Twitter took over @X account without paying previous owner
Elon Musk has taken over the Twitter account @X without paying the previous owner. Twitter was recently renamed to X. The former owner of the account said he had initially not heard of the platform and wanted to sell the account.
The former owner of the @X account, American photographer Gene confirms to British newspaper The Telegraph that the account was taken over without being paid for it. Twitter implemented its rebrand from Twitter to X on Monday, but had not contacted Hwang until recently. The photographer said he was willing to sell the account to the platform.
The @X account name has been adopted
Hwang received an email from X on Tuesday informing him that he would lose the account name. “They did send an email saying it’s essentially owned by X,” the photographer told the British daily.
Hwang says he was offered X merchandise. He is also allowed to meet with the company’s management, but he has not received any financial compensation for the account. It is not known whether he accepted those other offers. Hwang’s account name has now been changed to ‘@x12345678998765’. The user then wrote ‘all’s well that ends well’ in a tweet.
Twitter users cannot derive any legal rights from their username, The Telegraph notes. The platform’s terms and conditions state that usernames can be removed if trademark violations are violated. It is not known whether Musk owns the rights to X, although he does own the URL x.com, which now refers to the former Twitter.
Single-letter Twitter account names were only allowed to be created in the first months of Twitter’s existence. In the past, such account names have been sold for tens of thousands of euros, writes The Telegraph. User @n reportedly received $50,000 for their account.
Alls well that ends well