Does Microsoft own the letter 'X' trademark?

We didn’t think it was possible, but Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter took an even stranger turn this week after he rebranded the social media platform to “X” out of the blue.

It turns out Musk has been obsessed with naming things after the letter all his career, but it still came as a big surprise that he decided to change the name of an internationally recognised brand overnight to something that sounds more like a porn site or gentleman’s club.

The logo is a pretty generic graphic, which replaced the famous blue Twitter bird after Musk crowdsourced ideas from users last weekend.

It’s left people with more questions than answers at this point – one of them surrounds the issue of Microsoft and potential disputes over the letter “X” as a trademark.

“X” is pretty common in names of companies and organisations and the likes of Meta and Microsoft reportedly have intellectual property rights around the letter “X”.

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In fact, as Reuters reports, the likelihood is that Twitter – now "X" – could well face legal action over the name change.

"There's a 100 per cent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben.

According to Gerben, there are close to 900 active U.S. trademark registrations surrounding the letter “X”.

Microsoft does indeed have an X trademark which it’s held since 2003. However, it’s related to communications about its Xbox video game system.

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Meta Platforms also owns a trademark for an “X”, which is related to software and social media.

According to Gerben, the two companies are unlikely to sue over the Twitter name change unless they believe the move encroaches on their brand equity.

Douglas Masters, who is a trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb, said [via Reuters]: "Given the difficulty in protecting a single letter, especially one as popular commercially as 'X', Twitter's protection is likely to be confined to very similar graphics to their X logo.

"The logo does not have much distinctive about it, so the protection will be very narrow."

Social media user Keith Edwards posted on the topic by uploading a screen grab of Microsoft’s 2003 patent for “X”, writing: “Microsoft owns the trademark for X. This is just too good.”

A community note was added to the post which read: Microsoft only holds this trademark for videogame-related services; this wouldn't affect Twitter.

“However, Meta holds the ‘X’ trademark for ‘online social networking services... social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming and application development…’”

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