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Can You Trademark a Letter?
It feels like a stupid question. Indeed, you would roll your eyes and shake your head at the idea. Completely ludicrous. Until Elon Musk decided he wanted to own X. Can he just do that?
Breaking the rules seems to come as natural to Musk as it does to Trump. That’s where the likeness ends though. Well, one more thing, the overinflated self confidence. Which is what eventually will break both, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back to the incredulity of ‘trademarking’ a letter. Who in their right mind would replace a well regarded household name like Twitter with a single letter? Twitter, in addition to being established and recognized all over the world, had the very desirable (and rare) property of lending itself well to both verbification and nounification. We used to tweet and share/save/like tweets all the time. You simply cannot X easily, can you? Or refer to an X? Like “The police just Xed about the incident.” It just sounds — well, weird. That’s why people keep referring to ‘tweets’ on X. And to ‘tweeting’, even after the name-change.
Did Musk lose? No, he won. He now de facto owns the letter X. And he needs no law to support his ‘claim’. Even states and governments back off. There is simply too much money, too much power behind it — and too much risk in challenging it. Political, financial or both.
It obviously fits into Musk’s broader scheme: SpaceX, X.com (the bank), xAI — for now. To many of us, it still looks like a bad move, but that’s besides the point.
It’s a powerplay, and Musk won while we — the world — lost. Because the next time some bigshot comes around and claims a letter, what do we do? “Sorry, you’re not as badass and powerful and rich as Musk, so forget it”? Doesn’t work. We’re hosed. In a few years we may be Aing with P using K and G while listening to F, eating Z — and sharing on X.
Makes sense? I don’t think so either. Yet here we are. Unless we collectively dump the s…hole X has become. Send a message.
Originally published at https://mindset3.org on June 10, 2024.
