- Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as “X” this week.
- Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta already appears to have a trademark for an “X” logo.
- Musk’s new logo for “X” also resembles a Unicode character and a Monotype font.
Twitter may have hit a snag while rolling out its new logo — it seems like Meta already holds the rights to it.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, announced that the platform will now be called “X,” but 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.”
Twitter’s new logo, which was rolled out Monday, also resembles a generic Unicode character known as “mathematical double-struck capital X” that was added to the Unicode in March 2001.
(Unicode is an international computing standard in which every character or symbol has a specific numerical value that can be used across platforms.)
Matthew Scroggs, a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London, tweeted that the character has “been used in mathematical text books since the 70s.”
The symbol doesn’t have a specific, universal use, but it’s sometimes used to denote an abstract geometric space or object.
The new logo is also nearly identical to the lowercase “x” in the Monotype font “Special Alphabet 4.”
This story is developing. Check back for updates.