Musk renamed Twitter as X on Monday and unveiled a new logo for the social media platform, a stylized black and white version of the letter.

Trademark owners who protect trademarks, logos, and slogans that identify the origin of goods may allege infringement if other marks are misleading to the consumer. Resources range from indemnification up to blocking of use.

Microsoft has owned the brand since 2003. X associated with messages about your Xbox gaming system. Meta Platforms, whose Threads platform is a new competitor to Twitter, owns a federally registered trademark covering the letter in 2019. blue-white “X” for areas including software and social media.

Meta and Microsoft probably wouldn’t have sued if they didn’t feel threatened by Twitter infringing on the brand value they built on writing, Gerben said.

Three companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Meta itself ran into intellectual property issues when it changed its name to Facebook. Last year, she was sued by investment firm Metacapital and virtual reality company MetaX, settling another lawsuit over her new infinity logo.

And if Musk changes the name, others can claim the “X” for themselves.

“Given the difficulty of protecting a single letter, especially one as commercially popular as ‘X’, Twitter’s protection is likely to be limited to graphics very similar to its X logo,” said Douglas Masters, trademark attorney at law firm Loeb & Loeb.

“The logo is not very distinctive, so the protection will be very narrow.”

An insider previously reported that Meta had an X label, and attorney Ed Timberlake tweeted that Microsoft had one too.