No one reached out to him or contacted him regarding the same.
In a rather rushed campaign, Elon Musk renamed the social media network Twitter as X on Monday and unveiled a new logo for the social media platform, a stylized black-and-white version of the letter. Twitter also changed its official handle to @X as part of the ongoing rebranding, while the original @Twitter handle is now inactive.
However, it now turns out Mr. Musk took over the @x Twitter account without paying its owner, Telegraph reported. Gene X Hwang, co-founder of event photo company Orange Photography, said he had been willing to entertain a sale of the @x account, which was registered in 2007, but he simply received an email on Tuesday saying that the account was being taken over by the company.
''They did send an email saying it is the property of ‘x' essentially,'' he said. However, no one reached out to him or contacted him regarding the same.
He told The Telegraph: “They just took it essentially – kinda what I thought might happen.”
Though he was offered some X merchandise and a meeting with the company's management, he was not offered any financial incentive.
While Twitter users have no legal rights over their usernames, the company's terms of service say it will only remove people's accounts in cases of trademark infringement. Mr. Hwang had signed up for the Twitter account in 2007, a year after the platform launched.
Meanwhile, the company has moved Mr. Hwang's account to a new handle called “@x12345678998765”. On Wednesday morning, he wrote: “All's well that ends well.”
Notably, the rebranding could also be complicated legally as companies including Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.
"There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.
Mr Musk is seeking to make X into a “super app” that features not only Twitter's existing social networking and messaging features but also payments and banking as well as video.