Elon Musk-led Twitter on Monday underwent a complete transformation as the billionaire accelerates his efforts to turn the microblogging platform into an “everything app”.
To start off with, the beloved Twitter logo and the iconic bird symbol were replaced with a white stylized “X” on a black outer space-themed background. Also, Twitter was rebranded to “X,” and the official handle was changed from @Twitter to @X, which made the original @Twitter handle defunct.
However, the social network’s ongoing rebranding has not gone down well with the original owner of the @x account Twitter handle, Gene X Hwang.
He claims that the Musk-owned company took over his account as part of the rebranding without warning or financial compensation.
Hwang, a photographer from San Francisco and co-founder of event photo company Orange Photography, had owned the @x handle since 2007 and has over 53,000 followers on the social media site.
Previously, Hwang had said he would be willing to sell the @x account to Musk, as the rebrand was certainly going to happen. Instead, the photographer received an email regarding the handle change on Tuesday, informing him that his account was now their property.
“They just took it essentially – kinda what I thought might happen,” Hwang told The Telegraph.
Hwang said he had been offered new X merchandise and an exclusive meeting with the members of the rebranded social media company but no financial compensation.
“They did send an email saying it is the property of ‘x’ essentially,” said Hwang, adding that no one contacted or reached out to him regarding the same.
“When it all started happening, I thought maybe something cool would come out of it. In a way it was kind of like the fantasy of a winning lottery ticket. You buy the ticket and there’s some hope that maybe you’ll win something, but you also know that’s probably not going to happen,” Hwang told in a statement to The Business Insider.
Hwang also added that people said he could likely get a Tesla Model X or a ride on a SpaceX rocket out of it.
“Some amount of money or compensation doesn’t seem like it would be too big a deal for them. I definitely would have accepted something for it, but I also wasn’t trying to extort money or anything like that,” he said.
Meanwhile, Twitter has moved Hwang’s account to a new longer handle, @x12345678998765, from where he tweeted on Wednesday, “All’s well that ends well.” His posts and followers have also been transferred to the new account.
Alls well that ends well
— x (@x12345678998765) July 26, 2023
According to Twitter’s terms of service, Twitter users have no legal rights over their usernames, as it only mentions that users’ accounts will be removed in case of trademark infringement.
Musk had formerly announced the rebranding of the social platform on Sunday.
As part of the transformation, he replaced his own Twitter profile avatar with a white X on a black background and posted a picture of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Monday.
Meanwhile, typing domain ‘X.com’ is redirecting the users to ‘twitter.com’. The company has already changed its business name to X Corp.
