Musk’s blow torch post is why X just lost the Twitter bird logo

On 22 July 2023, Elon Musk posted that X would “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” The next day he said the company was taking blow torches to the Twitter logo on the building. Three years on, both posts have cost him a trademark.

Chief Judge Colm Connolly ruled on 3 September that X keeps the Twitter name. It has probably given up the word “tweet” and the bird logo. His opinion, filed in the District of Delaware, runs to 31 pages. It turns, repeatedly, on what Musk said in public.

The case is X Corp. against Operation Bluebird, a startup set up to claim the marks Musk discarded. X sued it in December 2025. Days earlier, on 2 December, Bluebird had filed its own applications for “TWITTER” and “TWEET” with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

What X kept, and what it cost

X won on eight marks, the group Connolly calls Twitter-formative. It won them on a single clause sitting in the Apple App Store.

The X app listing opens: “Welcome to X (formerly known as Twitter), your trusted digital town square.” Naser Baseer, a legal director at X, testified that the company added that parenthetical deliberately. The point was that anyone searching for Twitter would find the X app, and grasp that it was the same platform.

Connolly took the admission at face value. X is still trading on Twitter’s goodwill, he found. Survey evidence the company filed itself showed the mark remains well-known, commercially strong and famous with the American public. Bluebird is blocked from the name until the case is decided.

The judge pointedly declined to rule on whether twitter.com redirecting to x.com counts as use too. He did not need to reach it.

The bird went because Musk said it would

On “tweet” and the bird logo, X had nothing the court would take. Connolly wrote that X does not meaningfully dispute that Bluebird will establish an intent not to resume using them. It could not credibly do so, he added, given the July 2023 statements. Musk’s posts predate the litigation, which made them more probative than anything X’s witness said at the hearing.

X never withdrew the trademark applications it inherited. The patent office granted it the TWITTER FLIGHT marks in August 2023. It granted the TWEET mark on 30 April 2024, nine months after Musk announced the brand was going. Registration is not use, and under the Lanham Act only use keeps a mark alive.

The remaining evidence was 12 web pages. Four contain neither the tweet mark nor the bird logo at all. Of the eight that do, three carry a date. The oldest was made in 2012. The newest is a blog post from March 2023. That was the month X acquired Twitter’s assets, four months before Musk’s posts.

Baseer said X kept those pages up deliberately. Connolly did not credit it. Baseer could not name a single occasion when such a decision was taken, and X produced no documents supporting him. The pages are “remnants of prior use,” the judge wrote.

A deposition that did not help

X also pointed at the legacy Twitter app, saying more than 200,000 people still keep it on their phones. It produced nothing to substantiate the figure. There was no evidence in the record that X still distributes the app at all.

“I don’t know what a push update is,” Baseer said at his deposition. He was being asked how software companies send updates to users. He also could not say when X last shipped a version of the app carrying the bird as its icon.

A brand-guidelines argument went the same way. X said third parties use the marks under guidelines that keep the goodwill with the company. Baseer then admitted X has never licensed the Twitter marks to anyone.

One vendor email made it into the record, sent in October 2025 with bird-logo attachments. Connolly found it redacted past usefulness, sender and recipient both unknown, and said its purpose was recruiting suppliers rather than selling X’s services.

The bond, and the arithmetic behind it

The injunction on the Twitter name only takes effect once X posts a $500,000 bond. Bluebird had pushed for far more, projecting ten million users in its first twelve months.

Connolly called the projection pure speculation. Bluebird collected 150,000 sign-ups between December 2025 and May 2026, largely through press coverage of a trademark cancellation filing. It gave the court no reason why that scales to ten million.

So the judge did his own sum. X submitted an average revenue per user of $0.84, taken from the earliest public figures for Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit. Applied to 150,000 sign-ups, that is $126,000 of lost revenue. The bond is close to four times it.

Neither side wants this over quickly

The oddest line in the opinion sits near the end. Connolly has repeatedly offered to try the case on an expedited basis. X and Bluebird jointly asked for a trial in November 2027, and have still not taken him up on it.

That leaves the name frozen for another 14 months at least. Bluebird has already renamed twitter.now to Tweet.app, built on the two marks it won. “They kept the word. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet,” Bluebird president Stephen Coates said in a statement to Ars Technica, which reported the ruling first.

Bluebird is running on Musk’s slogan too

The new homepage is aimed squarely at one man. It says the richest man alive bought the town square, renamed it, and threw the bird away on his way out. Early access costs $20 to join and $40 to what the site calls fight. The pitch ends: “No trillionaire.”

One line goes further. Among Bluebird’s stated principles is “freedom of speech, protected. Freedom of reach, earned.” That is a rewrite of the moderation doctrine Musk himself introduced at Twitter in 2022, freedom of speech but not freedom of reach. The startup is running on his slogan as well as his logo.

More than 172,000 people have requested a handle at $20 each, the startup told TechCrunch. Bluebird is run by two lawyers, one of them a former trademark lawyer at Twitter.

None of this is happening to a healthy platform. X is ending revenue sharing for creators this month. It has rebuilt its Android app from nothing after years of neglect.

The company has pushed users towards X Money, its payments product. Musk’s Wikipedia rival, Grokipedia, quietly stopped updating in April.

A court has separately upheld a verdict that Musk defrauded Twitter investors during the takeover. The bird is not the only thing he has lost this year.

Bluebird has one problem the coverage has skipped. In a footnote, Connolly found it forfeited the right to contest consumer confusion, having given the question one page of a 23-page brief and never mentioning the ten-factor test the Third Circuit applies. That is the argument it will need in November 2027.