Elon Musk. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Elon Musk’s X sued a start-up on Tuesday after it sought to cancel X’s Twitter trademarks so it can “bring Twitter back” as a new social media platform.

X said in the lawsuit in Delaware federal court that its Twitter brand is still “alive and well” and “not ripe for the picking”, and that Operation Bluebird’s attempt to “steal” the name constituted trademark infringement.

“Our cancellation petition is based on well-established trademark law and we believe we will be successful,” Bluebird founder Michael Peroff said in a statement in response to the lawsuit. “We are prepared to take this as far as we need to in order to achieve our goal.”

Spokespeople and attorneys for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.

Musk bought Twitter for US$44-billion in 2022 and rebranded the social media platform to X. He said in a 2023 social media post that the company would “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.

Virginia-based Operation Bluebird asked the US Patent and Trademark Office on 2 December to cancel X’s federal “Twitter” trademarks, arguing the company had abandoned them. Bluebird said that it wanted to use Twitter-related trademarks for a rival platform called twitter.new, and separately applied to register its own “Twitter” mark.

The petition was filed by Stephen Coates, a former Twitter trademark lawyer who now serves as Bluebird’s general counsel.

‘Continues to persist’

X told the Delaware court on Tuesday that it had not abandoned its Twitter trademark rights and that the brand “continues to persist in many ways”. The company said that millions of users still access the platform through twitter.com, users and businesses continue to refer to it as Twitter, and X still maintains and enforces its Twitter trademarks.

“Twitter is one of the world’s most recognized brands, and it belongs to X Corp,” the lawsuit said. “Simply put, a rebrand is not an abandonment of trademark rights.”