A new Twitter launches mid-trademark fight

Operation Bluebird just stood up Twitter.now — a paid, early-access social network built around the claim that Elon Musk’s X walked away from the bird brand. X already sued to keep the marks. A Delaware judge has floated, but not written, doubts about whether those marks still belong to X. The fight is now live product versus live lawsuit.

Virginia-based Operation Bluebird, with former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates on the founding team, petitioned the USPTO in December 2025 to cancel X’s “Twitter” and “tweet” marks. X sued in Delaware the same month, arguing the brand is “alive and well.” In April 2026, Judge Colm Connolly tentatively suggested from the bench that X may have abandoned “tweet,” the bird logo, and possibly “Twitter” — with no written order yet. On Aug. 26, Coates told Ars Technica the company would wait no longer. Twitter.now launched with familiar replies and retweet-style mechanics, a Gemini-based “Vera” fact-check layer, a $20 early-access fee, and only hundreds of users so far.1234

Backers point to Musk’s 2023 “bid adieu to the Twitter brand” line and the judge’s April comments. X’s complaint says a rebrand is not abandonment. Trademark lawyer Josh Gerben called the launch “chutzpah.” On X, the Ars post cleared about 1.4 million views when checked — a snapshot, not a ranking — while skeptics joked about a rival still promoting itself on X.

Reporting: Ars Technica · Reuters USPTO · Reuters lawsuit · TechCrunch

The three quoted X posts are an illustrative sample, not a poll. Times shown in the images are UTC.