Gene X Hwang knew his days on Twitter as @x were numbered.

“Elon had been kind of tweeting about X previously,” Hwang said. “So I kind of knew, you know, I had an inkling that this was going to happen. I didn’t really know when.”

Since 2007, Hwang’s username on the site was @x — but after Elon Musk renamed the social media platform to X earlier this week, it was only a matter of time before the company commandeered the handle.

The news came shortly after Hwang had competed in a pinball tournament in Canada. "So when I landed and fired up my phone, I just got all these messages and I was like: ‘What is what is going on?’ "

Hwang received an email from the company explaining that his account data would be preserved, and he’d get a new handle. It offered Hwang merchandise, a tour of its offices and a meeting with company management as compensation.

Hwang’s account is one of the latest casualties in the chaos following Musk’s takeover of the social media company. On Monday, Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo was replaced with the letter “X.”

The rebrand is the company’s next step in creating what Musk has called “the everything app.” Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino envision the platform becoming a U.S. parallel to WeChat — a hub for communication, banking and commerce that’s become a part of everyday life in China.

But experts are skeptical X will be able to become an “everything app.” “I’m not sure he has enough trust from his user base to get people to actually exchange money or attach any type of financial institution to his app,” Jennifer Grygiel, a professor at Syracuse University, told NPR.

Hwang is among those who have been looking for Twitter alternatives. “I’ve been checking out, you know, other options like Threads and Mastodon and Bluesky,” he said. “I’m still on Twitter for now, but … it’s changed a lot. So we’ll see how much longer I’m on there.” Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

  • I think we agree legally it’s fine, but I still disagree and think it’s ethically fine. Companies realize putting their point of contacts on third party services is risky and should be mitigating that.

    Like a company should have their own email domain rather then Gmail. There are things you can digitally own, like the domain name itself because you purchase it and then have a contract with it.

    If Twitter acted as a service where you buy your profile and make an agreement, that would be unethical at that point, and also illegal. Twitter users shouldn’t be under the impression they perpetually own their account handle, they haven’t paid anything and simply claimed it through a signup or username change. That’s not comparable to say, buying a domain, where that would be extremely unethical and pretty sure illegal. Also impersonation is bit of a funny topic to bring up with Twitter right now lol, considering how messed up the verification is.

    I would agree with you if social media services were treated as like a utility and usernames were contracted as such. Which I actually do wish was a thing, it’d be a much healthier ecosystem with much stronger protections. But that’s a different topic.

    • For whatever their other faults, companies like Google and Microsoft are very reliable and a very low risk.

      X formerly known as Twitter is very unreliable and a huge risk. There’s a reason it’s hemorrhaging advertisers right now. It’s a poor business decision.

      I think it’s fine for Musk to make poor business decision. I don’t own any stock in any Musk companies. It’s Musk’s free market right to make bad business choices that drive users and advertiser and businesses away. That’s the beauty of the free market. Businesses will find a better place to do business.