Delaware judge blocks startup from using Twitter name but frees Tweet mark

A split ruling in Delaware

A federal court in Delaware has barred a startup rival from using the Twitter name, while clearing the way for it to use two other trademarks that Elon Musk's X Corp is likely to have abandoned.

According to TechCrunch, US District Court Judge Colm F. Connolly issued a split decision on X's request for a preliminary injunction against Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup that had launched a rival social network under the name Twitter.now. The judge granted the injunction covering eight Twitter-related marks, blocking the company from using the Twitter name itself. But he denied the injunction for the Tweet word mark and the Twitter bird logo.

In his opinion, the judge wrote that Bluebird was likely to succeed in proving that X Corp had discontinued bona fide use of the Tweet mark and the Bird logo and did not intend to resume using them.

The startup relaunched as Tweet.app

The consequence was immediate: the startup rebranded its website as Tweet.app and opened it to the public. The company told TechCrunch that more than 172,000 people requested a handle before launch — demand TechCrunch attributes largely to the lasting affinity people still have for the Twitter brand, a name the company can no longer use. Tweet.app is charging users $20 to reserve a handle and join the network, which TechCrunch notes likely helps cover its legal bills.

A venture run by trademark lawyers

Operation Bluebird was founded by Michael Peroff, a lawyer based in Illinois, and its president is Stephen Coates, who previously worked as a trademark lawyer at Twitter. Given those backgrounds, TechCrunch questions whether the pair are genuinely building a new social network, suggesting the venture looks more like an attempt to acquire valuable trademarks that X gave up when it rebranded. The startup's own homepage frames its mission as going back to pick up what Musk dropped when he renamed the platform X — and, as the site puts it, threw the bird away on his way out.

In an announcement shared with TechCrunch, Coates argued that X kept the word it renamed itself with but let go of both the bird and the tweet. A tweet was never a corporation, he said — it is one person saying something — and the word survived three years of a company trying to replace it because the public declined to stop using it. In his view, that shows who the word belongs to.

The case is not over

The ruling is a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment. According to TechCrunch, the case will proceed to determine whether X ultimately retains rights to any of the Twitter marks, given that the company now goes by X in most places.

Why it matters

The decision is an early signal that trademark rights can lapse when a company stops using even extremely famous marks. If the final judgment confirms that X abandoned the Tweet mark and the bird logo, those assets could effectively pass to a third party — an unusual outcome for brand equity on this scale.

For X, the injunction protects the Twitter name for now, but the broader question of what remains of the trademark portfolio it discarded during its rebrand is unresolved. For everyone else, the episode is a reminder that brand value can outlive the brand itself: years after the switch to X, a six-figure queue of users still lined up for a handle on a site whose main claim to attention is a familiar name.