Earlier today we reported on the rebranding of Twitter to ‘X’ and the chaos caused by Musk and his multiple shenanigans since he took over the app in October of last year. Turns out, there’s even more chaos arising.

Turns out, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has already registered an “X” logo in connection to “online social networking services” and “social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development.” 

Furthermore, the new X logo, which was rolled out only this Monday, also resembles a generic Unicode character known as “mathematical double-struck capital X” that was added to the Unicode international computing standard in March 2001. In addition, the character had “been used in mathematical textbooks since the 70s” according to Matthew Scroggs, a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London.

Both cases – Meta and Unicode – present trademark issues for Musk’s plans moving forward. Trademarks are what lawyers call “source identifiers” — a symbol or branding that customers associate with a company. Josh Gerben, a trademark lawyer who is a founding partner at the D.C.-based law firm Gerben IP, said a logo needed to be unique and distinctive in some way to be trademarked with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
“My first thought is how much value is probably tied into the Twitter brand, and the bird logo, that has been cast aside,” Gerben told Insider. “Because it’s exceptionally rare that any brand becomes so pervasive in culture and quite frankly, around the world, as Twitter has become.”