Elon Musk Is So Incapable That Twitter Doesn’t Even Own the “X” Trademark

Elon Musk has tried to whip up excitement for his decision to rename Twitter, but it looks like he may only be whipping up legal challenges, as nearly 1,000 other companies have already trademarked the new name.

Musk announced Sunday afternoon that he was rebranding Twitter to “X,” and true to form, the rebrand has not gone well. The new website URL kept redirecting to a hosting platform instead of the homepage, and people are saying that they don’t intend to use the new name anyway. Musk also didn’t get permits for street equipment to remove the “Twitter” sign from the company’s San Francisco headquarters, so city police shut down the project before it was completed.

And now, it looks like Musk will have to prepare for a legal battle over the new name. There are hundreds of trademarks on the letter X for business logos.

“There’s a 100 percent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” trademark attorney Josh Gerben told Reuters. Gerben said he counted 900 active U.S. trademark registrations for the letter X across multiple industries.

Two of those trademarks belong to Microsoft, related to its Xbox gaming system, and Meta, which owns Twitter rival Threads. Neither technology titan is likely to sue Twitter, according to Gerben, but there are still 898 other companies that could.

It will also be hard for Musk to defend any exclusive claims to the letter X as a logo, because the letter is so popular for branding. (The new X logo is also near impossible to differentiate from several porn sites.) So he’s actually diluted Twitter’s brand power by trying to change the name.

Musk seems to have a great affinity for the letter X, perhaps more so than other people. He had previously insisted on using the name “X” for what would become PayPal, a sticking point that led to internal disagreements and reportedly contributed to his ousting from the company in 2000.

He has included it in the name of his rocket design company, SpaceX, and even named one of his sons “X.” It seems that X is rapidly becoming Musk’s personal brand—and as it turns out, it’s not even that original.

The DeSantis team is facing blowback after reports that a campaign staffer over the weekend shared a video of the presidential candidate with a Nazi symbol.

The short clip, reportedly first posted by the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account, shows a “doomer” looking unhappy as he reads news stories on things like Donald Trump’s inaction on immigration, his promotion of Covid-19 vaccines, and his support for the LGBTQ community.

Then DeSantis enters (through an eerily small doorway), and the doomer is happy.

Images of the Florida governor are spliced together with alligators, rockets, and women in bathing suits, in a bizarre compilation reminiscent of another very bad DeSantis campaign ad released earlier this month.

But one scene caught a lot of people’s attention: an image of DeSantis, a Nazi symbol interposed over the Florida flag, and soldiers marching toward it.

The far-right circular symbol is known as a “sonnenrad,” a symbol co-opted by Nazis in their attempt to claim an “Aryan heritage.” Today, it’s often found in white supremacist literature and the manifestos of far-right mass shooters.

And apparently, it’s also found in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter deleted the video shortly after reports that a campaign staffer who regularly engages with the account reshared the video.

Florida Democrats pounced on the news, noting that DeSantis “has been given every chance to denounce neo-Nazis and what they stand for, and he refuses to do it. His administration has already attempted to rewrite the history books on slavery—is the Holocaust next?”

Florida Representative Maxwell Frost also attacked DeSantis. “When I first started calling [Ron DeSantis] a fascist, I got blowback from folks in both parties,” Frost tweeted. “Now, he’s being so overt about it that people are coming around.

“Calling DeSantis a fascist isn’t hyperbole, it’s defining what he is.”

Last week, Florida’s Board of Education approved new academic standards for African American history in public schools, requiring middle schools to teach students how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis has defended the move.

Also on Sunday, The New York Times reported that the DeSantis campaign had created that bizarre, homophobic video from earlier this month—but planted it in a fan account so it wouldn’t seem like the campaign was actually behind it. That report led people to wonder if the campaign did the same thing again, but this time with a video including a very large Nazi symbol.

The far right is constantly warning that if you go woke, you’ll go broke. But when it comes to the new Barbie movie, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Barbie, which follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbie Land to explore the real world, earned a whopping $162 million in its opening weekend, Variety reported Monday. This is the biggest opening weekend of the year, and the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever.

The film had already made $22.3 million at the domestic box office from Thursday previews, the biggest preview haul of the summer. It blew the previous record of $17.5 million (made by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in May) out of the water.

Barbie has consistently made double the take of Oppenheimer—which opened opposite it and spawned the “Barbenheimer” meme—which made $10.5 million in previews and $82.4 million over the whole weekend.

All of this success comes despite conservatives trying their absolute hardest to smear the film as propaganda, either woke or Chinese. Far-right activists Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro slammed the film for featuring a transgender actress and dismantling gender norms (Shapiro was roundly mocked online for his review).

Representative Matt Gaetz and his wife went to the movie premiere, after which Ginger Gaetz declared the film highly skippable because it “neglects to address any notion of faith or family” and features “disappointingly low [testosterone] from Ken.” Some film critics have branded Barbie “anti-man.”

Other Republican lawmakers waded in, insisting the movie shows Hollywood is just a tool of the Chinese Communist Party. In one scene in Barbie Land, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

China has used the nine-dash line to mark its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Over the years, Beijing has tried to claim sovereignty over 90 percent of the region. Even though The Hague ruled in 2016 that China has no legal basis for its claims, the country has pressed on, building military installations on otherwise uninhabited islands in the sea. Republicans insisted that the shot was a clear indication that Barbie is just Communist propaganda.

But given Barbie’s explosive success just on opening weekend, it would seem all these far-right efforts simply are not Kenough.

Elon Musk has rebranded Twitter to “X.com”—but it seems a lot of people can’t actually make it to the new website.

Musk announced Sunday afternoon that “X.com” would redirect to “twitter.com” and unveiled a new logo for the rapidly tanking website. He had previously insisted on using the name “X” for what would become PayPal, a sticking point that led to internal disagreements and reportedly contributed to his ousting from the company in 2000.

Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017, and apparently has been saving it for this momentous occasion (his site crashing and burning before our very eyes).

Much like everything else since Musk took Twitter’s reins, the rebrand rollout has not exactly gone smoothly. Ryan Mac and Brian Merchant, the tech reporters for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times respectively, both tweeted that X.com actually redirected them to GoDaddy, a domain-hosting platform.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey also experienced the website malfunction. When he tweeted about it, a current Twitter employee blamed the problem on the domain name system, or DNS. Supposedly, X.com’s data storage system was showing old data to some users.

The only problem is, that was Sunday night. Users who type “X.com” into the URL bar are still being directed to GoDaddy on Monday afternoon.

Musk has not commented further on the issues. He has said he wants X to be “the everything app,” but it’s pretty hard to be someone’s everything when nothing works.

As presidential hopeful Tim Scott slowly edges up in the polls, his 2024 opponents are gearing up to attack one of the only Black candidates for being soft on crime.

Republicans have increasingly insisted the United States is falling into a state of lawlessness, with violent crime on the rise and Democratic leaders unable or unwilling to do anything about it. (Violent crime has actually gone down in the past six months.) Many GOP candidates at all levels of governance are promising to be “tough on crime.”

Scott has actually been a big champion in Congress for police and criminal justice reform, making him a prime target for accusations of being soft on crime. He co-sponsored the First Step Act in 2018, which reduced some mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related charges and also allowed some people already incarcerated to request shorter sentences.

The South Carolina senator also pushed for police reform in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who was arresting him. Scott introduced the JUSTICE Act, which would withhold federal funding from local police departments until they changed their operating policies. (The bill went nowhere.)

Still, his little action on police reform seems like it will become fodder for his Republican rivals. Some Republican presidential candidates are already attacking the First Step Act. Ron DeSantis said in May he would want to repeal the law, while Mike Pence tried to be cute and said he wanted to “take a step back from the First Step Act.”

Except … DeSantis voted for an early version of the act in 2018, when he was still a Florida representative in Congress. Pence also championed the legislation while serving as vice president. And current Republican front-runner Donald Trump signed the act into law. So if this is the point they’re going to use to try to take down Scott, they all may want to look in the mirror.

Meanwhile, Scott may actually have sabotaged a bipartisan police reform measure so he could seem tough on crime during his presidential campaign. Excerpts released in June from Washington Post writer Ben Terris’s book The Big Break reveal that Scott worked with Democratic Senator Cory Booker to craft legislation in 2021. Shortly after Booker’s staff gave Scott a copy of the bill, it was leaked to the National Sheriffs’ Association.

“With the Sheriffs’ Association as a shield, Scott rejected the offer,” Terris wrote. “Even though the bill would have added millions of dollars to police department budgets, he accused Democrats of wanting to ‘defund the police,’ something that almost no one in Congress had been saying for months.”