Elon Musk’s X Loses Ground in Twitter Trademark Battle as Tweet.app Goes Live
A federal court in Delaware has delivered a mixed ruling in a closely watched trademark dispute involving Elon Musk’s X and a startup looking to build a social network around parts of the old Twitter identity.
The startup, Operation Bluebird, initially tried to launch under the name Twitter.now. X challenged the move, arguing that the company was infringing on trademarks tied to Twitter. The court agreed with X on the central “Twitter” brand, blocking Operation Bluebird from using Twitter.now.
But the ruling did not go entirely in X’s favor. The court found that Operation Bluebird is likely to succeed in arguing that X abandoned two major pieces of the former Twitter brand: the word “tweet” and the iconic bird logo. That decision allowed the startup to move forward under a new name, Tweet.app, which has now opened to the public.
Operation Bluebird is based in Virginia and appears to be built around a very specific mission: reclaiming parts of the Twitter brand that were left behind after Elon Musk renamed the platform X. The company’s messaging makes that goal clear, presenting itself as an effort to pick up what Musk discarded during the rebrand.
The project is being led by two lawyers, including founder Michael Peroff and Stephen Coates, a former trademark lawyer at Twitter. Their legal backgrounds have raised questions about whether the company’s primary goal is to create a new social network or to secure valuable abandoned trademarks connected to one of the internet’s most recognizable brands.
Still, Tweet.app is now accepting users in early testing. Before launch, the company said more than 172,000 people had requested a handle, showing that there is still strong public interest in the language and culture of Twitter, even after the platform officially became X.
Users are currently being charged $20 to reserve a handle and join the new social network. That fee may help fund the company’s operations, including the ongoing legal fight with X.
The court ruling is not final. U.S. District Court Judge Colm F. Connolly issued a split decision on X’s request for a preliminary injunction. X wanted to stop Operation Bluebird from using several Twitter-related trademarks that the startup claimed had been abandoned after the rebrand to X.
The judge granted X’s request for a preliminary injunction on eight Twitter-related marks. However, he denied the request as it related to the “tweet” trademark and the Twitter bird logo.
In the opinion, the judge wrote that Operation Bluebird was likely to prove that X had stopped making legitimate use of the “tweet” mark and bird logo, and that X did not intend to resume using them.
That finding could become important as the case moves forward. The larger legal question is whether X still owns meaningful rights to parts of the Twitter brand after publicly moving away from them in favor of the X identity.
Coates, now president of Operation Bluebird, framed the ruling as a key moment in the battle over Twitter’s cultural legacy.
“They kept the word. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet,” he said in a statement about the rebrand. “A tweet was never a corporation. It’s one person saying something. That word survived three years of a company trying to replace it, because the public declined to stop using it. We think that tells you who it belongs to.”
For now, X has successfully stopped the startup from using the Twitter name itself. But the fight over “tweet” and the bird logo is far from over. If Operation Bluebird ultimately wins, Tweet.app could become one of the most unusual social media launches in recent years: a platform built not just on new technology, but on the abandoned language of one of the internet’s most famous brands.
