X Things That Have Already Gone Wrong on X, the Social Network Formerly Known as Twitter

Months after quietly doing away with Twitter Inc. and reregistering the company in Nevada as X Corp., owner Elon Musk has kicked off the process of transforming and rebranding the bird app into an “everything app” named after his favorite letter: X. After beaming the new logo onto Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters early Monday morning, the company deployed construction equipment to remove the “Twitter” letters affixed outside the building—but, because the company didn’t get the city’s permission to change this signage, the San Francisco Police Department arrived to shut the ongoing removal down, leaving the letters “er” on the HQ. As Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu reported in the New York Times, throughout Monday, “X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to words with X in them, including ‘eXposure,’ ‘eXult’ and ‘s3Xy.’ … Workers also began removing bird-related paraphernalia, such as a giant blue logo in the cafeteria.” It didn’t stop there; Mac later tweeted additional updates on how Twitter was “trying to remove all bird-related paraphernalia,” starting with “a 10-foot tall blue bird logo from the cafeteria.” Not that this was so easily accomplished—Mac further mentioned that “someone tried to remove a logo from the security desk of San Francisco HQ and failed, leaving a broken bird that’s still attached to the furniture.” Another metaphor alert! Yes, I said hundreds—one legal attorney informed Reuters that he’d found “nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.” Some of these trademark owners include: • Microsoft, for video gaming purposes related to the Xbox ; • Meta, for “online social networking services” ; and • X Japan, a beloved rock band that’s been performing in its home country since the 1980s. I have stuck by that promise, but since I still have the ability to view pending Community Notes not visible to the public, I couldn’t help but share a few of the suggested, otherwise-invisible Notes regarding the X rebrand that have popped up under posts from Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino, among others: Like I noted in my Notes piece, Twitter users often used the feature to express their extreme displeasure with Elon Musk whenever something goes wrong with the site.