Elon Musk has once again found himself in controversy due to the new Twitter logo he recently launched, called “X.” The city of San Francisco has filed a complaint and started a probe into the large “X” symbol that was placed atop the city’s building on Friday, which was previously known as the Twitter headquarters.
City officials claim that changing letters or symbols on buildings or placing any signs on top of structures requires permits for design and safety reasons.
The “X” came into the picture when San Francisco police prevented workers from removing the prominent bird and logo of the brand from the building’s edge on Monday, stating that they hadn’t taped off the sidewalk for pedestrians’ safety in case anything fell.
The establishment of this symbol requires a review and approval of the plan. Patrick Hannan said, “The city is opening a complaint and initiating an investigation.”
Musk replaced Twitter’s famous Blue Bird logo with a new “X” logo, as he had remade the social media platform he bought last year for $44 billion. The “X” started appearing on Twitter’s desktop version on Monday.
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, has been attracted to the letter “X” for a long time, and after purchasing it in October, he had already changed the corporate name of Twitter to “X Corp”. One of his children’s name is “X”, and the child’s actual name is a collection of letters and symbols.
Mask (referring to Elon Musk) has repeatedly used the letter “X” in his companies as well. He co-founded x.com in 1999, which later became PayPal. In 2017, he repurchased the domain x.com from PayPal, stating it had “emotional value.”
The domain x.com now redirects to Twitter.
Rebranding Twitter as “X” could be legally complicated as the letter “X” is commonly used and trademarked by other companies like Meta and Microsoft, who already possess intellectual property rights related to that letters.