One year after the disastrous Twitter rebrand to X, things still aren’t going great. Aside from the social media platform’s problems with bots and fake news, the X logo itself continues to cause controversy.
To recap, Musk announced in July last year that he would rebrand Twitter to X overnight if someone could knock up a logo in a couple of minutes (see our Twitter logo history). Someone delivered the goods by putting a unicode character on a black background, and the X logo was born.
The first problem was that other people were already using it. And then neighbours didn’t take kindly to being blinded by an enormous illuminated X on the roof of the company’s headquarters. Then a company called X Social Media complained that X was stealing its trademarks.
Now a Virginia-based PR firm called Multiply has filed a lawsuit in California claiming that it has been using ‘X’ branding since 2019 and that it owns a federal trademark on an ‘X’ logo. It says that branding of the former Twitter has already caused confusion among potential clients. It’s seeking unspecified monetary damages and wants the court to ban X from using its logo.
A Multiply spokesperson told Reuters that Musk had “shamelessly stole the established identity of our social media and PR agency” and that the company “had no choice but to defend our mark and fight Twitter in court.”
As the CEO of two companies, executive chairman of a third and a man intent on colonising Mars with offspring named after Transformers, Elon Musk doesn’t have a lot of time to think about branding or graphic design. And yet these two things keep coming back to bite him. The Tesla logo looks like an RUD, the Cybertruck logos are illegible and SpaceX stole a goat from a small Scottish football club.
For more logo design news, see the new Mazda logo and the new DC Comics logo.
