Twitter abruptly took the @x username from the guy who originally had it. Read the email he was sent offering an 'exclusive visit' to Elon Musk's rebranded X HQ.
Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- Twitter rebranded to X this week, and is changing all its official accounts to match.
- One user had already registered @x — but he says the company abruptly took it from him.
- The owner of the handle, Gene X Hwang, said he'd been willing to trade it.
In its rebranding efforts, X — formerly known as Twitter — abruptly took over one of its user accounts with the handle @x on Tuesday night.
The original owner of the handle, Gene X Hwang, told Insider he received an email regarding the handle change and was given the much longer handle @x12345678998765. He'd owned the @x handle since 2007 and has since generated over 53,000 followers on the social media site.
Hwang, a photographer from San Francisco, said he'd been open to the idea of trading the handle, but X didn't end up providing him with any financial compensation for it.
"When it all started happening, I thought maybe something cool would come out of it," Hwang said. "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 added that people had told him he could possibly 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," he said. "I definitely would have accepted something for it, but I also wasn't trying to extort money or anything like that."
The email from X, which was viewed by Insider, said the user handle "is affiliated with X Corp" and Hwang had been given a different handle as a result. His posts and followers had also been transferred to the new account. The Telegraph was the first to report on the issue.
The company told Hwang they would provide him with "X merch and an exclusive visit to X's HQ to meet members of our team." Though, Hwang said he's already visited the company's headquarters years ago with a friend and would be more interested in Twitter-related merch than X-branded material.
Courtesy of Gene X Hwang
The social media company's owner, Elon Musk, announced the company was rebranding over the weekend and ditching its iconic blue bird logo for a simple "X."
As well as continually evolving its new logo, the company has been changing the names of its official accounts on the platform. Though, the company's main account took a bit longer because Hwang had already registered @x.
Social media users began noticing the then-private account @x was changing its bio to "!!!" and "Oh" as the X logo began popping up all over the site earlier this week.
"He must be scared for his life," joked one tweet with nearly 200,000 likes.
"All's well that ends well," Hwang tweeted on Tuesday night after his account was changed.
In the past, users on the site formerly known as Twitter have been able to sell their handles for thousands of dollars on the black market. The practice violates the company's username squatting policy which does not allow users to buy and sell handles on the site. The owner of another single-letter account, @n, said in 2014 that they had been offered $50,000 for the name before they were hacked and lost the account, Gizmodo reported.
Hwang faced a similar hack in 2014 but was able to regain control of @x, he wrote on his blog.
One company account yet to change its name is @TwitterMovies — which could be linked to the fact that several users have joked that the name X sounds more like a porn website.
—slweeb ????????️???????? (@slweeb) July 25, 2023
What's more, taking over the @x handle appears to be the least of the social media's rebranding woes. The company's rival, Meta, also holds the rights to a trademark for the "X" logo — an issue that could cause more head aches for Musk's company. And the company's efforts to switch out its Twitter sign at its headquarters were foiled by police on Monday night after the San Francisco Police Department said they responded to "a possible unpermitted street closure," though later determined it wasn't a police matter.
A spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.