Delaware court blocks X rival from using Twitter name, allows "Tweet"

A federal court in Delaware has issued an interim ruling in a trademark dispute between Elon Musk’s X Corp. and Operation Bluebird, a startup seeking to launch a competing social network under the name Twitter.

The court barred Operation Bluebird from using the Twitter name, granting X’s request concerning its primary trademark. At the same time, Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly preliminarily found that X had likely abandoned two other related marks — the word “Tweet” and the original blue bird logo. As a result, he declined to issue a preliminary injunction preventing the startup from using those marks, according to foreign media reports.

Following the ruling, Operation Bluebird renamed its website Tweet.app and opened the platform to users for early testing. The company said more than 172,000 people had applied to reserve usernames before the launch. Users are charged $20 to reserve a username and join the social network.

Under the court’s interim ruling, the ban on using the Twitter name remains in effect, while X has received temporary protection for eight Twitter-related trademarks. The “Tweet” word mark and the blue bird logo are not covered by the prohibition. X’s ultimate rights to the disputed trademarks will be determined in further proceedings.

Operation Bluebird is led by attorney Michael Perloff, the founder of the Illinois-based startup, and Stephen Coates, a former Twitter trademark lawyer. On its homepage, the company says it aims to reclaim the marks that X, in its view, abandoned after changing Twitter’s name to X.

“They kept the word. They let the bird go, and they let Tweet go. A tweet was never a corporation – it was one person expressing themselves. The word survived three years of the company trying to replace it because people did not want to stop using it. We believe that shows who it belongs to," Coates said.

The court’s ruling is not final. Further proceedings will determine whether X ultimately retains rights to the disputed trademarks after abandoning the Twitter name and switching to the X brand.

By Tamilla Hasanova