A Delaware judge let X lock down the old name. The rival walks away with the bird and the verb everyone still uses.
Elon Musk spent years trying to kill the Twitter brand. This week a federal judge told him he only half succeeded.
U.S. District Judge Colm F. Connolly granted X Corp. a preliminary injunction against Operation Bluebird’s use of “Twitter.” He refused to block the word “tweet” or the blue bird logo. Hours later the startup renamed its service Tweet.app and kept flying.
The split that matters
X sued Operation Bluebird in December 2025 after the Virginia startup filed to cancel X’s Twitter and Tweet registrations. Bluebird argued Musk abandoned the marks when he rebranded the company in 2023 and posted that he would “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
Connolly agreed on two of three fronts. X still prints “formerly known as Twitter” in its Apple App Store listing. That parenthetical, the judge wrote, makes it unlikely Bluebird can prove X dropped the core name. Eight Twitter-formative marks stay locked for now.
The bird and “tweet” were different. Neither appears on the current X app listing. Musk’s own posts about cutting the logo off the building with blowtorches counted as “compelling evidence” of intent not to resume use. Vendor emails X offered as proof of continued use were undated and solicited services, not customers. The judge denied the injunction on those two marks.
Who is Operation Bluebird?
Stephen Coates, a former Twitter trademark lawyer, leads the company. It launched a waitlist as Twitter.now in late August, charging $20 to reserve a handle. More than 172,000 people signed up before the ruling. Handles and founder numbers carried over after the rename.
“They kept the word. They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet,” Coates said after the order. The site now lives at tweet.app. It pitches a “public square rebuilt on trust,” with an AI layer called VERA that scores claims and lets users set their own filter thresholds. The company says it is not affiliated with X.
Why this is not over
The order is preliminary. X must post a $500,000 bond. The case, X Corp. v. Operation Bluebird Inc., No. 1:25-cv-01510, continues toward trial in Delaware. Bluebird still has a cancellation petition pending at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. It has said it will keep fighting for the Twitter word itself.
X has not issued a detailed public comment on the split. Its lawsuit called Bluebird’s plan a “heist” of a brand that “never left.” Millions still type twitter.com. People still say “tweet.” That everyday language is exactly what the judge treated as abandoned commercial use.
What users actually get
Tweet.app is in early access. The product is a browser social feed with verification tools, not a clone of 2018 Twitter. Whether a $20 founding membership and a recycled bird can pull people off X, Threads, or Bluesky is a separate question from the trademark fight.
The ruling does something simpler. It draws a line through one of tech’s messiest rebrands. X owns the name on paper. The bird and the verb now belong, at least for this phase of the case, to the company that picked them up off the floor.
AI Disclosure: This article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools and was reviewed and edited by the Glowls News editorial team before publication.