisco headquarters and the blue bird at the top of twitter.com has been replaced by an “X”. While the new logo was reacted by many users, research began on it. So much so that this decision taken by Twitter could cause big troubles in legal and financial terms.
Twitter has set a new logo, what are the problems it can open?
Elon Musk said this change is more than just the name. It wants to turn the service formerly known as Twitter into an “everything app” that includes banking and financial services. However, this rebranding could present new economic challenges to the company, which has been grappling with problems since advertising revenue fell more than 50 percent.
First, there are hundreds of companies, including Microsoft and Meta, that have trademarked for the “X” variants. This could open the door to lawsuits and other legal headaches for Musk. Shubha Ghosh, a law professor at Syracuse University, says it’s “pretty common” for lawsuits to arise when large companies rebrand and change their names and logos.
Trademark attorney Josh Gerben said he counts about 900 other companies that have trademarks on “X”. This makes “X” an easy target. The company could easily spend hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees and settlement costs as it tries to obtain trademark registration for the new logo and deals with potential lawsuits arising from this change.
For the same reasons, it turned out that it might be difficult for Twitter to use the new X logo internationally. So much so that for all the services Musk intended to provide, the chances of successfully registering a trademark for ‘X’ in every country he wanted to provide them turned out to be very slim. So even if it solves these problems in the US, it’s very difficult to have an “everything app” around the world.
Even if Twitter can overcome legal challenges, it’s also not clear that there are serious business risks in removing a brand as globally recognized as Twitter’s. Some analysts have estimated that the name change could wipe out billions of dollars from a brand that has already been damaged by Musk.
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